1799-1850
French novelist Honoré de Balzac was born on this day in Tours, France to a father from the Occitan region and a Parisian mother. He was their first child to survive infancy, making him the oldest of four siblings. From the beginning, young Honoré spent little time at home, first being sent off to a wet nurse who did not live with the family, and then to a boarding school. He along with his next eldest sibling, a sister, they spent the first four or five years of their young lives in this situation together. The only time in his younger years that he spent at home was between the ages of 5 and 10, when his boarding education began. His parents, aggressively upwardly mobile, kept an unhealthy distance from their own children, in some vain attempt to emulate nobility. This forever effected the writer and would play a big part in his writings. He spent 7 years at the boarding school, where he was constantly bullied because of his skin-flint father, who had money to spend on the boy but refused to do so in another vain move to improve his own social standing amongst his peers and "instill" a work ethic in Honoré. This affected his studies, which in turn further degraded his situation, because his instructors frequently sent him into a solitary punishment cell (a place in the building that one school employee of the school called "the dungeon"). Again, these are themes that would come into play in his work later on. The one thing that he came away from the school with was a vast knowledge of books, which he read while in punishment. Eventually the situation caused him fairly extreme health problems and he had to leave the school because of them. A move to Paris by the whole family came soon after. Two years later he entered the University of Paris (more well known by the name of Sorbonne), after surviving a suicide attempt. He was then pressured by his father into studying the law and was sent into an apprenticeship, which lasted only around three years, after which Balzac had, had enough! This is when he became determined to become a writer and keep his own hours in life. Needless to say, this DID NOT go over well with his family, who left him in a tiny garrit in the city and moved into a fancy home on the outskirts of Paris. Though known to us today primarily as a novelist, his first work was actually a libretto for a comic opera based on the work of Byron. He had trouble, however, trying to find a composer willing to score it for him. He then turned to writing plays, the first of which he completed in 1820. He then turned to novel writing, though his first three efforts went unfinished. He was then persuaded to try his hand at short stories, but this was short lived. It did seem to provide a path for Balzac to finally graduate to successful novel writing. By 1826, he had nine published novels, though published under various pen names. He additionally engaged in various business ventures in the world of publishing in an attempt to help support himself--most of which were failures. It was in 1832 that he dreamed up the idea for the volume of work that he is most famous for today: La Comédie humaine. And what a work it is! Consisting of 91 finished and 46 unfinished volumes, it is a series of interconnected novels largely set during the Bourbon Restoration. And it is one of the volumes in this work that was made into the very first film using his work for source material. The False Oath was a short Italian production directed by Artuo Ambrosio and Luigi Maggi--two directors from Turin; the film was released in October of 1909. It was the first in a very long line of film and television productions of his work, with a very large number of them coming between the years 1909 and 1928. The very next film--The Wild Ass's Skin (La peau de chagrin)--was the first French production of his work--this film was actually released before the Italian production in August of 1909. It was directed by French director Albert Capellani before his move to the United States. The first American production of his work also came in 1909 and remains a well known film today. D. W. Griffith's The Sealed Room was based on the same work as the Italian film, and also managed to find a theatrical release before it in September (it has been restored and ranks as one of Griffith's finest Biograph shorts today). While the first film production of his work in Germany came in 1912 with Maskierte Liebe; with the first Danish production being Den hvide djaevel in 1916. Hungary also got into the game in 1916 with Jenö Janovics' Ártatlan vagyok! Finally, the first UK production of his work comes in what we would consider a fantasy horror film today, and it comes rather late to the list in 1920; Desire was adapted and directed by George Edwardes-Hall, an American working in Britain--it is based on The Wild Ass's Skin. It wouldn't be the last such film made from his work in the silent era; that same year Robert Brunton Productions found distribution for The Dream Cheater directed by Ernest C. Warde. The last silent film made from his work was the French production La cousine Bette in 1928 (though one film--Survival--a German film made in 1927, was actually released in 1930). The first film from his work released in the sound era was the Lloyd Bacon directed Honor Of The Family released in October of 1931. The first time his work was shown on a television broadcast came in a 1950 episode Vengeance of the mystery series "The Clock" (which was in turn based on a radio show). In 2015 a video documenting a seminar on his work simply entitled Balzac was released in France; while the Greek film Magic Skin released in 2018 represents the latest release to date. As of this writing, two films are in post-production: Lost Illusions and Eugénie Grandet. Balzac died at just 51 years of age in Paris, probably of some type of cardiac event, judging from the descriptions of his brief illness and very steep decline (possibly from some type of infection??) on the 18th of August. His funeral/memorial was attended by every famous writer in Paris and his eulogist was fellow French writer Victor Hugo. He is buried in Paris' famed Père Lachaise; the bronze statuary the tops his tomb was cast by French artist/sculptor Auguste Rodin.
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