Balzac: His Life and Works Trivia Quiz

Answer: 1799

Bernard-François Balssa, who had risen from peasant beginnings to become Secretary to the King's Council, relocated to Tours with his wife a few years before the birth of his second son, Honoré, after being charged with co-ordinating supplies to the French Army in the city. The first born son did not survive beyond infancy.

Honoré was born in the city on 20th May 1799, and was named for Saint Honoré of Amiens whose saints day is celebrated four days previously. After he tasted early success with a series of novelettes, Honoré Balssa spent much of his time in Paris attempting to make himself an important figure in high society in the city. During this time he adapted his surname to Balzac and added the honorific "de" to make himself sound more noble.

Answer: He worked in a law office

Balzac trained as a lawyer and studied at the Sorbonne. He worked for a time in law offices before deciding he wanted to be a writer. Many of his works involve characters who work in law offices and include lengthy passages that demonstrate his intricate knowledge of legal practices.

Answer: Scènes de la Vie Privée

"Scènes de la Vie Privée" became the first volume of Balzac's life work, "La Comédie Humaine" (The Human Comedy), a series of interlinked novels chronicling life in France in the first half of the nineteenth century; though this was not Balzac's intention when the novellas were first published.

It was only when Balzac came upon the idea of "La Comédie Humaine" that he returned to the original six novellas and added to them to create the first volume. The volume begins with the first tale "La Maison du chat-qui-pelote" (At the Sign of the Cat and Racket) which is the story of the marriage of Augustine, the daughter of a family of haberdashers, to an artist and the difficulties that come of a partnership between two from such disparate backgrounds. The other five novellas are "Le bal de Sceaux", "La Vendetta", "Une double famille", "La paix du ménage" and "Gobseck".

Answer: Both novelists' works were often serialised, appearing in installments before publication in book form

Many of Balzac's novels were initially serialised but he was a compulsive tinkerer and a man bounding with ideas; expanding his thoughts and embellishing his works after they had gone to press. This meant that the final work could be markedly different to the first published work, and could produce markedly more expensive bills from the printer. An extreme example of this was his "Illusions Perdues" which after beginning life in fairly modest form at a village printers in 1837, was ultimately completed in 1843 and extended to two volumes over a thousand pages long. In comparison, Dickens' novels by and large were published in book form exactly as they had appeared during serialisation.

W. H. Helm, the critic who described Balzac as "The French Dickens", also referred to Dickens as "The English Balzac".

Answer: All of these

After declaring that the law was not for him, Balzac's father had instructed him that he had two years to make himself financially independent by his writing before he would be cut off from family help. In this period, beginning in 1822, Balzac wrote a series of melodramas with the intention of selling a large number of copies and with little regard for literary merit. Many of these melodramas, such as "The Vicar of the Ardennes", "The Heiress of Birangue" and "Annette et le Criminal", was published under a nom de plume and yet others were published anonymously. The first novel that Balzac published under his own name was "Les Chouans" in 1829.

Any financial security that Balzac may have gained from these potboilers was lost when he invested heavily in a series of failed business ventures that left him with significant debts that hung around his neck for his entire life.

Answer: 1850

Balzac corresponded with Eveline Hanska, for more than fifteen years. In 1848 he travelled to Poland to see her for the first time. Even though her first husband had died in 1841, Hanska only agreed to marry Balzac in 1850 when Balzac was already in very poor health.

He died in Paris in August 1850, only five months after the wedding. The correspondence between the two was published in four volumes as "Lettres à l'Étrangère" (Letters to a Foreigner) many years after Balzac's death.

Answer: Realism

Whilst the critical idea of literary realism wasn't expounded until after his death, Balzac is considered a founder of the realist school of fiction; portraying the panorama of French society as he perceived it, particularly with regard to the relationship between social background and the personality that developed due to it. He is also credited with establishing the tradition of the omniscient narrator in the novel form.

One of the central tenets of literary realism is that the novel should be a detailed observation of an ordinary man or woman, and was an idea that took hold in France in the 1850s. Its introduction to the wider literary world came with the success of Gustave Flaubert's realist masterpiece, "Madame Bovary", published in 1857.

Answer: La Comédie Humaine

Balzac's "La Comédie Humaine" (The Human Comedy) described French Society of Balzac's era. The novels it included described the Restoration and the post-revolutionary Monarchic period of the nineteenth century. Over a period of twenty years it included 95 finished works.

Answer: Scenes from Church Life

Balzac's final work consisted of three sections, "Studies of Manners", "Philosophical Studies" and "Analytical Studies". The "Studies of Manners" was broken down into further sections; "Scenes from Private Life", "Scenes from Provincial Life", "Scenes from Parisian Life", "Scenes from Political Life", "Scenes from Military Life" and, "Scenes from Country Life". By far the largest of these sections was the "Scenes from Private Life" which had originally started with the six novelettes that Balzac wrote prior to forming the plan of "La Comédie Humaine".

Answer: Oliver Cromwell

Against the wishes of his family, Balzac wrote a tragedy based on the life of Oliver Cromwell. Despite their reluctant support for the project, it was neither a critical or a commercial success. A reading of the original manuscript of the play led the family tutor Andrieux to proclaim, "The author should do anything he likes, but not literature." ("Balzac: A Biography", Graham Robb).