Prométhée ou la vie de Balzac was published by Hachette in 1965, two years before Maurois’s death at eighty-two. It was his last major work and, in many ways, his most fitting: Balzac — who wrote eighteen hours a day, consumed rivers of coffee, pursued impossible love affairs, speculated disastrously in business, and produced one of the largest bodies of fiction in any language — was the subject Maurois had been building toward his entire career. The Promethean metaphor of the title captures both Balzac’s creative fire and the punishment that accompanied it: the debts, the exhaustion, the early death at fifty-one.
Maurois had the advantage of decades of Balzac scholarship to draw on, including the extensive correspondence with Madame Hańska (the Polish countess whom Balzac loved for eighteen years and married five months before his death) that had been published in the intervening years. He also brought his own experience of the literary life — sixty years of continuous writing — to bear on Balzac’s working methods. The passages on Balzac’s creative process are among the best things Maurois ever wrote: the midnight-to-noon sessions fueled by coffee, the obsessive revision of proofs (which drove his publishers to despair), the way characters from one novel would appear in another as the vast plan of La Comédie Humaine took shape.
The biography is organized chronologically but with thematic excursions on Balzac’s finances (a catastrophe from first to last), his political ambitions (he wanted to be a deputy, then a peer), his relationships with women (which followed a pattern: intense passion, extravagant promises, eventual disappointment), and his relationship to the society he depicted. Maurois argues persuasively that Balzac was neither a social critic nor a social conservative but something rarer: a man who loved the world he described, with all its vulgarity, corruption, and vitality, and who reproduced it with a completeness that transcends moral categories.
At 600 pages in the French edition, Prometheus is the longest of Maurois’s biographies, and some reviewers found it diffuse — the narrative occasionally bogs down in financial details or minor love affairs. But the book’s cumulative effect is powerful: by the end, the reader has a sense of Balzac as a living presence, sweating over his proofs in his monk’s robe, dreaming of the fortune that would always elude him, creating a world more vivid than the one he lived in.
Collecting Prometheus
First French edition (Hachette, Paris, 1965): Prométhée ou la vie de Balzac. Large-format book, illustrated.
First English edition (Harper & Row, New York, 1965): Prometheus: The Life of Balzac. Translated by Norman Denny.
Market values:
- French first edition: $20–$60
- English first in dust jacket: $15–$40
- Later paperback editions: $5–$10
This is Maurois’s late work, and collectors tend to favor the earlier biographies. Fine copies with jackets are worth acquiring but not expensive.