On the other he was the nemesis of mistresses and relatives with money. He was indiscriminate in those he exploited. His first mistress, Mme Laure de Berny, loved him tenderly; his mother preferred her adulterous offspring to him; and Balzac impoverished the first and significantly reduced the fortune of the other. At his death he left his wife of five months with mountains of debts. The thought of what he could have done with credit cards defies the imagination.
Like many great artists he made changes in the genres in which he worked, and evaluations of his success depend on whether or not one understands what he was doing. Those who seek traditional short stories and novels will often be disappointed. While the eighteenth-century novel was dominated by narration, one must look beyond that level in the works of many period writers and, certainly, in La Comédie humaine. Authors of Balzac's day were turning away from the commitment to Aristotelian structuring of plot and character. Stendhal's revolutionary essay Racine et Shakespeare (1823-1825) was an aesthetic symptom of the age. Though Balzac was more than willing to please his popular audience and provide enough in the way of melodramatic plots to sell his books, he was a narrational minimalist and was thoroughly committed to his oft-repeated desire to be the secretary of his age, the portrait painter of the July Monarchy.
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