Up to 50 cups of black coffee a day, 48-hour writing sessions, creditors at the door and a printing business that collapsed into 50,000 francs of debt owed to his own mother. This episode explores how Honoré de Balzac failed spectacularly at the business of living and used those failures to build La Comédie Humaine, the interconnected fictional universe that mapped post-Napoleonic French society. We start with a cold childhood: four years with a wet nurse, a strict boarding school where he was repeatedly locked in a cell called the alcove, and the reading binge that ended in a coma-like collapse.

From a law clerk's desk watching families fight over inheritances, through pseudonymous potboilers and doomed ventures in publishing, printing, Sardinian slag and Ukrainian oak, we follow Balzac to his 1832 vision of recurring characters and enviro ...