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Auction: 312 - Numismatic Collector's Series Sale
Lot: 1632

Balzac, Honore de Major French novelist and playwright (1799-1850); his vast masterpiece, The Human Comedy, comprised nearly 100 books. Good content Autograph Letter Signed "de Balzac," 1-1/2 pages, 8vo, Tours, June 23, (1830). He writes to the Baron of Mortemart in Paris, apologizing for not replying to his letters. When he arrived on June 2, he went immediately for the coast, where he fished and swam, and forgot "about Paris, about the literature of the world I had been in," and was, so to speak, like "a dogfish or a King." He says that he was ready to respond to his letters like a government minister, but had been deprived of the means. Creases, otherwise VG. Balzac´s roots were in Tours, and he returned to the area frequently to escape the hubub of the capital. The month after this letter, Paris was rocked by the July Revolution, which overthrew Charles X and placed Louis Philippe on the throne. Balzac would support the old aristocracy, fittingly, since his correspondent the baron had been named president of Charles´s council of ministers.

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