Most sightseers who venture into Paris' chic, residential Passy neighborhood go there to admire the quarter's lavish Art Nouveau buildings that have risen up in between the typical bourgeois Haussmannian constructions of the latter half of the 19th century. If they make their way to Rue Raynouard, however, they will come upon an unexpected and picturesque anomaly: a modest, late 18th-century country house and garden--one of the last traces of the old village of Passy. They may be puzzled that such an unpretentious house has survived more than a century of real estate speculation, especially considering the high property values, until they read the inscription "Maison de Balzac" discreetly marked on a masonry wall near the entrance to the property.
Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), the prolific 19th century writer and founder of French realism, lived and wrote here from 1840 through 1847, in a five-room garden apartment rented under an assumed name, Monsieur de Breugnol. Deeply in debt and pursued by creditors after a string of entrepreneurial failures, Balzac went into hiding, seeking "temporary" refuge here, having his young Alsatian housekeeper, Louise Breugniot, sign the lease in his stead. The dodgy circumstances of his seclusion undoubtedly stimulated, if not enabled, Balzac's overwhelming literary output for that period; for it was here in the peace and quiet of Passy, often working relentlessly through the nights and drinking inordinate amounts of coffee, that Balzac endeavored to write himself out of financial straits. Balzac described his regimen: "To work means to wake up each evening at midnight, to write until eight o'clock, take a quarter of an hour for breakfast, work until five o'clock, have dinner, go to sleep and start again the next day."
From his small writing table in the south-facing study overlooking the garden, he produced some of his greatest works--Cousin Betty, Cousin Pons, Ursula Mirouet, La Rabouilleuse, The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans--and assembled and corrected the entirety of his colossal 94-volume masterpiece and social inventory of human passions, The Human Comedy. In it the keenly observant Balzac painted a vibrant panorama of 19th century French society, in which he himself had participated fully, through highly detailed, omniscient narratives of more than 2,500 characters--characters living in a changing world driven by desire, market forces and the unending appetite for acquiring money through any means. In their constant quests-- be it for money, power, sex, love, vengeance or respectability, some would find splendor, others only misery. Not surprisingly, with his own accumulating debt looming over him, money became an eternal theme. Balzac, who was attached to the idea that everything affects everything else, had a stroke of genius which formed the basis for The Human Comedy: to use throughout the novels recurrent characters who were interconnected by family, money, business or love and set in the bustling social and political saga of the times. The effect not only gave characters more depth and a "path in life," it reinforced the reader's impression that they existed.
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