Tattoo - Sangdawgu

“The Passage” is a short story by Balzac. However, it is written in the style of a novel. The information contained in the short story is embedded in the story of the novel. The reader of “The Passage” short story will want to know the summary of Balzac’s short story. And they should. Balzac is so unique that he can be called the “literary Napoleon” in French literature.

A brief biography of Balzac is provided below.

The great French novelist Balzac was one of the most prolific writers. He wrote nearly a hundred novels and short stories in the ten years up to 1830 under the title "Human Stories." There are only about fifty more novels that are not included in this collection. The number of characters he portrayed is over two thousand. In addition to novels, he also published works in magazines,

He wrote countless articles. He even wrote some plays. He was very hard at writing. He also wrote copies of novels and read them over and over again. He read and edited everything from the first printed draft, called Galliproof, to the last printed page, called machine proof. The typesetters and typographers were very angry with him because he was so thorough.

He entered not only into literature but also into business. He was not a real businessman, and whenever he did something, he was always in a hurry and ended up in debt. It is rare to find a person who worked as hard as he did. Bolzano lived only fifty-one years. A man who worked almost twenty-four hours a day would have died of exhaustion at the age of fifty, let alone from other diseases. Only because of his physical strength and good health could he have lived to that age.

Balzac's era was a time of great and powerful writers in French literature. There were writers who were his equal in age and writing ability, such as Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas. They were also quite good writers. But among them, Balzac is arguably the most important person.

Balzac was not from a noble family. His father was the son of a peasant from the south of France, but he gave his son a royal name by adding the suffix “de”. There were also real royal Balzacs. But none of them were famous. Balzac’s full name was Honoré de Balzac. His father had no interest in literature and art, but his mother did. Balzac loved his mother very much. His mother treated him like a child until her death. His mother lived longer than he did.

Balzac was not a scholar. He showed no sign of being a scholar either at school or at university. He was just an ordinary student. If he was widely recognized, it would be because he was good at making a fuss, not because he was a scholar. The novels and poems he wrote at school were nothing special. Here, if we compare him with his contemporary, Victor Hugo, he is completely different. Hugo was already a famous writer at the age of seventeen.

He first tried to become a lawyer. But he did not succeed as a lawyer either. So he left the legal world after working as a paralegal for about two years and entered the literary world. At first he could not produce anything special. He began his literary career by publishing a biography of the English leader Cromwell in English. That English was also not very popular. He had to try to make a name for himself. While he was trying, he could not survive without the money he received from his parents.

After writing Cromwell's "The Adventures of the Black Swan," Balzac began writing novels. The readers did not like them because they were "light." Balzac realized that the reason his novels were not popular was that he was not writing to please the audience, but was trying to improve his literary skills. He adhered to the "appeal" principle and began to publish them regardless of whether they were liked by the audience or not.

Balzac, who was at the bottom of the literary ladder but was at the top of the list, wrote novels under various pseudonyms as if they were machine-generated. When he wrote only for the audience's liking, Balzac's novels became noticeably more enthusiastic. Balzac realized that it would be better if he wrote stories that the audience liked and that were relevant to life, so he wrote in a way that reflected the events of the time. That kind of writing was really interesting. The readers liked that kind of writing because they were satisfied with their own images appearing in the writing. Balzac also often described the details in the beginning with a desire to make the images vivid. People did not like Balzac's writing because it was too detailed.

If you make money, you will be respected and free. Balzac, who adhered to this philosophy, worked hard to earn money through literature. His books were popular, and the money he craved came in steadily. However, his greed grew as the money came in. Therefore, he began to do business while writing. At first, he tried to make a living as a publisher. The books he published were by famous writers and playwrights, but he did not understand business and the distribution was poor, so he did not sell the books. He went down the drain, and if he lost, he took out loans, invested more money, bought a printing press and continued to spread his business. Every time he did this, he lost more than his debts. Although his parents, relatives and his wife helped pay his debts, his debts exceeded ninety thousand francs, so he had to write and do business, and he also had to hide from his creditors.

It was in the midst of this financial crisis that his best writings emerged. He had initially hoped that his books would bring him wealth, but his dreams were not fulfilled and he was instead surrounded by hardship.

This period of economic ruin was also the time when Balzac's literary talent matured. Having run out of money, he accepted an invitation from a friend to spend some time in the south. It was at this moment that he became acutely aware of the beauty of nature and the activities of the poor, and realized that literature is only literature if it reflects that real life.

Balzac abandoned the fictional elements and began writing a series of novels that chronicled the personal lives of ordinary people. He included these novels in his "Human Stories" series.

Balzac's characters are people. There are bad people. There are good people. There are good people. There are naive people. People like his characters because he has studied various people and portrayed them in every way. In fact, these characters are not other people, but just us in the audience. The novels included in the "Human Stories" series are divided into categories. These categories include domestic novels, southern novels, Parisian novels, military novels, and worldview criticism.

Great literary scholars have praised him for his outstanding portrayal of the characters.

He had the ability to portray a peasant as deeply as a city shopkeeper. He had the ability to portray human nature and its subtleties with such precision. The great Russian writer Maxim Gorky once said that he had only read Balzac's "Piegerio" when he first saw the full extent of human nature.

Balzac slept from six in the evening until midnight, and wrote non-stop from midnight until noon the next day. He drank coffee while writing. His diligence turned out his letters as if they were machine-made, and they sold very well. He spent his money as ruthlessly as he earned it, and for the rest of his life he was in debt.

He married three women from the same family, one after the other. The first woman was older than him. She loved him so much that she paid off his debts. She was as old as his mother, so she was a source of comfort to Balzac. The second was also a woman of great beauty. This woman did not take Balzac for herself, but for her fame. Balzac took revenge on her by creating male characters of the upper class who were also of great beauty. The third was a Polish woman, Madhubala. She was the heroine of the "Song of the Wind".