Honoré de Balzac
Videos
Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. The novel sequence La Comédie humaine, described as a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life, is generally viewed as his magnum opus.
Vendôme Oratory School – engraving by Armand Queyroy
Drawing of Balzac in the mid-1820s, attributed to Achille Devéria
Laure Junot, Duchess of Abrantès
The Maison de Balzac is one of three Parisian literary museums.
Ewelina Hańska
Videos
Eveline Hańska was a Polish noblewoman best known for her marriage to French novelist Honoré de Balzac. Born at the Wierzchownia estate in Volhynia, Hańska married landowner Wacław Hański when she was
Honoré de Balzac
…France, hoping that his anonymous critic would see it. Thus began a fifteen-year correspondence between Balzac and "the object of [his] sweetest dreams": Ewelina Hańska. Ewelina (née Rzewuska) was married to a nobleman twenty years her senior, Marshal Wacław Hański, a wealthy Polish landowner living near Kyiv. It had…
Portrait by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, 1835
One historian compares the Rzewuski estate in Pohrebysche to "a little kingdom".
Hańska's first husband Wacław Hański was more than twenty years older than her.
In her November 1832 letter, Hańska told Honoré de Balzac: "My heart has leapt as I read your works."