YDS READING PASSAGES / TEST 6 37. Soru

-13.HONORE DE BALZAC

The great French novelist Honore de Balzac was born in Tours, France, in 1799 to a peasant's son who had become a banker and a supplier to Napoleon's army. His mother came from a middleclass family. In infancy he lived at his nurse's home. When he was 4, he was boarded out with strangers, coming home only on Sundays. When he was 7 he was sent to a boarding school at VendÛme. He was a poor student, neglected by his parents and misunderstood by his teachers. He attended the University of Paris for a time, then was apprenticed to a notary. When he was 20, Balzac asserted himself. He begged his parents to support him for two years while he prepared to be a writer. In a Paris garret he wrote several amateurish pieces that interested no one. Then in 1829 he wrote 'Les Chouans', the first volume of The Human Comedy'. This series of almost 80 novels and tales forms a social history of France in the first half of the 1800s. In the works Balzac depicts more than 2,000 named characters.

The passage contains the information that Honore de Balzac's father ------ .