1798 year. Napoleon's Egyptian campaign failed. His doomed army crosses the Sahara, repelling the attacks of the Mameluke warriors. The young French officer Augustin Robert fearlessly fights the enemy, believing in his salvation. But the Sahara completes destruction by overthrowing the surviving soldiers beyond reality. Being at that moment in a semi-unconscious state, Augustin escaping from his pursuers meets with a leopard. It was supposed to be a meeting with death....

Eugenia Grande was considered the most enviable bride in Saumur. Her father, a simple bochar, became rich during the Revolution, buying up confiscated church estates for nothing - the best vineyards and several farms in the Saumur district. He was elected mayor at the Consulate, and during the time of the Empire he was only called Mr. Grande - however, he was familiarly called "dad" by the eyes. No one knew exactly what capital the former Bochar had, but savvy people said that dad Grande had six to seven million francs loyal. Only two people could confirm this, but the notary Kruscho and the...

Being buried twice and still staying alive. To be born in a shelter for foundlings, die in an almshouse for the elderly, and in the interval between these lines to help Napoleon conquer Europe and Egypt - what a fate! The fate of Colonel Chaber....

The late 1820s and early 1830s, when Balzac entered the literature, was the period of the greatest flowering of the work of romanticism in French literature. The great novel in European literature before the arrival of Balzac had two main genres: a novel of personality - an adventurous hero or a self-deepening, lonely hero and a historical novel. Balzac departs from both the novel of personality and the historical novel of Walter Scott. He seeks to show the "individualized type", to give a picture of the whole society, the whole people, the whole of France. Not a legend about the past, but a...