Lost Illusions by Honore de Balzac

Henry James called Balzac “a final authority on human nature” and said that he “took in more of human life that anyone since Shakespeare.” James referred to Balzac as “really the father of us all.”

If you’ve read James, you will find this extremely surprising because neither Balzac’s life nor his fiction bear any resemblance to James’s own.

Honoré de Balzac (1799 – 1850) lived his chaotic life to the fullest. Life was one long adventure. Many mistresses, and perhaps some boyfriends too (his sympathetic picture of gay male characters is referred to more than once in Proust’s oeuvre), illegitimate children, crazy business schemes, debtors’ prison, law school (he dropped out), parties, travel – he never stopped. He was his own greatest creation.

In his spare time, Balzac managed to complete 91 novels, all of which are part of his lifetime literary project, La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy). If you hear echoes of Dante, don’t be surprised, Balzac always compared himself to the literary greats. Charles Robb, one of Balzac’s modern biographers, wrote of La Comédie humaine: “Balzac’s epic of modern life is the last attempt by any writer to comprehend and educate a whole world in its diversity, to offer a complete, unified, scientific picture of society and human experience.”

I know that in prior material for the Literary Salon I referred to Flaubert as the inventor of literary realism. I’m not stepping back from that, but the birth of literary realism wasn’t an immaculate conception: Balzac was there at its beginning.

Our work with Balzac’s La Comédie humaine continues with Lost Illusions (Les Illusions Perdues). Why? Mostly because the three-novel series (Le Père Goriot, Les Illusions Perdues, and Les Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes) form a unified work that covers all of Balzac’s preoccupations. Each work, brilliant in its own right, is amplified in proximity with the others, uplifted into the highest stratosphere of French literature.

And, as a bonus, we’ll spend more time with Eugène de Rastignac and Vautrin from Père Goriot.

JOINING DETAILS:

• 10-meeting study led by Ralph Kleinman
• Thursdays, 7.00-9.00 pm (UK), 16 April – 25 June 2026
• Recommended edition: Lost Illusions, translated by Herbert Hunt, Penguin Classics, ISBN: 9780140442519
• £350 for 10 two-hour meetings