Does Balzac’s legal reality have a principally historical value or does it instead reflect something more like the “poetic license” used for the history in Les Chouans? If so, what is this poetically altered reality ? The possible answers found in Le Colonel Chabert, L’Interdiction and other novels show that writing the law in realist fiction requires imagination, invention and illusion — everything that is the absolute opposite of the terse, lapidary prose of the Napoleonic codes. In thus sounding the depths of La Comédie humaine, this article takes an approach originating in law but centered on literature. This is the opposite of the customary process of critics coming from the legal academy: the article reads the law to reveal a few of the secrets of Balzac’s creative process. This approach focuses on neither legal history nor Justice, but only on the literary text itself without any polemic, political or other agenda.