A Film Adaptation of Balzac's 'Lost Illusions'

“French society would be the historian; I was only to be the secretary.” So Honoré de Balzac humbly characterized his sprawling, multi-volume panorama of French geography and social life. But as the Dantesque title of his Human Comedy suggests, Balzac was more a commentator—a Virgilian guide—than a copyist. By analyzing how historical forces and social relations press upon human dreams, he sought to accomplish for his contemporary France what Walter Scott’s historical novels had done for Scotland’s past. Natural history, occult mesmerism, dramaturgy: these and many other disparate authorities were to be recruited to the task.