Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) helped to establish the current form of the novel, and was one of the greatest and most prolific novelists and short story writers of all time. Nearly a hundred of his novels and short stories formed
La Comédie Humaine, in which some characters occur in several stories.
Clara Bell (1835-1927) was an English translator fluent in eight languages.
George Saintsbury (1845-1933) was an English writer, literary historian, scholar, critic and wine connoisseur who edited an English edition of
La Comédie Humaine published in 1895-98 by J. M. Dent.
This ebook contains a Preface by George Saintsbury, Balzac's Introduction, and five short chapter free novels:
At the Sign of the Cat and Racket, The Ball at Sceaux, The Purse, The Vendetta, and
Madame Firmiani. The novels are all in the Scenes from Private Life group, were written between 1829 and 1851, and deal with various aspects of love and marriage.
The text was taken from the Temple Edition published in 1901 by Macmillan Company in the Internet Archive and from the University of Adelaide ebook library. I have silently corrected typos, curled quotes, replaced italics, diacritics, and scene breaks, used British English, and made changes to spelling, punctuation, and hyphenation using oxforddictionaries.com. The illustrations have been omitted.
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