Selected Short Stories

For this volume Sylvia Raphael has chosen twelve stories, includingAn Incident in the Reign of Terror, The Atheist's Massand The Red Inn. All of them reveal Balzac's ability to excite curiosity, his intituitive grasp of what made other lives tick and his instinctive understanding of the contradicions in human behavior.

The fifty stories that Balzac wrote during his working life display all the qualities of his novels, and many of them feature the charaters that throng theComedie Humaine. Nevertheless, while they do offer an interesting counterpoint to the great novels, the stories as themselves.

For this volume Sylvia Raphael has chosen twelve stories, includingAn Incident in the Reign of Terror, The Atheist's Massand The Red Inn. All of them reveal Balzac's ability to excite curiosity, his intituitive grasp of what made other lives tick and his instinctive understanding of the contradicions in human behavior.

The son of a civil servant, Honoré de Balzac was born in 1799 in Tours, France. After attending boarding school in Vendôme, he gravitated to Paris where he worked as a legal clerk and a hack writer, using various pseudonyms, often in collaboration with other writers. Balzac turned exclusively to fiction at the age of thirty and went on to write a large number of novels and short stories set amid turbulent nineteenth-century France. He entitled his collective works The Human Comedy. Along with Victor Hugo and Dumas père and fils, Balzac was one of the pillars of French romantic literature. He died in 1850, shortly after his marriage to the Polish countess Evelina Hanska, his lover of eighteen years.