At first glance, that doesn\u2019t exactly sound enticing. Ninety-one novels is quite a lot, and \u201cmanners\u201d hardly sounds thrilling. But Balzac\u2019s novels are anything but dull. He writes about people in a truly exciting way\u2014their stories, the backgrounds of the individual figures, and especially the circumstances, the social framework, and the characters themselves. His books always begin with a rather chatty description of the setting and the people, and sometimes he simply inserts a person\u2019s biography and interrupts the current plot. Or he describes several people before the actual story gets going. He does this so deftly, in such a pleasant style, with a profound, expansive, philosophical, and worldly gaze that is simply fascinating and wonderfully entertaining.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
He arranges his figures\u2014their inner worlds, their ways of acting, their development, and the entire social framework\u2014so skillfully, so vividly and realistically, that you feel you\u2019re reading real biographies. Of course he also often exaggerates, which makes his novels tremendously exciting. Old Grandet, the miser, will always remain in my memory. Or Father Goriot<\/em> with his ungrateful daughters; Lucien, the dandy and daredevil from Lost Illusions<\/em>; or Carlos Herrera\u2014and not least Esther the courtesan. Balzac brought all these protagonists to life for me; they\u2019ve become real people in my mind.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n He is said to have created over 3,000 characters in his novels. In any case, there are an extraordinary number of them, and what\u2019s fascinating is that they reappear again and again\u2014sometimes only in passing, sometimes in a significant supporting role, and sometimes as central figures. Eug\u00e8ne de Rastignac, Count Henri de Marsay, Baron Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric de Nucingen\u2014these are examples of characters who recur throughout. For Balzac, people and their actions are always the result of their environment, their social \u201cspecies,\u201d which he compares to the species of the animal kingdom shaped by their surroundings. His Human Comedy is thus more than a collection of novels; it describes an interacting social system in all its comprehensive complexity.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Once you start reading all these novels and novellas, you quite quickly reach a point where it becomes difficult to keep track of all the figures. You can, of course, read each novel on its own and ignore the overarching context, but Balzac only unfolds his full fascination when you keep both levels in view. A helpful tool is the list of characters in my edition, appended at the end of each novel. What\u2019s missing, however, is an overview of all the families and people and how they relate to one another. Balzac repeatedly describes kinship ties and the origins of the individual figures in great detail.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n I quickly searched the web to see what was out there\u2014especially infographics, because a project like this practically cries out for them, and I love well-done visualizations. I finally came across an interesting-looking family tree on the website of the Maison de Balzac in Paris. The museum is located in one of Balzac\u2019s former workplaces and offers numerous insights into the author\u2019s life and work. If I ever get back to Paris, it will be an absolute must-visit. In 2005, Anne-Marie Meininger created a family tree of the characters in The Human Comedy<\/em> for this museum. On the Maison de Balzac website you can admire a small excerpt of this tree titled G\u00e9n\u00e9alogie des personnages de La Com\u00e9die humaine<\/a>. This little snippet was certainly enough to get me thoroughly hooked. I then scoured the entire internet for the full tree. I dove into the deepest depths of the web\u2014and even the darknet had nothing on it. Credit card numbers in packs of a thousand, Kalashnikovs, and drugs\u2014everything was on offer, just not a Balzac family tree. Okay, I\u2019m exaggerating, but after some more searching I wrote to the museum and received no reply there either. Only on AbeBooks did I find a copy from a French antiquarian bookseller for 120 euros.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n In the end, I did track it down\u2014at a place that, for many, seems as inscrutable as the darknet: the Bavarian State Library. According to the OPAC, there was a single copy. So I went into the grand, palatial, boxy building and got myself a library card. Then I was finally able to order the family tree, though it took a week for them to pull the coveted item from the farthest corner of their stacks. And I wasn\u2019t allowed to take it with me\u2014only to view it in the reading room. Fortunately, there are book scanners there, so I scanned each page and saved them to a USB stick. The whole thing cost me 50 cents; the card is free, and you pay only for scanning\u2014which is basically nothing for such excellent scanners.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n At home I stitched the individual images together, did some retouching, removed scan seams, and created three huge posters measuring 120 \u00d7 30 cm. PosterXXL happened to be running some promotion weeks, so I had the three prints made. The result is impressive\u2014elegant and finely prepared. The coats of arms were drawn by Michel Pastoureau, and together with the carefully constructed family tree, it\u2019s an absolute delight for any Balzac fan.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Anne-Marie Meininger compiled the actual family tree, and it must have been an enormous task to extract and organize all this information from the texts. She has also written a few French-language books on Balzac and seems to be something of a specialist. Unfortunately, you can\u2019t really find her online; otherwise I would have written to her and tried to get the family tree directly from its creator.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n All the big fish from the novels are here. Smaller, less networked families are listed in a separate section\u2014Eug\u00e9nie Grandet\u2019s family, for instance. But you\u2019ll also find characters from Lost Illusions<\/em>, A Harlot High and Low<\/em>, and numerous novellas I\u2019ve read. I can\u2019t say exactly how many figures are actually recorded on the tree\u2014only that there are very, very many.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/balzac_genealogie_4.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/a><\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/a><\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/a><\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n