Ferragus, Chief of the Dévorants

In this novel, Balzac describes the Dévorants as a group of 13 men who, loyal to each other only, lived beyond the law and society in nineteenth-century Paris. They were, in effect, criminals who obeyed no laws but lived only by their own rules. They were a secret society mostly unknown and unrecognized. Ferragus was their leader, and the novel focuses on him.