Balzac wrote of soldiers, artists, writers, journalists, owners of magazines, feuilletons, literary critics, drama critics, bankers, usurers, moneylenders, castrati, opera singers, inheritances, young men with nothing to lose, local gentry, priests, misers, mothers, government bureaucrats with ambitious wives, actresses, courtesans, mistresses, felons, rogues and pranksters, honest judges, crazy counts, notaries and marriage contracts, merchants, mountebanks and swindlers, doctors, fools, women who drive their men to ruin, musicians, businessmen, nobility, virtuous wives, men under the spell of a woman, duels, and much much more. You're likely to meet these different types over and over again in an infinite number of variations and guises as you read the Comedie Humaine.
The recurring characters of the Comedie Humaine are famous, emulated by such famous successors as Marcel Proust. But it's often hard to even notice sometimes that a character that has just been introduced is actually a character that you've met before in another of Balzac's works. A good example is Cerizet the printer's assistant in "Lost Illusions" who is already showing crooked tendencies in that novel. When you read the "Lesser Bourgeousie" that comes near the end of the Comedie Humaine chronology you encounter him again and in the interval between the events in the two novels he has accumulated quite an infamous biography.
This section provides you with some tools to get a big picture on characters in the Comedie Humaine. Biographies of characters are indexed alphabetically. A gallery of character descriptions has been extracted to demonstrate outside of the context of any one novel some of the rich, detailed descriptions that Balzac weaves. Finally, a list of character types found in the Comedie Humaine is provided.
Balzac tells us in his introduction of 1842 that he constructs character types:
...by composing types out of a combination of homogeneous characteristics, I might perhaps succeed in writing the history which so many historians have neglected: that of Manners. (Balzac 1842 Introduction, Project Gutenberg: hciaa10.txt)
What these types exactly are he never fully spelled out, but it's fun to speculate. I cooked up my list of character types during my reading of the Comedie Humaine. Others should cook up their own lists and share them over the net. This would be a fun way to get to know the Comedie Humaine better.