Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) was born in Tours. By the time of his death, he had written over one hundred novels, novellas, and plays, all the while working as a journalist. Colonel Chabert is one of the "Scenes from Private Life," which is a part of Balzac's well-known life-long project, La Comedie Humaine. Peter Brooks has written extensively about the nineteenth-century novel, French and English. His books include The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess; Reading for the Plot, Body Work, Psychoanalysis and Storytelling and The Emperor's Body: A Novel. After many years on the faculty at Yale University, he currently teaches at Princeton University. Burton Raffel is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Emeritus. He is the translator of many works, including Gargantua and Pantagruel (awarded the French-American Foundation Translation Prize), Père Goriot, Beowulf, and the five romances of Chrétien de Troyes.