Amazon.com description: Product Description: In this work Balzac elucidates the nature and attitudes of the French. Delving deep into his characters, he comes up with a tightly knitted plot and implicitly communicates his perceptions. Due to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is renowned for his multifaceted characters, who are morally ambiguous. His writing influenced many subsequent novelists and philosophers.