Sarah Coppock, age 16, of Laconic, N.H., for her question:

WHO WAS BALZAC?

When you make up a list of the great literary figures of the past, you will have to include the name of the fine French writer of realistic novels, Honors de Balzac. He didn't write ordinary fiction but instead elected to divide human nature into all its types, and then presented every type among his characters.

Historians tell a great story about Balzacls writing habits. He went to bed immediately after dinner each evening, but then got up at midnight and started to writs with great haste. Often he would write for 15 hours at a stretch. An inner force always seemed to be driving him.

Balzac wanted to study mankind the way naturalists were studying lower animals. He was interested in their surroundings and how one differed from another. He wanted his work to show human society as it really existed. His objective was to view life scientifically. He wanted to account for society through his pen.

Several years before he died in 1850 at the age of 51, he selected about 95 of his short stories and novels into what he called "The Human Comedy."

Much of Balzac's work is rated among the world's best fiction. "The Human Comedy" is especially highly regarded.

Balzac was born in the French town of Tours. His father was a well to do local politician. As a boy, he received a good education but didnot show any special talent as a youngster.

To please his parents, Balzac went to Paris to study law. This was followed by about 10 years living in a Paris attic, writing poor novels to make a living. Then in 1819 at the sae of 30 he wrote "The Chouans," a novel that won him recognition and the friendship of Victor Hugo and many other men of letters. After that, he wrote four or five novels, a number of short stories and at least a dozen articles every year.

Balzac's fiction is regarded as uneven in quality, since some of it was written when he was worn out or ill. But he had several thousand characters move through his pages and they definitely did represent the France of his day. The way they looked and details of what they were thinking were presented in Balzacls writing with an uncanny exactness.

The experts regard Balzacls prose style as having a rich, dynamic quality that makes his work compelling and absorbing.

Balzac certainly achieved his gain objective: to show French society with the utmost realism.

After 18 years of waiting for the woman he loved because she was married to another person, Balzac finally married a Polish countess named Eveline Hanska. His health broken, he died just five months after his marriage.

Balzac called his ceaseless toil of writing with pen and ink as "putting black on white."