Another mention by Barbara Hambly!
She leaned to withdraw the folded sheets. “We follow families, names, neighborhoods for years, sometimes decades. To us, chains of events are like the lives of Balzac’s characters, or Dickens’. The nights are long.”
Traveling with the Dead (James Asher #2) by Barbara Hambly
*****
A marvelous resource for tracking the lives of Balzac’s characters is Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine by Anatole Cerfberr and Jules François Christophe, free from Project Gutenberg.