It is a novella by Honoré de Balzac. It is the third part of the Thirteen series, which includes the short stories Ferragus and La Duchesse de Langeais. It is also part of his La Comédie humaine novel sequence.

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.