Returning in later years, Balzac would experience the delicious sensation of being buried up to the neck in a giant pâté de foie gras.⁴ For him, his native land was a peculiar combination of Romantic exoticism and womb-like comfort, a land of lotus-eaters in the middle of France. ³ With its warm climate and easy abundance, Touraine had always provided a nutritious medium for geniuses. A street which lacked only one thing according to Balzac: a memorial to the region’s most famous sons, Descartes and Rabelais. Balzac too would create an Empire, a fictional world so real that Oscar Wilde would be able to describe him only half-humorously as the inventor of the nineteenth century.Īs for the house which disappointed Henry James, it was in the busy centre of Tours, in ‘a street with a pavement on either side’ – in fact, ‘the only street in Tours’, for the others are ‘dark, winding, narrow and damp’. Bonaparte was about to make himself First Consul. The year was also historically appropriate. Born in 1799 with what he called a centenarian’s constitution, he had the best possible chance of seeing three centuries.

‘If the tenement selected for this honour could not be ancient and embrowned, it should at least have been detached.’ ² It seems fitting, though, that a life devoted to exploring the private worlds of his contemporaries should have begun within hearing of the neighbours.īalzac himself was always delighted with his initial coordinates.

on in the city of Tours.Īlmost a century later, during his Balzacian pilgrimage to the Loire Valley, Henry James was shocked to find that the man who ‘took in more of human life than anyone since Shakespeare’ was born in a house ‘in a row’ – ‘a house, moreover, which at the date of his birth must have been only about twenty years old’. For us, the story of Balzac’s life must begin with his birth at 11 a.m. Unfortunately, his father never indicated how the great creator of characters was himself created. ¹ Balzac inherited his passion for genetics from his father, who had ‘strange ideas’ for improving the human race. ‘NOTHING IS insignificant,’ Balzac declares, characteristically – the mother’s diet, the father’s virility, and, most important of all, the ‘posture’ of the parents at the moment of conception.

Balzac by Graham Robb