Berlioz made it easy to become acquainted with his short stories when he included them in Les Soirées de l'orchestre, a comic masterpiece that appeared in 1852 and has remained in print to this day. The creation of that volume out of previously published stories, biographies of composers, and other journalistic writing about music was a stroke of literary genius parallel to the musical inspiration, six years before, of La Damnation de Faust, which cast into dramatic form the individual scenes he had set from Goethe's poem in 1828. Of such mid-career recastings the most famous contemporary example was Balzac's Comédie humaine, announced in 1842 on the basis of previous and projected writings, and still in progress at the writer's death in 1850. It seems fitting that Berlioz should mention Balzac at the start of both Les Soirées and its sequel of 1859, Les Grotesques de la musique. By their extraordinary range and variety, Berlioz's two volumes put one in mind of a human comedy of the musical world – comedy both in the usual sense of farce, wit, irony, and humor, and in the Balzacian sense (derived from Dante) of drama in the world-theatre of human events.