If it be true of Moliére that he was not only the greatest of comic authors, but ©comedy© itself, it may be said of Balzac that he was not only the greatest, the most fertile and diverse of our novelists, but the ©novel© itself; and the object of the present volume is to show that in saying this I say nothing but the absolute and exact truth. For this reason the reader is requested not to seek in the following pages a biography of Honoré de Balzac, or what today goes by that name - information about his origin, anecdotes of his college days, the tittle-tattle of his love-affairs, and the tedious narrative of his quarrels with newspapers or publishers - but solely a study of his work: a study in which, of course, I do not refrain from speaking, when necessary, of the man and of the romance of his life, but wherein I wish especially to define, to explain, and to characterize his work - which in my opinion, would remain the same if Balzac, instead of being born in Tours, had been born, for instance, in Castelnaudary, and if, in place of studying law, he had studied medicine.