Cousin Bette by Honore de Balzac, Honore de Balzac, Kathleen Raine, Kathleen Raine (Translator), Kathleen Raine (Translator)

The Barnes & Noble Review

Not too long ago, my friend Harold told me that if he didn't have to earn a living, he would just read Balzac. This is something a literate Francophone in the middle of his life could wish for reasonably, because Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) wrote over 90 novels and a number of plays to comprise the definitive chronicle of his era -- La Comédie Humaine -- giving Harold sufficient material to engage his days. Balzac, who enjoyed popular success in his lifetime, influenced a number of significant writers, most notably Gustave Flaubert, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Emile Zola, Charles Dickens, Friedrich Engels, and Marcel Proust. His complete works are not readily available in translation, so those of us who are not fluent in French have to content ourselves with a comparatively meager handful of Balzac's treasures in English. The literature professors would most likely suggest that the must-reads are Eugénie Grandet, Père Goriot, Lost Illusions, Cousin Bette, and Cousin Pons -- all glittering masterpieces wrought by Balzac's playful hand.

But if you have a day job and feel shy about committing to even a mere 5 volumes out of 92, for my money, the first I'd pick up would be the Modern Library's Cousin Bette (translated by Kathleen Raine, with an introduction by Francine Prose), a delicious novel of envy, lust, money, revenge, and sexual hunger that began its narrative life, preposterously enough, as a children's short story written by Balzac's baby sister, Laure.

At its simplest, Cousin Bette is a tale of the Hulots -- one unhinged aristocratic family. Without comparison, Baron Hector Hulot is the memorable sex maniac father character of 19th-century literature. Adeline Hulot, née Fischer, serves as the baron's martyred wife; Victorin is their prim lawyer son; and Hortense is the pretty young daughter in search of a husband. The hidden engine of this broken family machinery is Adeline's first cousin, the title character Lisbeth Fischer, referred to coarsely as Bette. This country cousin -- 43 years old at the beginning of the novel -- deserves top billing, because she plots the complex course of the novel through her desire to avenge herself for the numerous slights she has suffered throughout her life as the homely, ridiculed spinster.

The painful back-story is important to bring up here, for Vosges soil nourished the roots of Bette's murderous envy. Bette and Adeline, daughters of the Fischer brothers, were raised in the same peasant household, but Adeline, the elder by five years, was treated royally for her marked beauty, in contrast to Bette -- "[a] Vosges peasant woman in all senses of the word -- thin, dark, her hair black and stringy, with thick eyebrows meeting in a tuft, long, strong arms, flat feet, with several moles on her long simian face..." The younger sister is consigned to labor in the field. When the 16-year old Adeline is chosen by the Adonis-like Hector Hulot, then the ordnance officer-in-chief in Napoleon's army, to be his wife, Bette is left behind in the mud of Vosges for years, until Adeline sends for her in Paris, where it becomes clear to her family benefactors that "it would be impossible to marry this girl, with her dark eyes and black brows, who could neither read nor write..."

In Paris, Bette, armed with her "peasant shrewdness," is trained expertly to embroider the uniforms of the Imperial Army to earn her keep, thereby permitting her to live alone in a hovel and maintain the marginally dignified existence of the poor relation. At the age of 43, "The girl gave up all idea of competing with or rivaling her cousin, having experienced the effects of her superior qualities; but envy remained hidden in her secret heart, like the germ of a disease that is liable to break out and ravage a city if the fatal bale of wool in which it is hidden is ever opened." Balzac takes care to succinctly detail this family history of two girl cousins, and with a rousing start, our story blasts off.

It is July 1838; Baroness Adeline Hulot is 48 years old. Balzac, ever the lover of mature married women, lets Adeline have a significant physical advantage at an age when most writers, then and now, would have made her a wizened matron. Due to his lifelong erotomania, the 62-year-old Baron Hulot has blown through his capital and leveraged his financial prospects on a series of exquisite teenage entertainers. Much to Adeline's heartbreak, there is no cash left for Hortense's dowry. Adeline's otherwise adorable Baron Hulot has also made an enemy for life by stealing Josepha, the young and beloved mistress of the unsightly Celestin Crevel, a wealthy ex-perfumer, who is also the father-in-law to Victorin Hulot.

In the masterfully conceived first chapters, Crevel, the savant businessman and parvenu, gauges accurately the Hulot family's fragile household economy. To avenge Hulot's theft of the gorgeous Jewish singer, Josepha, Crevel proposes this bargain to Adeline Hulot: 200,000 francs for Hortense's dowry in exchange for a decade of Adeline's sexual favors. Naturally, the good wife spurns the little toad. While this scene is taking place, the maiden Hortense is ferreting out nuggets of intelligence from Bette about her young sweetheart, Wenceslas Steinbock -- an impoverished Polish count and sculptor who Bette has kept alive above her garret by eating into her modest savings. With her information at the ready, it takes the beautiful Hortense only one scene to pilfer Wenceslas from Bette's private store. Hortense then succeeds in her scheme to marry the handsome Polish count with the blessings of her parents. Bette's cache of injuries, now multiplied irredeemably by this ultimate Hulot family betrayal, provides tremendous horsepower for the novel's ensuing intrigues. With the evil siren Valerie Marneffe as her instrument of destruction, Bette's revenge unspools.

