Terme de Glossaire

A French writer, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and journalist of the first half of the nineteenth century.He is considered one of the greatest French novelists in the field of realism. But it is difficult to place him in one category or another, his whole work covering such a vast range. Critics of the day did not spare him but he is today acknowledged as an author of the highest order, leaving behind him a monumental oeuvre, painting in words the society of his day, and succeeding in this to the extent that the French dictionary of great French writers, Le Robert, says that he realised the dream of every ambitious novelist: ‘_Creating the illusion that what he invents is real’_.

He produced an outstanding body of work, The Human Comedy, a sequence of several dozen novels whose ambition was to describe in a quasi-exhaustive way the French society of his times. Amongst his novels one could cite Le Colonel Chabert (1835), Le Père Goriot (1835) and Les Chouans (1829).