With all his accustomed brilliance of perception and style, the novelist-critic V. S. Pritchett here gives us a penetrating full-scale portrait of the most extravagant of all the great novelists Рthe massively gifted, massively human Balzac, who was so profoundly a man of his times that his own life Рas much as his monumental La Com̩die humaine Рuniquely embodies the experience of France from the rise of Napoleon to the fateful Revolution of 1848