Balzac's biographer Graham Robb writes, "From 1829 on, each of his novels tells the story of debt." The author lived perennially with a team of creditors chasing him, his bills of exchange evidencing the man's profligate consumption patterns. Balzac, who remains unchallenged as France's greatest man of letters, outspent his income throughout his adult life in blazing style and died a debtor despite a number of publishing successes. That his character Bette would employ each character's lust, vanity, and prejudices to bring about their destruction points to Balzac's intimate awareness of immutable obsessions and his belief in the inevitable dominance of a person's essential nature. This novel refuses to serve up redemption, admirable choices, or personal growth, yet the highly pleasurable story is all the better for it.

His gargantuan ambitions matching his voracious appetites, a 34-year-old Balzac declared that he would characterize his epoch and nation through endless volumes of fiction. For the remainder of his life, a scant two decades, he wrote and wrote about human debts and our bottomless hunger for more. Cousin Bette is Balzac's magnificent story of debt -- of debts fatefully incurred, and of debts requiring settlement at the hands of earthy women and men. --Min Jin Lee

Min Jin Lee is the author of the novel Free Food for Millionaires. She has received the NYFA Fellowship for Fiction, the Peden Prize from The Missouri Review for Best Story, and the Narrative Prize for New and Emerging Writer. Her work has also been featured on NPR's Selected Shorts.

From the Publisher

Cousin Bette (1846), long considered Balzac's last great novel, is a key work in his Comedie humaine. Grounded in a meticulous documentation of contemporary France, this tale is set in the prosperous Paris of Louis-Phillipe and details a jealous woman's campaign of persecution against her own family. This new translation has an introduction by David Bellos which sets this work in its social, historical, and literary context.

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INTRODUCTION

In Balzac's La Comedie Humaine we see the beginnings of history treated as a serious novelistic subject, a subject that would dominate much of 19th-century literature and find masterful expression in Tolstoy's War and Peace. Knowledge of historical context is crucial to an understanding of Balzac's thematic concerns as an artist, as well as to a basic understanding of his characters' motives and fortunes. The Napoleonic Wars, Restoration, and 1830 Revolution, all events experienced by the young Balzac, were defining moments in the nation's history and were readily invoked by intellectuals to explain the circumstances, national or domestic, of Balzac's time.

After Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815, France restored the Bourbon regime under Louis XVIII and Charles X. The Restoration had managed to absorb the republican changes of the Revolution and Napoleon, but, when in 1829, King Charles X revoked the charter which guaranteed a free press among other things, the people, led by the middle class, staged a successful revolution. Charles abdicated, and, under the new King Louis-Philippe a constitutional monarchy was established which had to answer to the Chamber of Deputies, an institution equivalent to the British House of Commons. Composed mainly of wealthy middle class entrepreneurs, the Chamber of Deputies moved rapidly to divide the large family estates that dominated the nation's feudal past and to base France's economy on the principles of finance. This was the political and economic system under which Balzac labored as an artist, and one in which he saw the seeds of destruction for the glories of Napoleonic and dynastic France.

Much of this history can be deduced from the details of Cousin Bette, and we can gather Balzac's attitude about these historical changes in the novel's nostalgic and apprehensive tone. Balzac, whose father was a supplier to Napoleon's army, laments the Empire's military defeat, but, more significantly, he mourns what he felt to be the loss of the noble values of its past. He believed France had become a nation of shopkeepers upholding the morality of self-interest and survival. The heroic past is remembered in as a period of conjugal, social, and professional harmony. Baroness Adeline Hulot recalls that her husband's infidelities began with the dissolution of the empire; and her daughter Hortense is said to be the product of "true love." Throughout the novel, the narrator, along with Hulot and other personages of the old guard, lament the changing times, the loss of the great hereditary estates, and, with them, the proper patrons of art. "Every-thing bears the stamp of personal interest," in a nation where the men are judged by the shrewdness of their speech not the bravery of their deeds; they are but "walking coffins containing the Frenchmen of former France." At the novel's conclusion, Dr. Bianchon offers diagnoses not only of the ailing Baroness and Bette, but of the state itself. "Lack of religion and the encroachment of everything of finance" is to blame for all the social evils. "Noble disinterestedness, and talent, and service to the state, were thought worthy of esteem; but nowadays the law makes money the measure of everything."

