Cousin Pons

COUSIN PONS

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. 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.

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HERBERT J. HUNT was Senior Fellow at Warwick University. Educated at the Lichfield Grammar School and Magdalen College, Oxford, he was a Tutor and Fellow at St Edmund Hall from 1927 to 1944, then until 1966 he was Professor of French Literature and Language at London University. He has published books on literature and thought in nineteeth-century France as well as a biography of Balzac, and a comprehensive study of Balzac’s writings: Balzac’s ‘Comedie Humaine’ (1959, paperback 1964). Herbert J. Hunt died in 1973.

Honoré de Balzac

COUSIN PONS

PART TWO OF POOR RELATIONS

TRANSLATED AND INTRODUCED BY HERBERT J. HUNT

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This translation first published 1968

Copyright © Herbert J. Hunt, 1968

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

ISBN: 978-0-14-196120-0

Contents

Introduction

1 A glorious relic of Imperial times

2 Decline and fall of a prize-winner

3 The two ‘Nutcrackers’

4 One of a collector’s thousand thrills

5 One of the thousand insults a parasite has to swallow

6 The Concierge Species – male and female

7 ‘The Two Pigeons’: a fable come true

8 Prodigal sons from Frankfurt-am-Main don’t always end up with the husks of the swine

9 Pons brings the Présidente something better than a fan

10 A German whimsy

11 Pons under a landslide of gravel

12 ‘Why, what a god is gold!’

13 A treatise on the occult sciences

14 A character from Hoffman’s Tales

15 Tittle-tattle and tactics – elderly concierge style

16 Corruption in conference

17 How all careers begin in Paris

18 A ‘man of law’

19 Fraisier makes things clear

20 La Cibot at the theatre

21 The Fraisier blossoms forth

22 A warning to old bachelors

23 Schmucke climbs to the mercy-seat of God

24 A testator’s cunning

25 The spurious will

26 Re-enter Madame Sauvage

27 Death’s gloomy portals

28 Schmucke’s Via Dolorosa

29 When wills are opened all doors are sealed

30 The Fraisier bears fruit

Conclusion

Introduction

‘THE great events in my life,’ Balzac once wrote, ‘are my works.’ Yet the life-span of this robust, boisterous, indefatigable genius contains more than the normal ration of events comic, dramatic and pathetic. From his boyhood, much of which was spent at the Oratorian College of Vendôme, through his years as apprentice lawyer, apprentice writer, publisher, printer, through the years when, domiciled mainly at Paris, he was producing the voluminous series of works later to be arranged systematically in what he called his Human Comedy, in fact right through to his dying days, he was avid for experience of all sorts. Hence his incursions into the social life of his times, the merry-makings which compensated for his long and arduous sessions at his writing-desk, and his persistent quest for perfect satisfaction in love, which eventually and after long anguish led him to marriage with his Polish countess, Evelina Hanska – about five months before his death, in August 1850, at the age of fifty-one.

But all this was secondary to his real life-purpose: to achieve glory as a Napoleon of letters, as the historian of his own times, as the ‘secretary’ of French society. Long before he embarked upon the series of ‘studies’ – Studies of Manners, Philosophical and Analytical Studies – he had written, under various noms-de-plume, such a quantity of novels as might well have satisfied any normal man with an itch for scribbling. But he rightly discarded all these ‘pot-boilers’, written between 1820 and 1824, and in 1829 he launched upon the most ambitious project which a novelist (who claimed also to be a philosopher) had ever yet undertaken. The Human Comedy was the result of this. He only found a title for his collected works about 1840, and he only began to edit or re-edit them under this title from 1842. But he had the whole scheme roughed out at least as early as 1834. It was an ever-expanding project. Disease and death caught up with him before it arrived at completion. Yet, as it stands, it comprises about ninety-seven novels, short stories and other ‘studies’.

His ‘Studies of Manners’ are assigned to six compartments: Scenes of Private Life, in which the main interest is the exploration of emotional situations within or on the margin of family life; Scenes of Provincial Life, in which Balzac gives his attention to the more parochial and sometimes petty struggles taking place in what are, relatively speaking, ‘closed’ communities; Scenes of Parisian Life – Balzac both hated and adored Paris as the hub of the French universe, and the novels in this compartment generally present a terrible picture of human ruthlessness; Scenes of Political and Scenes of Military Life, categories which are perhaps less important because they were inadequately filled; and finally Scenes of Country Life, which establish a curious contrast between the normal animality of the French peasants (according to Balzac’s view) and the efforts made by benevolent reformers to improve their lot and thereby convert them into responsible human beings.

Of the ‘Philosophical Studies’, mainly important because they express more directly Balzac’s general outlook, The Exiles (1831), Louis Lambert (1832–5) and Séraphita (1834–5) are noteworthy examples. But in this respect two points should be noted: one is that Balzac’s ‘philosophy’ obtrudes even in the ‘Studies of Manners’, Cousin Pons forming no exception to this rule; the other is that the ‘Philosophical Studies’ include some of Balzac’s finest novels, for instance The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831) and The Quest of the Absolute (1834).

As for the ‘Analytical Studies’, Balzac never had time to deal adequately with this category, but it contains his amusing, and at the same time penetratingly critical disquisitions on relations between the sexes; The Physiology of Marriage (1829) and The Minor Vexations of Married Life (1830–46).

All this was a stupendous performance. Does it argue for quantity rather than quality? It might have done so with a lesser genius, and Balzac’s feverish method of composition did not allow for meticulous attention to niceties of style and finish. He was usually occupied with several novels at one and the same time, and he felt himself continually obliged to press on, not only thanks to the urgency of ever-mounting debts, but also in order to bring into being that ‘world’ – modelled upon the real world, but transformed by his particular vision – which was seething in his brain. Balzac has his own peculiar quality. He was, in the first place, a born storyteller. He had remarkable powers of observation and a prodigious memory. But he had something more: an astounding faculty for sympathetic divination, an intuitive vision of men and things which he himself, borrowing the term from Sir Walter Scott, called ‘second sight’.

His claim to be the ‘secretary’ of contemporary society was no vain one.