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Who is Vautrin in Lost Illusions and A Harlot High and Low?

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Honoré de Balzac daguerreotype, 1848 — Honoré de Balzac The French novelist helped to establish the traditional form of the novel, and is considered one of the greatest novelists of all time.

In the works of Honoré de Balzac, Vautrin is a resourceful and formidable criminal mastermind. Also known by his real name, Jacques Collin, he is a recurring character who appears in several novels within The Human Comedy.1234

In the novel A Harlot High and Low, he operates under the alias Carlos Herrera, a perverse figure who manipulates the lives of the characters Esther Gobseck and Lucien de Rubempré. Vautrin is depicted as a powerful, dominant force in the world of Balzac’s fiction, representing the raw, often destructive energies of the era. His presence across multiple stories, including Lost Illusions, serves as a key example of Balzac’s technique of using recurring characters to provide temporal density and dynamism to his vast literary project.341