An exploration of Honoré de Balzac’s feuilleton, or serialized novel Cousin Bette is apt to begin with this quote: “Women always persuade men that they are lions, with a will of iron, when they are making sheep of them.”
An ancestor of the modern thriller, Cousin Bette was originally published in 1846 as one of a pair of novels, known collectively as Poor Relations; the other novel in the pair is Cousin Pons. Cousin Bette was first translated into English from its original French by Katherine Prescott Wormeley in 1888.
In this story, Balzac aims to capture the middle-class revolution of the post-Napoleonic era. The political and social ambitions of this type of society would come to be regarded by Marx as “prototypes of the bourgeois society.”
Cousin Bette tells the chaotic story of an unmarried, middle-aged woman who, believing herself slighted by her extended family for being ugly and unweddable, plans to destroy their happily-ever-after.
Cousin Bette tells the chaotic story of an unmarried, middle-aged woman who, believing herself slighted by her extended family for being ugly and unweddable, plans to destroy their happily-ever-after. She befriends the beautiful yet unashamed social climber Valérie Marneffe, who wields her own unhappy marriage as an instrument of vice and deception in a plot to gain the favors of various men of higher status.
At the heart of the entire debacle is Baron Hector Hulot, who cheats on his wife Adeline with Valerie. Baron and Adeline’s daughter, Hortense, is cousin to Bette, also known Lisbeth. Initially, Cousin Bette provides financial support to an artist named Wenceslas, saving him from himself. However, the beautiful Hortense later marries him, taking him away from Bette. This begins the inevitable dissolution of the family, helped along by Baron Hulot’s unscrupulous spending on various mistresses, such as Valerie.
Throughout the novel, Balzac returns to his major themes of class versus character and the social capital of beauty. He explores the implicit expectations which rendered women dependent on men. Though wrestling with weighty double-dealings and backstabbing, the writing retains a tone of comical drama, of objective self-criticism. The characters, however egoic or driven by the old adage “an eye for an eye,” retain an awareness of their folly.
“Money never misses the slightest occasion to demonstrate its stupidity. Paris would by now contain ten times the treasures of Venice if our retired businessmen had had the instinct for fine things that distinguishes the Italians.”
Class awareness and its signifiers are rampant throughout Cousin Bette, and they drive the characters toward the end of ever-elusive affluence. At the time, French society was entering a period of economic growth. It was also establishing itself as a nation state with a social identity steeped in the “liberty, equality, and fraternity” which had set off the French Revolution and, a half century later, in Balzac’s era, resulted in greater social mobility.
The character of Lisbeth, or Cousin Bette, represents a threat to an ideal at the center of the desired social cohesion of the burgeoning nation state, one that prides itself on the moralization of conventional beauty, loyalty, and order. “Cousin Bette, a primitive peasant from Lorraine and not without a strain of treachery, had a nature of this savage kind, a kind that is commoner among the masses than is generally supposed and that may explain their behavior during revolutions.”
Balzac effectively demonstrates this connection between poverty and vice throughout the novel, going so far as to point out its inconsistencies and double standards when held up to the rich. “The moralist cannot deny that, generally speaking, well-bred people addicted to a vice are much more likeable than the virtuous are.” The poor should be pious, the rich are excused, and the pious rich are disturbed. “Dear old lady, twenty-five years of virtue are always rather off-putting, like a neglected disease. And your virtue has only grown moldy here, my child.”
Though wrestling with weighty double-dealings and backstabbing, the writing retains a tone of comical drama, of objective self-criticism.
The link between desire and possession perfectly ties into the major themes of the plot: pride, cheating, and transactional relationships.
The structure of the conflict is a house of cards. Varying side plots come to a head as the novel closes, ending in avoidable sacrifices, death, and loss.
“‘But I will not leave her alive if she is not mine. . . . She shall not be another man’s!’”
Overall, Cousin Bette is a comical drama centered on the everyday whims of human desire, akin to other classic nineteenth-century works like The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky or Emma by Jane Austen. It fits right into Balzac’s greater work of the La Comédie Humaine, or The Human Comedy, the collection of interlinked novels depicting the Restoration period of French society.
