"With all his accustomed brilliance of perception and style, the novelist-critic V. S. Pritchett here gives us a penetrating full-scale portrait of the most extravagant of all the great novelists - the massively gifted, massively human Balzac, who was so profoundly a man of his times that his own life - as much as his monumental La Comédie humaine - uniquely embodies the experience of France from the rise of Napoleon to the fateful Revolution of 1848. " [from the inside cover]