Get This Man an Armani Suit : A prolific chronicler of 19th Century Paris describes a city uncannily like our own. : BALZAC: A Biography, <i> By Graham Robb (W.W. Norton: $35; 417 pp.)</i>

If anybody is still looking for the quintessential Los Angeles novelist, I’ve just found him: Honore de Balzac. The prolific chronicler of Paris in the first half of the 19th Century describes a city uncannily like my own. Nowadays Paris has become an upscale Disneyland for grown-ups, but Balzac’s Paris was a caldron of greed, envy and intractable class conflict. It’s pure Los Angeles, right down to the polluted air, the crowded, dangerous streets and awful slums cheek-by-jowl with ostentatious displays of fabulous wealth. The Faubourg Saint-Germain was a 19th-Century Beverly Hills, a place, Balzac wrote, where “thinking is kept to a minimum.”

Balzac called his hometown “that insulting city,” “the great melting-pot,” and “dear old hell,” but he was as loyal as a post-quake Angeleno who refuses to move. During one brief visit to rural Sardinia, Balzac grew homesick and complained: “There are . . . no prostitutes, no cheap theaters, no society, no newspapers, nor any of the impurities that betray the presence of civilization.” He would have loved Southern California.

Balzac, who largely invented the young-man-from-the-provinces genre, starred in one himself: Born in the Loire Valley in 1799, he arrived in Paris when he was 20 (the same year he had Eugene de Rastignac hit town in “Pere Goriot”) and started out in the Grub Street world of commercial journalism, churning out articles, reviews and the occasional pseudonymous potboiler. Not one of the hack writers, plagiarists and hustlers who populate his later novels would be out of place in a studio development office or a Writers Guild board meeting today. The titles alone--”Lost Illusions,” “The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans”--bring Hollywood immediately to mind.

Like every one else in his Parisian Babylon, Balzac was not satisfied with modest success; he was forever planning his big financial score, from Mediterranean silver mines and Brazilian treasure hunts to elaborate publishing ventures and a scheme to sell life insurance along with special editions of his novels. The plans always failed and, though forever in debt, he retained a firm belief in second chances, which marks him as an honorary Californian.

He came into his own as a novelist during the 1830s, the era of the July Monarchy, when a new bourgeois regime presided over two decades of unrestrained appetite and acquisitiveness far more evocative of our own times than Dickens’ sentimental paternalism. Balzac had found a worthy subject, and though he considered himself a royalist, he was the Restoration’s most subversive critic. Oscar Wilde said that Balzac “invented the 19th Century,” but Balzac would have given Napoleon the credit. The author kept a bust of the emperor in his study, with a note attached: “What he was unable to finish with the sword, I shall accomplish with the pen.”

By the time he died at mid-century, at the age of 51, Balzac had produced more than 100 novels and tales filled with countless recurring characters, all part of one over-arching structure entitled “La Comedie Humaine.” In the English-speaking world, Balzac is one of the most neglected of the 19th-Century masters. Only a fraction of his books are in print, and apart from “Pere Goriot” and “Cousin Bette,” which still turn up in college courses, he is little read in this country. Graham Robb’s biography is the first written in English in over half a century.

The popular image of Balzac derives from the idealized Rodin sculpture, made long after his death, and Andre Maurois’s over-romanticized 1965 biography: that Balzac was a Romantic Artist who never left his desk and floated an entire fictional universe on gallons of strong black coffee. He supposedly talked to his fictional characters as if they were flesh-and-bone companions, and the classic myth is that on his death-bed he called for Dr. Bianchon, a recurring character in the novels, and cried out: “Only he can save me now!”

Graham Robb, a former Oxford fellow, provides the sober Anglo-Saxon antidote to the hype, but he may have gone to the other extreme. Robb is scrupulous about his facts--and offers little but the facts. He shies away from the creative speculation necessary to synthesize a believable and compelling portrait. For example, he never provides more than the barest sketch of Balzac’s crucial relationship with his mother, a tyrannical witch (if the son’s letters are to be believed) from whose suffocating embrace he was never able to extricate himself. Robb only teases the reader with the possible ways in which she may have influenced Balzac’s art; he never addresses them directly.

For the most part, Robb ignores the novels themselves as a record of Balzac’s state of mind. He favors the letters, which are a record of love affairs, bills paid and unpaid, and get-rich-quick schemes. But it is in the fiction that Balzac’s genius shines, anatomizing every level of society with an anthropologist’s eye and a psychiatrist’s ear. It is the interconnectedness of the life and the art that is missing from this biography.

Just before his death, Balzac was given the kind of romantic happy ending that he never permitted his characters. For 17 years he had conducted a long-distance love affair with Eveline Hanska, a wealthy Polish countess living in the Ukraine. His letters to her take up two volumes in the collected works, but he rarely laid eyes on her. Her husband died in 1841, and Balzac finally married her. When she finally appeared in Paris, Alfred de Vigny wrote: “I had always believed the Russian woman to be a fantasy and was amazed to learn she was real.” Balzac and Eveline were only physically together for about four years, but they were blissfully happy. One of her servants described finding the middle-aged newlyweds together at night, sitting by the fireside: “They talked and talked until morning. . . . Whatever could they find to talk about for so long?” Whatever indeed.

Balzac believed in the talismanic power of certain objects. In his former house in Passy, I was once shown a set of small dolls clothed in a few shreds of faded material, which Balzac had supposedly used to keep track of the countless characters in the “Comedie Humaine.”

In Los Angeles, another little bit of “Balzaciana” recently turned up in Dailey Rare Books on Melrose, where I found a three-volume edition from an obscure French mediocrity named J.F. Ducis, who improvised French translations of Shakespeare without bothering to read the original. The Ducis “Othello,” which has a happy ending, is particularly nice. The set was produced by Balzac under his own imprint as part of a failed attempt to become a successful publisher. An aura of enterprise, optimism and fraud adheres to these elegant little volumes, with their perfect leather bindings and gold lettering. They seemed right at home on Melrose Avenue.

I first encountered Balzac as a teen-ager. I identified with Lucien de Rubempre in “Lost Illusions” and the young Rastignac. They were both quintessential young men in a hurry, and so was I. Over the years, I continue to work my way through the “Comedie Humaine,” and I still encounter Rastignac in later volumes. He’s gotten older; he married well and become rich and self-satisfied. I’ve gotten older too, and I note the diminution of his inner fire with a certain grim satisfaction.

“A steady course of Balzac,” Oscar Wilde wrote, “reduces our living friends to shadows, and our acquaintances to the shadows of shades. . . . One of the great tragedies of my life is the death of Lucien de Rubempre. It is a grief from which I have never been able to completely rid myself. It haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember it when I laugh.”