Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) was a French novelist who organised almost his entire output into a single connected scheme, La Comédie humaine, running to some ninety finished novels and stories with recurring characters. He worked in enormous bursts fuelled by coffee, was pursued by creditors for most of his life after early business failures, and died at fifty-one months after finally marrying the Polish countess he had courted for eighteen years.