Honoré de Balzac set out to do something no novelist had attempted before: capture an entire society, from Parisian salons to provincial backwaters, across nearly a hundred interlinked novels and stories he called La Comédie Humaine, the Human Comedy. This edition collects the complete cycle in Balzac's own organizing scheme, from the domestic dramas of the Scenes from Private Life and the social climbing and ruin of the Scenes from Parisian Life, through the political intrigue, military adventure, and rural life of the later sections, to the visionary Philosophical Studies. Characters and families recur across the novels, building a densely interconnected fictional world that influenced everyone from Zola to Proust. This Chronicle Vault edition presents the complete Human Comedy, unabridged, in a clean, fully reflowable format for all e-readers.
