You can make 49 anagrams from letters in Balzac (aabclz).
I open, for example, any one of half a dozen French studies of Balzac.
So any list of the “essential” Balzac inevitably omits a handful of great works.
He also bewailed the fact that he had been born at what he called the confluence of Hugo and Balzac.
As I said, Balzac wrote about an epoch that is curiously like our own.
Balzac was the great novelist of money, social climbing, and power.
He saw the art of Richardson and Balzac in an entirely new aspect.
Notice that Balzac—who at times is a delightfully heavy-handed writer—never shies away from explicitly stating his case.
Don't you get up every morning meaning to prove you're equal to Balzac or Thackeray?
It is as easy to sit in Shakespeare's brain and think from there, as it is from Balzac's.
Okay, not everything in this book meets the standards of realism as practiced by Balzac and Zola.