SOMERSET MAUGHAM said: I suppose Balzac is the greatest novelist who ever lived." Certainly, he
left behind him one of the great literary monuments of all time. At the age of thirty he
started writing La Comédie humaine, worked almost without stop for twenty years, and died at fifty,
worn out from overwork. In those twenty years he had little opportunity for life or family or love,
hardly enough for friends.
Balzac wrote sixteen hours daily, sometimes not leaving his room for three days at a time, eating
very little, and drinking cup after cup of black coffee His routine was a dinner of sorts at five
in the afternoon, sleep until midnight, then work all night and most of the next day. It is said
that the manifold intricacies of the novels and stories that make up the many volumes of The Human
Comedy were all in his head at the same time. He knew all the details of the lives of every one of
his two thousand or more characters, the condition of the country and province from which each came,
the nature of the trade or profession each belonged to, and the political changes that were
going on in their world. He was in their consciousness, in their clothes, business,
palaces, even in their beds. "After Shakespeare, he is our great magazine of documents on human
nature," said Taine.
Never satisfied with his finished manuscripts, Balzac went over the proofs time and time again,
changing the order of stories, rewriting, spending a fortune on printers' bills for revised proofs.
"A Passion in the Desert" was written in Balzac's first year of work on La Comédie humaine
and is a part of Tales the Military Life.
