It is an 1833 novel by French author Honoré de Balzac and included in the Scènes de la vie parisienne section of his novel sequence La Comédie humaine. It is part of his trilogy Histoire des treize: Ferragus is the first part, the second is La Duchesse de Langeais and the third is The Girl with the Golden Eyes. The novel is set around the year 1820.

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.