Of these proposed three to four thousand characters Balzac succeeded in creating some two thousand, in twenty-two years of intensive work at relentlessly high pressure, working fourteen, sixteen, eighteen hours a day for months on end, choosing the night to work in, when he would be free from interruption, and stimulating his tired brain with cups of strong black coffee. In those years, apart from numerous essays, short stories and plays, he wrote nearly ninety volumes, of which almost every one is a novel of the first rank.