Honore de Balzac

  • Notable Interns

    In The Physiology of the Employee (1841)—a pamphlet-length essay on the misery of bureaucracy—the French novelist Honoré de Balzac wrote: “An intern is to the Civil Service what a choirboy is to the Church, or what an army child is…

  • How Much Coffee Did Balzac Really Drink?

    It has long been a favorite factoid of writers that Honoré de Balzac drank fifty cups of coffee a day. But is it true? The Airship’s Freddie Moore has put an admirable amount of research into investigating the claim, dividing…