A Parisian Woman

Cousin Bette 

by Honoré de Balzac

In Paris, when a woman has made up her mind to use her beauty as her livelihood and merchandise, it does not necessarily follow that she will make her fortune.

- Balzac, Cousin Bette, p 155

Cousin Bette by French author Honoré de Balzac is set in mid-19th century Paris, telling the story of an unmarried middle-aged woman who plots the destruction of her extended family. Bette works with Valérie Marneffe, an unhappily married young lady, to seduce and torment a series of men. One of these is Baron Hector Hulot, husband to Bette's cousin Adeline. He sacrifices his family's fortune and good name to please Valérie, who leaves him for a tradesman named Crevel. Bette has harbored a resentment against her cousin Adeline Hulot since childhood. Bette's father and Adeline's father were two of the Fischer brothers. Their uncle, Johann Fischer, brought the girls up and still contributes to their financial well-being as adults. Adeline and her cousin Bette are exact opposites. Adeline is fair-haired and of light complexion while Bette is dark and rather ugly. Bette sees Adeline as the enemy because of her beauty and good fortune in life. Adeline is married to Baron Hulot, a successful government employee and one-time benefactor to the Fischer brothers. After Bette moves to Paris at Adeline's insistence, she hatches a plot to destroy the beautiful Adeline, her husband and their children.

Cousin Bette and many of the primary protagonists in the novel are afflicted with the vices of greed, envy, and lust. Bette's greed seeks to overthrow Adeline Hulot. Madame Marneffe's greed and lust are only satisfied by acquiring wealth and material possessions. Baron Hulot's lust carries him from one affair to the next and his greed deepens his financial trouble each time. Crevel's greed motivates him to "steal" a mistress from Hector Hulot only to have it cost him his life. The morals and standards of nineteenth century French society come under the author's scrutiny in Cousin Bette. The novel is also a critique of the concept of a French ruling class after the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte. Balzac's novel is also a morality play in that the characters are imaginative figures as well as character types. And while the story in and of itself is tidily resolved, the narrative nonetheless exposes an underside of human behavior that is puzzling at best and deadly at worst.

The book is part of the Scènes de la vie Parisienne section of Balzac's novel sequence La Comédie humaine ("The Human Comedy"). Writing quickly and with intense focus, Balzac produced La Cousine Bette, one of his longest novels, in two months. It was published at the end of 1846, then collected with a companion work, Le Cousin Pons, the following year. The novel's characters represent polarities of contrasting morality. The vengeful Bette and disingenuous Valérie stand on one side, with the merciful Adeline and her patient daughter Hortense on the other. The patriarch of the Hulot family, meanwhile, is consumed by his own sexual desire. Hortense's husband, the Polish exile Wenceslas Steinbock, represents artistic genius, though he succumbs to uncertainty and lack of motivation.

La Cousine Bette is considered Balzac's last great work. His trademark use of realist detail combines with a panorama of characters returning from earlier novels. While I do not admire it as much as some critics, it has been compared to works by Shakespeare and Tolstoy. It is considered both a turning point in the author's career and a prototypical naturalist text. The novel explores themes of vice and virtue, as well as the influence of money on French society. Bette's relationship with Valérie is also seen as an important exploration of homoerotic themes. I would compare it with Dickens although it lacks his humor and overall seems more bitter. The best of Dickens, by contrast, usually focuses more on a positive character.


 

La Comédie humaine

Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac

“A letter is a soul, so faithful an echo of the speaking voice that to the sensitive it is among the richest treasures of love.” ― Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot


Another wonderful translation by Burton Raffel, this is a faithful and readable edition of one of Balzac's most popular novels. It is one of the finest and most characteristic examples of Balzac's longer fictions. It was in the course of writing this novel that he hit upon the idea of reuse of characters invented in earlier stories; he is said to have rushed round to his sister, Laure Surville, to tell her that he was ‘in the process of becoming a genius’.
Eugène de Rastignac, the young man whose adventures and feelings are at the centre of Le Père Goriot, is an episodic character of La Peau de chagrin (1830), and most of the society figures whom he meets in this novel had appeared in earlier stories of Parisian life. After Le Père Goriot, Balzac systematically reused its characters in dozens of other stories and novels, notably in Illusions perdues, where the arch-criminal Vautrin crops up under another disguise. Although history is not central to Le Père Goriot, the post-Napoleonic era serves as an important setting, as is Balzac's use of meticulous detail while he presents a balanced view of human nature. Although the novel is sometimes referred to as "a mystery it is not an example of whodunit or detective fiction. Instead, the central puzzles feature the origins of suffering and the motivations of unusual behavior. Characters appear in fragments, with brief scenes providing small clues about their identity. Vautrin, for example, slips in and out of the story – offering advice to Rastignac, ridiculing Goriot, bribing the housekeeper Christophe to let him in after hours – before he is revealed as a master criminal. Le Père Goriot can also be seen as a bildungsroman, wherein a naive young person matures while learning the ways of the world. Rastignac is tutored by Vautrin, Madame de Beauséant, Goriot, and others about the truth of Parisian society and the coldly dispassionate and brutally realistic strategies required for social success. As an everyman, he is initially repulsed by the gruesome realities beneath society's gilded surfaces; eventually, however, he embraces them. Setting aside his original goal of mastering the law, he pursues money and women as instruments for social climbing. In some ways this mirrors Balzac's own social education, reflecting the distaste he acquired for the law after studying it for three years.
While it is a relatively short novel it seems longer, perhaps due to the fragmentary style. It has been translated many times and I found the translation by Burton Raffel (who also translated Rabelais and others) a beautiful one to read. This is a good novel in which to enter the world of Balzac's "Human Comedy".


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