Gargantuan appetites on the rue Basse

Honore de Balzac was the first writer to describe in minute detail the importance of money in French society. His surviving Paris home, in the now stylish neighbourhood of Passy, is a reminder of the central, unhappy role that the lack of money played in Balzac's own life. Debts envenomed the writer's relationship with his mother, complicated his love affairs and led him to work himself to death 150 years ago. He died on August 18th, 1850, at the age of 51, devastated that he had not completed the task he set himself as "historian of the human heart".

When Balzac moved to the rue Basse (now the rue Raynouard) in 1840, he chose the location for its inaccessibility to creditors and bailiffs and for its escape route. Until 1937 another, much higher building rose in front of the three-level, cream-coloured stucco house with pale green shutters where the great writer lived for seven years. The house on the street obscured the one below it, where Balzac rented five rooms under his housekeeper's name - again to give the lie to creditors. His friends, including Victor Hugo, knew the passwords for the concierge: "One enters like wine into bottles".

If by mischance a bailiff got through these barriers, Balzac raced down the communal staircase to the courtyard below and out the gate into the rue Berton. Turning left, he could reach the banks of the Seine and catch the ferry into central Paris. The path to the right led to open fields and countryside. It is a wonder that Balzac, with his wide girth, could get down the narrow wooden steps at all. The charming rue Berton, with its street lamps, cobblestones and tree-shaded wall, has not changed since the mid-19th century. You cannot reach it from the Balzac museum and library, but it's worth the detour past Turkish Embassy guards to see it.

The most surprising thing about the apartment where Balzac shut himself away to map out the Comedie humaine - and where he wrote, among other volumes, A Dark Affair, Splendours and Miseries of Courtesans and Cousin Bette, to give them their English titles - is its modesty. You can't help being surprised how a man of such gargantuan appetite and talent fitted into these small rooms. How could the pantry, now the ticket office, have held food enough to satisfy him? One dinner purchased by Balzac's publisher consisted of 100 oysters, 12 lamb chops, a duck, two partridges, a sole and 12 pears, most of it consumed by the writer.

Balzac was a spendthrift who liked brightly coloured, hand-tailored clothes as well as lavish meals. He called his compulsion for buying antiques he could not afford "bric-abracomania". Traces of it remain in the Passy house - his gold and turquoiseencrusted cane, to which his contemporaries mockingly attributed magical powers; a framed gold crucifix that he bought for the Polish Countess, Eve Hanska. Balzac's sitting room is devoted to mementos of Hanska, whom he married five months before his death. Their 16-year courtship began when the bored noblewoman sent Balzac anonymous, adoring reader's letters from her estate in Ukraine.

In the 17-volume Comedie humaine, Balzac created a universe of more than 2,000 named characters. To produce an average of 2,000 pages annually over a 19-year period, he rose at midnight, brewed very strong black coffee, wrote until 8 a.m., breakfasted and then resumed work until five every evening. His white porcelain coffee pot, emblazoned with the initials "H.B." can be seen in Balzac's red velvet-lined office. Martine Contensou, a curator, says she feels his presence in the study, which has been painstakingly decorated following his descriptions of it in letters. "We are working to promote his oeuvre, and it's very much alive," Contensou says. "He was interested in everything, he took part in everything. You still feel his energy."

The most powerfully evocative object is Balzac's original desk and armchair. He wrote to Hanska of the simple, dark wood, Henri II table that it was "witness to my anguish, my misery, my distress, my joy, everything . . . My arm has almost worn it away, moving over it as I write."

Maison de Balzac, 47 rue Raynouard, Paris 16e. Open every day except Monday and bank holidays, from 10 a.m. until 5.30 p.m. Entry Ffr 30.