Honoré e Balzac (IPA: [ɔnɔʁe də balˈzak]) (May 20, 1799 – August 18, 1850) was a nineteenth-century French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of almost 100 novels and plays collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the fall of Napoléon Bonaparte in 1815.