It is an 1836 short story by French author Honoré de Balzac and included in the Scènes de la vie parisienne section of his novel sequence La Comédie humaine. And it in 1837 was classified by Balzac as a Philosophical Study

Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled Human Comedy, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon Bonaparte.Due to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is renowned for his multifaceted characters, who are morally ambiguous.