La Comédie Humaine: La Femme de trente ans

The chronology of its publication is difficult to trace insofar as Balzac has continued to retouch this text, cutting it into fragments published in a scattered manner, adding chapters to it, before reuniting the whole under its final title in 1842 in the Furne edition.

In 1830 , Balzac published, in the review La Silhouette , without signature, Une vue de Touraine , which will be the main part of the first part of the novel, completed in 1831 in the Revue des deux Mondes and published under the title Le Rendez-vous. . That same year, La Caricature published under a pseudonym Napoleon's Last Review , which formed the beginning of this first part. The Revue de Paris publishes in 1831 , under the title Les Deux Rencontres , the text which will be the fifth part of the novel, then Le Doigt de Dieu., which will form the first half of the fourth part. The third part of the novel, published in 1832 in the Revue de Paris , is entitled At thirty . That same year, the four parts, to which the author added L'Expiation  , were brought together in Scènes de la vie privée published by Mame and Delaunay-Vallée without a global title bringing them together.

It was in 1834 that Madame Charles-Béchet published the revised set, with the names of the protagonists changed, and two important additions, namely the chapters La Vallée du torrent and Souffrances inconnues , under the title Same story . Other transformations took place for the publication of the text by Werdet in 1837 , then by Charpentier in 1839 .

The Woman of Thirty Years only takes its final title, with the parts linked together, in the Furne edition of 1842 .