Balzac

A study of Balzac by an American who admired him past reason: the debts, the coffee, the twenty-hour days, the Comédie humaine as a single building, and the marriage that came too late. Edgar Saltus published it in 1884 as his first book, in the ornate style he never abandoned. It is criticism as advocacy, and the account of Balzac's working method is accurate. Sixty plates from 1849 to 1899, among them Daumier and Manet, track the Paris Balzac knew and the caricatures his name inspired.