Honoré De Balzac
1859
Théophile Gautier knew Honoré de Balzac when both men were at the height of their powers, and this intimate portrait captures the novelist at work and at table, in conversation and in the solitary wrestle with prose. Written with the romantic's eye for the vivid particular, Gautier recalls their first meeting in 1835, the famous white cashmere robe, the volcanic appetite, the mind that could not stop invention. He gives us Balzac the glutton and the workhorse, the friend who could be lavish and the writer who drove himself to exhaustion. This is biography as portraiture, not chronology. We see the man behind La Comédie humaine, that vast human comedy that mapped every corner of post-Napoleonic France. Gautier understood Balzac's restless genius, his refusal to rest on success, his conviction that he was building something that would outlast him. For anyone who has been swept into Balzac's world, this is the closest thing to sitting across from him, watching him light a cigar and talk about what he will write tomorrow.
