The Ball at Sceaux

By Honoré De Balzac and Clara Bell

The Ball at Sceaux is the second work in Balzac's La Comédie humaine published by Hawthorne Classics. The novella tells the story of young Émilie de Fontaine who, despite

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hawthorne Classics
• Release date: Feb 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781087940557

Honoré De Balzac

Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) was a French novelist, short story writer, and playwright. Regarded as one of the key figures of French and European literature, Balzac’s realist approach to writing would influence Charles Dickens, Émile Zola, Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, and Karl Marx. With a precocious attitude and fierce intellect, Balzac struggled first in school and then in business before dedicating himself to the pursuit of writing as both an art and a profession. His distinctly industrious work routine—he spent hours each day writing furiously by hand and made extensive edits during the publication process—led to a prodigious output of dozens of novels, stories, plays, and novellas. La Comédie humaine, Balzac’s most famous work, is a sequence of 91 finished and 46 unfinished stories, novels, and essays with which he attempted to realistically and exhaustively portray every aspect of French society during the early-nineteenth century.

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