Honoré de Balzac grave

A bronze bust of Honoré de Balzac sits atop a tall stone pedestal in Division Forty-Eight of Père Lachaise Cemetery. The author stares perpetually toward the crowded paths of the city he documented in his novels. When he died in eighteen fifty, his admirers commissioned this monument to mark his final resting place. A young Auguste Rodin later used this same likeness as a starting point for his own controversial statue of the writer, which now stands elsewhere in the city.