Honoré de Balzac

Un début dans la vie is a novel by the French writer Honoré de Balzac. It is the sixth of the Scènes de la vie privée in La Comédie humaine. The novel was serialized in the review La Législature in 1842 under the title Le Danger des mystifications. In 1845 it appeared under its present title in the second Furne …

The text is that of Burton Raffell’s acclaimed 1994 translation. The text is accompanied by an introduction, textual annotations by the editor, and a map of Paris. "Responses: Contemporaries and Other Novelists" illustrates Balzac’s immense influence on other writers, among them Charles Baudelaire, Hippolyte Taine, …