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Author's name: Honoré de Balzac

The seven stories in this book are just a part of “La Comédie Humaine,” the immortal work that Honoré de Balzac spent twenty-four years working on. What distinguishes “La Comédie Humaine” is that Balzac did not work to standardize it within a specific literary form, nor did he even specify a specific form for any single work. Rather, everything he wrote that revolved around its basic theme was an addition to it. Hence, the formal diversity in the texts, which ranged from novels, both long and short, to stories, essays, and others. This collection contains seven texts from “La Comédie Humaine,” which could properly be called “stories.” Overall, they do not deviate from Balzac’s narrative atmosphere in general, due to the realistic context he adopted in his exploration of the world of nineteenth-century France, with its social classes and individuals, as well as the diversity of content, which he mastered due to the abundance of his production.