Honor? de Balzac (20 May 1799 - 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright best known for a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Com?die humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon.Due to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is renowned for his multi-faceted...