18 August 1850: Honoré de Balzac dies

At the age of 8, Honoré de Balzac was sent to boarding school. He was an undisciplined child and was often sent to detention. He looked on this punishment as a blessing because it gave him time for reading. [1]

Overweight, workaholic, and a caffeine abuser, French novelist, Honoré de Balzac lived a life of excess and died on 18 August 1850 aged 51.

I don’t think any other writer writes as brilliantly about money as does Balzac. His novel Eugénie Grandet is a powerful and moving study of a miser and the way in which he blights his daughter’s life. Balzac himself was always short of money because although he earned lots of it, he spent it faster than it came in. The constant struggle to earn enough to keep his creditors at bay drove him to a timetable of work that eventually ruined his health. He worked for up to eighteen a day, keeping himself awake with frequent cups of strong coffee. His epic La Comédie Humaine (The Human Comedy) reflects his real-life difficulties and includes scenes from his own experience.

Late in life, and with his health in serious decline, Balzac married his long-time love Ewelina Hańska, a Polish aristocrat, after a fifteen-year correspondence in March 1850. The newlyweds set off for Paris the following month but his health deteriorated on the way. They arrived in the French capital on his fifty-first birthday. Five months after his wedding, Balzac died from gangrene associated with congestive heart failure. He is buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Balzac’s lifework consists of a series of some ninety novels and short stories. He was a hugely important and influential writer, everyone in the 19th century read him, and his impact was enormous. Commonly regarded as the founder of social realism, he also had affinities with the romantics.