📗 Balzac (1799-1850) was a French novelist and playwright whose novel sequence La Comedie humaine, which represents a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life, is generally viewed as his greatest work. These two short stories which include some of the characters who appear in La Comedie humaine were written over a decade apart but Balzac later added his earlier work La Grande Breteche (1831) as a sequel to.Another Study of Woman (1842).