The Scientist in Balzac's Human Comedy: David Sechard in Lost Illusions

As I remarked not too long ago Balzac was an admirer of scientists and inventors, and a supporter of technological progress--with this, in fact, making him more critical rather than less of a money-dominated society, as we see in Lost Illusions. In Part III, "The Sufferings of Inventors," printer David Sechard, in an era where the demand for printed matter, and the material on which it is to be printed, are exploding, pursues the development of a new technique of paper-making.

Sechard's efforts are ultimately successful, but circumstances compel him to sell his innovation to richer businessmen prepared to destroy him to have control of the technology, such that they have the principal benefit of the development--all as Sechard's "discovery . . . [is] assimilated by the French manufacturing world, as food is assimilated by a living body," his development a tributary stream into a broad Mississippi of technological progress rather than a singlehandedly epoch-making occurrence. And after the hardships he had put himself and his wife through he gives up invention, "bidd[ing] farewell for ever to glory," and occupying himself with other pursuits.

In all that, as in so much else, Balzac's thinking is far, far truer to the history, and sociology, of science and technology than the conventional view prevailing at present, which desires to reduce that whole history to nothing but a series of Edisonades where inventors are invariably rewarded with demi-god-like glory and riches in this life, and eternal remembrance in a Pantheon of All-Time Greats after.