Honoré de Balzac (Tours, 1799-Paris, 1850) was the son of a modest villager who, in the heat of the changes that accompanied the Revolution of 1789 and thanks to his skills, rose up the social ladder to enjoy the luxuries of high society during the Napoleonic campaigns. At the age of fifty-one he married a woman thirty-two years younger, the daughter of a bourgeois family. In his childhood, Honoré felt rejected by his mother. Years later he confessed that this had been the cause "of all the evil in my life." At the end of 1814 the family moved to Paris. Either way, he finished his studies at another school. In 1816 he enrolled as a jurisprudence student at the university while working as a clerk in a lawyer's office. At last with his bachelor's degree under his arm, he placed himself in a notary's office. But in 1819 he declared that he did not want to exercise a bourgeois profession but to be a writer and to make rich and famous with his books. The fall of Napoleon impoverished the Balzac family, who decided to provide a small financial aid for two years to the new writer son. Between 1821 and 1829 he wrote under a pseudonym a multitude of low-quality novels. He also embarked on businesses related to the publishing world in which he failed. He finally obtained his first literary success with the novel Los Chuanes, which was followed by La piel de zapa (1831). The following year he conceived the idea of ​​writing a series of novels that portrayed the society of his time and that he integrated into the scenes of private life, the germ of his novelistic cycle The Human Comedy. At the same time he met the great love of his life, Ewelina Hánska, a countess of Polish origin and married. After the death of her husband, Balzac tried in vain to marry her. After several attempts, he achieved her purpose on May 14, 1850, but a few months later he died in Paris. As Stefan Zweig says in the biography that he dedicated to him, he killed himself by dint of working