Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac was born in Tours in 1799 to a fairly wealthy bourgeois family, studying at a boarding school first in his hometown and then in Paris, where he moved with his family.
Enrolled in law school, he found a job as a scribe in a notary's office but at the age of twenty he discovered his artistic vocation, to which he dedicated his entire life. His literary activity at the beginning was devoid of satisfaction: restless and unable to stand still, both mentally and physically, Balzac is a man who likes to risk, to experiment, with an entrepreneurial spirit. He set up a publishing house, which was soon accompanied by a typography and a font foundry: the programs are ambitious, but the attempt to establish himself on the market fails miserably.
With some budgetary problems, he landed in Sardinia, in Porto Torres, on 12 April 1838, after having sold his family jewels to pay for his trip. The goal is to explore the Silversmith mines, in the remote land of Nurra, northwest of Sassari, to search for treasures of lead and especially silver, with the intention of paying off debts and, if possible, getting rich once and for all, as well as writing a novel set on the island. The intentions fail: he is mocked by his business partner, a Ligurian merchant, who, after sending it to us, precedes him to those places and manages to have the concessions awarded before him. He tries again in the south, he rushes to the Domusnovae area, in five days he travels more than two hundred kilometers on a stagecoach and many others on horseback, he has neither the time nor - you can imagine - the desire to observe what he encounters on the street but the story is the same, nothing to do. After almost two months of a fierce diet (he also undergoes quarantine) he must embark from Cagliari without a penny in his pocket for Marseille. Thus, the Sardinia that Balzac describes in his letters with Countess Eva Hanska, whom he married a few months before his death (in 1850) perhaps precisely because of social ambitions and the usual problems of money, is little less than a den of knitters and leeches, a barren land devoid of happiness.

Update

25/6/2026 - 13:31