While Cousin Bette is an astute, and, at times, propagandistic, analysis of French social history, the novel is also a compelling portrayal of human, ahistorical passions, particularly of desire and vengeance. Hulot is the consummate slave to Eros, responsible for all the woe his family and comrades endure. Humiliated professionally and socially, he persists like some abstract figure of desire, taking on pseudonyms (all anagrams of his real name), attaching himself to one then another teenage mistress in ever more squalid corners of the city, reduced to nothing but his desire. Hulot is certainly repulsive as a human being, but there is something magnificent about his undeviating devotion to a single passion: sexual passion untarnished and undeterred by sentiment, by social life, by anything outside itself. In Bette, Balzac has added another masterful portrait to his gallery of human souls tyrannized by singular passions. Lisbeth Fischer, whose physical and moral ugliness is the antithesis to the saintly grace and beauty of her cousin Adeline, concentrates all her talents and energies onto the secret vengeance of the Hulot family. As she succeeds with her intricate machinations, the discrepancy between her humble status (despite her kinship to the Hulot family, she is referred to, like a servant, by her nickname "Bette") and the actual power she wields becomes almost grotesque. While there is something formulaic about this character driven by revenge, Balzac spends ample time on the causes of her hatred and jealousy; and in discussing her childhood, he anticipates Freud's theories on early trauma and unresolved emotions, and the manifestation of these traumas as adult neuroses.

Despite Balzac's overt aims of discrediting the administration of King Louis-Philippe and the Chamber of Deputies in favor of a centralized monarchy and reinvigorated national church, Cousin Bette, in its series of well-drawn portraits, never fails to honor the infinite complexity of the human soul regardless of historical context. Balzac's fidelity to the truth of his own manifold experience of life, fortunately, prevents him from furnishing simple political solutions to the crises of his time, and enables him to write with the moral courage and earnestness found only in his century's finest works of literature.

ABOUT HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Honoré de Balzac was born in 1799 at Tours, to Bernard-Francois Balzac, a servant, and Anne-Charlotte Sallambier. Put out to nurse at the age of four and later sent to boarding school, he had little contact with home. In 1814 the family moved to Paris, where Honoré continued his boarding-school education for two years, and then studied law at the Sorbonne. Balzac became a Bachelor of Law in 1819 but decided to begin a writing career, choosing to remain in Paris with the meager financial contributions of his family. The complete failure of his first literary effort, the play Cromwell, did not deter but redirected his artistic ambitions toward fiction. During the 1820s Balzac wrote various novels, both under different pen names and in collaboration; spent time in journalism; and tried to make money in printing and publishing ventures, whose lack of success laid the foundation for debts that plagued him for the rest of his life.

In 1829 Balzac published his first novel under his own name, Le Dernier Chouan (later Les Chouans), which was to become the first of those novels to be incorporated in his magnus opus, La Comedie Humaine. With the critical acclaim of Les Chouans and his collection of six stories called Scenes de la Vie Privee in 1830, Balzac entered the fashionable world of literary Paris, responding to it by adding the honorific "de" to his family name and adopting a luxurious life-style. Over the next twenty years Balzac remained a fixture of the Parisian social world, writing plays and articles and more than ninety novels and stories. In 1842 many of these were published in seventeen volumes as La Comedie Humaine, a monumental work containing more than 2000 characters, which forms the most comprehensive and brilliant social history of post Napoleonic France. Important works were still to come following the European revolutions of 1848, but after the publication of the magnificent paired novels Cousin Bette and Cousin Pons in 1847, Balzac's health and creative talents quickly deteriorated.

In 1832, in his extensive fan-mail, Balzac received a letter from a Polish countess, whose elderly husband owned a vast estate in the Ukraine. The next year he met Countess Hanska in Switzerland, and in 1835 the couple agreed to marry after her husband's death. For seventeen years, with intermissions, they conducted a voluminous correspondence, until their marriage finally took place in March 1850. Balzac died three months later in Paris.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Some critics have claimed that Baroness Hulot's patient response to her husband's infidelities is a flat portrayal of the ideal wife, and have charged Balzac with an implicit endorsement of her passive, selfless stance. Given the circumstances of the novel, do you think her course of action, or inaction, is repugnant and totally inappropriate; and do you think that Balzac is approving or critical of her behavior?
    
2. Though Balzac had very ambivalent feelings about Napoleon, he is partly responsible for the creation of the Napoleonic myth. Do you think Balzac presents the members of the imperial army, particularly Baron Hulst, Marshal Hulot, and Uncle Johann Fischer, as the embodiment of noble values standing honorably against the changing times, or are they faulted for inflexibility and for idealizing a past founded on aggression and tyranny?
    
3. At the very center of the novel when Balzac philosophizes on art, he concludes that "constant labor is the law of art as well as the law of life." Cousin Bette obviously provides many negative examples of this proverbial statement, but are there any positive cases in which this applies?
    
4. When Balzac narrates the changing artistic and romantic fortunes of Count Wenceslas Steinbock, he implies that Bette's relationship with the sculptor was important, even indispensable to his early success. How does this episode, and the professional failures Steinbock encounters after leaving Bette, problematize our interpretation of her?
    
5. Although Balzac poignantly shows how the older generation is morally destroyed by the market economy of Post Napoleonic France, is Cousin Bette a convincing demonstration that the rule of money is inherently incompatible with the rule of morality?
    
6. Baron Hulot's son Victorin, who is clearly meant to represent the new bureaucracy, is vital to the survival of the Hulot family. What, if anything, does Balzac value in Victorin and his generation?

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Cousin Betty

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