Well, hey.  thanks for the intro.    Now this:

I’ve always argued that bankruptcy law needs its Balzac, except that it
has its Balzac, and his name is Balzac. In a broad sense, you could say
that everything he wrote is about bankruptcy—or at least about
commerce, and usury, and rapacity, and greed, and wild speculation, and
all the things that made him Marx’s favorite novelist. He had
first-hand experience—it is said that he equipped his house with a
special back door, for the escape from creditors (he also took a
mistress more than 20 years his senior who was the mother of nine
children, go figure). He did write one explicit “bankruptcy” novel, Histoire de la grandeur et de la décadence de César Birotteau, about a guileless parfumiere,
undone by an unworthy servant, but particular references are scattered
through any number of other novels. One of the best bits may be the
passage in Eugénie Grandet, where the Old Grandet, the miserly cooper, undertakes to de-besmirch the name of his late brother, the speculator and suicide:

Presently
des Grasssins called a meeting of creditors, who unanimously appointerd
the Saumur banker and François Keller, the head of a large business
firm and one of the principal creditors, as joint trustees; and
empowered them to do anything they thought necessary to prevent any
doubt being cast on the good name of the family, or the bills. The
credit Grandet of Saumur enjoyed, the hopes des Grassins roused in the
hearts of the creditors as his agent, made this go smoothly. There was
not a single dissident voice among the creditors. Nobody dreamed of
passing his bills to his profit and loss account, and each man said to
himself, ‘Grandet of Saumur will pay!’

Six months went by. The
Parisians had withdrawn the bills from circulation, and had put them
away underneath all their other business papers. This was the first
result the cooper was looking for. Nine months after the first meeting
the two trustees distributed forty-seven per cent of the amount owing
to each creditor. This sum had been raised by the sale of valuables,
property, goods and chattels belonging to the late Guillaume Grandet, a
sale made with most scrupulous honesty. The delighted creditors
acknowledged the undeniable and admirable integrity of the Grandet
brothers. Having praised them and circulated their praises for a
suitably decorous length of time, the creditors began to ask when the
remainder of their money would be forthcoming. It became necessary to
write a collective letter to Grandet.

‘Now we’re getting somewhere,’ said the old cooper, throwing the letter into the fire.  ‘Have patience, my little friends.’

In
reply to the propositions put forward in the letter, Grandet of Saumur
asked that all the documents involving claims against his late
brother’s estate should be deposited with a notary, together with
receipts for payments already made, in order, so he said, that the
accounts might be audited and to establish correctly just how much
money was owed by the estate.

This all goes on for another page or so.  Then:

Twenty-three
months after Guillaume Grandet’s death, many of the merchants, in the
rush of business life in Paris, had forgotten their claims against his
estate, or thought of them only to say,

‘I’m beginning to think that the forty-seven percent is all I’ll see of that debt.’

And so it goes.  Earlier, young Eugénie had asked the old cooper:  ‘What is a bankrupt, father?’

‘A
bankrupt,’ answered her father, ‘has committed the most dishonorable
deed that a man can dishonour his name by being guilty of. … A
bankrupt,’ he went on, ‘is a thief that the law unfortunately takes
under its protection.’