Would you like to see a novel encounter between a great writer and a great painter? Neither one nor two, see you at the Balzac house. Balzac is in itself a great subject. An emblematic writer, a founding figure in realist literature, with a work rich in characters and intrigues, he had everything to catch the attention of Eduardo Arroyo (1937 - 2018). The meeting took place when he arrived in Paris, thanks to Rodin's sculpture on the Boulevard Raspail, but the link became concrete in 1964, when Gilles Aillaud suggested the theme of the novel Une passion dans le désert for a cycle of thirteen paintings. This will become the manifesto of narrative figuration, a pictorial movement of which Arroyo is one of the founders. In 2013, he reintroduces Balzac in his painting, with the ambition of illustrating The Human Comedy. Through some thirty paintings, collages and drawings, he is interested in the figure of Balzac, in the characters from his novels but also in the places where the writer lived. However, his work goes beyond the simple (re)discovery of Balzac, which becomes a pretext for the narration of memories and the restitution of impressions. Although this project was interrupted when he died, it is nevertheless the first attempt by a major artist to illustrate The Human Comedy.