 When Balzac began writing Le Père Goriot in 1834 , he had written several dozen books , including a stream of pseudonymously published potboiler novels . In 1829 he published Les Chouans , the first novel to which he signed his own name ; this was followed by Louis Lambert ( 1832 ) , Le Colonel Chabert ( 1832 ) , and La Peau de chagrin ( 1831 ) . Around this time , Balzac began organizing his work into a sequence of novels that he eventually called La Comédie humaine , divided into sections representing various aspects of life in France during the early 19th century . 
