Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac (20 may 1799 - 18 august 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie Humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 Fall of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Conan Doyle about Balzac

• There are some authors from whom I shrink because they are so voluminous that I feel that, do what I may, I can never hope to be well read in their works. Therefore, and very weakly, I avoid them altogether. There is Balzac, for example, with his hundred odd volumes. I am told that some of them are masterpieces and the rest pot-boilers, but that no one is agreed which is which. Such an author makes an undue claim upon the little span of mortal years. Because he asks too much one is inclined to give him nothing at all - Through the Magic Door, chapter V (1906-1907)

In the Sherlock Holmes stories

• Hosmer Angel quoted Balzac in a letter to Mary Sutherland. (IDEN, 254)

In The Stark Munro Letters

• Had I to choose between them, I think, entre nous, that the mother would have attracted me most, for I am thoroughly of Balzac's opinion as to the woman of thirty. - The Stark Munro Letters, chapter III (1894-1895)

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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle