A Harlot High and Low by Honoré de Balzac

And indeed his characters are often cut from the same cloth as adventure heroes. As a writer he sought to create a Paris that was as rich and vibrant as real-life but with vast connections that carried with it something fantastic. Of course, Balzac differs from his disciples Emile Zola and Gustave Flaubert in that the social thesis was merely a consequence of his writing style. Despite his own royalist leanings, his rich descriptions of working-class life and the nascent rise of middle-class capitalism meant that he was a favorite of ideological opposites Karl Marx (whose Capital makes repeated references to his works) and Friedrich Engels who once stated that Balzac taught him more about economics than any amount of financial reports. His style of writing is unique for its versatility, its exhaustive descriptions of French urban life and its social classes in quasi-ethnological detail and the distinctive tone of irony, cynicism and dark humour with which he chronicles post-Revolution France at the time when the aristocrats were losing out to the rising middle classes. Sculptor Auguste Rodin would sculpt a masterpiece with his monument and the film-makers of the French New Wave cited him as a Patron Saint. Henry James called Balzac one of his favorite authors and wrote of him extensively as a critic. His obscurity in the Anglophone Media is inverse to his omnipresence in France and his influence on writers and artists in variety of media. Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) is one of the greatest writers in French letters.

A Harlot High and Low by Honoré de Balzac