Cousin Bette

COUSIN BETTE

HONORÉ DE BALZAC was born at Tours in 1799, the son of a civil servant. He spent nearly six years as a boarder in a Vendôme school, then went to live in Paris, working as a lawyer’s clerk then as a hack-writer. Between 1820 and 1824 he wrote a number of novels under various pseudonyms, many of them in collaboration, after which he unsuccessfully tried his luck at publishing, printing and type-founding. At the age of thirty, heavily in debt, he returned to literature with a dedicated fury and wrote the first novel to appear under his own name, The Chouans. During the next twenty years he wrote about ninety novels and shorter stories, among them many masterpieces, to which he gave the comprehensive title The Human Comedy. As Balzac himself put it: ‘What he [Napoleon] was unable to finish by the sword, I shall accomplish with the pen.’ He died in 1850, a few months after his marriage to Evelina Hanska, the Polish countess with whom he had maintained amorous relations for eighteen years.

MARION AYTON CRAWFORD taught English Language and Literature in the Technical College at Limavady, Northern Ireland, until she died in 1973. She translated five volumes of Balzac for the Penguin Classics: Cousin Bette, Domestic Peace and Other Stories, Eugénie Grandet, The Chouans and Old Goriot.

OLIVIA McCANNON studied languages at the Queen’s College, Oxford. She has been based in Paris since 1998, working as a writer and translator. She has translated French plays for the Royal Court Theatre, and is currently working on a new edition of Balzac’s Old Goriot for Penguin Classics.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Cousin Bette

Part One of Poor Relations

Translated by MARION AYTON CRAWFORD

BookishMall.com

BookishMall.com

Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

www.penguin.com

This translation first published 1965
Reprinted with a Chronology and Further Reading 2004
30

Copyright © M. A. Crawford, 1965
Chronology and Further Reading copyright © Olivia McCannon, 2004
All rights reserved

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

INTRODUCTION

As the dedication makes clear, this novel is one of a pair entitled Poor Relations, which were conceived and written practically simultaneously, in less than a year, between 1846 and 1847; the other is Cousin Pons. In spite of its speed of production, Cousin Bette is a deeply considered book, the fruit of a life-time of thought and experience, and a culminating point in Balzac’s chronicle and analysis of Revolutionary, Napoleonic, Restoration, and later times, in his novel-sequence The Human Comedy. The main action takes place between 1838 and 1846, and is thus brought up to date, to the time when the novel was being written. The scene throughout is Paris.

Paris was then the capital of a rapidly changing France, in an age when the modern world as we know it was coming into existence, with the construction of railways, the expansion of industry and trade, the growing power of international finance and of the Press. The period saw the beginning of the French colonial adventure in Algeria. It was the age of the middle class. Louis-Philippe, ‘the bourgeois king’, brought into strictly limited power by the middle-class revolution of 1830, ruled a nation of highly acquisitive and politically and socially ambitious individuals.

The book depicts these changes vividly, through the eyes and lives of two generations. The older characters remember the glories of the Imperial past, the exhilaration of life under Napoleon, the circumstances in which their careers were made through unprecedented opportunities grasped then, the brilliance and lavish display of the First Empire society in which they played their part; their eyes are still dazzled. The younger generation have a different conditioning, a new outlook, different aims. It is evident that to Balzac, in comparison, the present was a mean and sordid age, carrying the seeds of disaster in its breaking up of the social framework, and its selfish and philistine money-grubbing. It is worthy of note that Karl Marx considered Balzac’s characters the prototypes of the bourgeois society that came into existence later – after Balzac’s death in 1850 – under Napoleon III.

The novel, for Balzac, always had a complex function. Cousin Bette is, among other things, a serious investigation of the Paris demi-monde. Because of its enlargement of the scope of the novel, and in particular its objective gaze at vice and crime, it has been hailed as the first volume of French fiction of the naturalistic school, later to be established by the works of the Goncourt brothers and Émile Zola. It has the purposes of the kind of inquiry with which modern Government Commissions have lately familiarized us, as well as those of the modern documentary film. It is also, plainly, an ancestor of the modern thriller.

There is nothing heavy or dull about this serious work. In reading it one occasionally remembers that Balzac had adapted the Contes drolatiques of Rabelais. Shakespeare, Molière, and Racine, three dramatists, are progenitors whom he invokes in the book; and brilliant scenes of comedy, irony, and high tragedy, although quite characteristically his own, show that he had assimilated something from all three. These scenes succeed one another at a very fast pace, with many changes of points of view and twists of circumstance. The book adds notably to Balzac’s gallery of unforgettable characters.

Balzac was always fascinated by the relations between husband and wife, father and children, lover and mistress, between those with material possessions, social status, and close family ties, and those not so endowed, and by the different ways in which emotional life can vary, and is tied up with the individual’s everyday existence. These relations and variations are explored and studied here in a way that anticipates Freud.

Many minor characters, set in their proper environment, help to re-create the richness of life in the capital.