Chronologically speaking, his novels and short stories cover the period of his own life, from 1799 to about 1847. When he came of age, France was emerging from the very troubled period of the Revolution and Empire, and was living through the uneasy years of the ‘Restauration’ (1814–30), with a whole set of social, religious and economic problems to face and solve. They were not solved, not even when Louis-Philippe, the ‘Citizen-King’, in 1830 seated himself on the Bourbon throne for eighteen no less uneasy years. The aristocracy, anxious to regain its former wealth and prestige, was being shouldered out of its privileged position by that indeterminate class of people known in France as the bourgeoisie – a new land-owning plutocracy, a Napoleonic noblesse largely consisting of civil servants and lawyers; functionaries, academics and legal luminaries; industrialists and manufacturers ‘on the make’; and even the shop-owning sections of the community. The Industrial Revolution in France, later than its counterpart in England, was just about to get under way, and ‘capitalism’ with its attendant evils – sweated labour not least among them – was in the offing. These evils, observed or foreseen, led to the formulation of many different pre-Marxist systems of socialist doctrine.

In his religious, political and social views Balzac was a reactionary, but in diagnosing the ills of his own times he laid his finger on two outstanding features: the reign of unbridled individualism – ‘Get out and make place for me!’ – and the worship of money – ‘the only God people believe in today’. So, in ranging through the classes and sub-classes of the early nineteenth century – from the hereditary aristocracy downwards to shopkeepers and tradespeople, in Paris and the provincial towns, and the half-civilized, grasping peasantry of the countryside – he showed generally that idealism, human-kindness and all the traditional virtues were being pounced upon and destroyed by the forces of acquisitiveness and ambition. His allegorical ‘Philosophical Study’ of 1831, The Wild Ass’s Skin, gives a remarkable general diagnosis, particularized in such novels as Gobseck (1830–35), which shows a usurer sitting like a spider at the centre of his web and asserting his power over the ‘socialites’ and ne’er-do-wells who come to him for loans; Eugénie Grandet (1833), which traces the rise to affluence and domination of a man who had started life, before the Revolution, as an insignificant cooper and vine-grower; Old Goriot, which is one of Balzac’s first revelations of Paris as a jungle wherein human nature is no less ‘red in tooth and claw’ than the animal nature from which it derives; the Rise and Fall of César Birotteau (1837), which gives the life-story of an honest but stupid manufacturer of cosmetics who, thanks to his social and financial ambitions, becomes a prey to a group of blood-sucking bankers and speculators; and La Rabouilleuse (a nickname – ‘fisher in troubled waters’ – given to the provincial-town trollop who occupies the centre of the story) : in this novel, written in 1841–3, is laid before us the struggle for an inheritance undertaken by a Napoleonic veteran soldier whose movements and stratagems afford us a vivid picture of life both in Paris and the stagnating town of Issoudun.

Balzac’s conscious purpose as the social historian of his country and times should not of course blind us to the human interest in his tales. He certainly spends a lot of time describing the material background against which the action of his tales is set. Readers of Cousin Pons will see for themselves how many pages are devoted to basic atmosphere and initial characterization before we are allowed to witness the opening scene between Pons and the Camusot mother and daughter. They will also notice that he reaches almost half-way before arriving at the essence of his story:

And here begins the drama, or if you prefer, the terrible comedy of the death of a bachelor delivered over by the force of circumstances to the rapacity of covetous people assembled round his bed [page 181].

But though description abounds, there is action in plenty, and action of an intensely dramatic nature. Balzac’s long preparations lead up to a sequence of ‘scenes’ in which we are shown the real stuff of human nature as he saw it: all his invented creatures (many of them modelled on people he knew), good, bad and indifferent, pursuing their various ends – and as a rule the good fare ill in the rough-and-tumble of life.

Balzac’s conception of character is an interesting one. Thanks to a peculiar ‘philosophy’ which he had largely drawn from the writings of Mesmer – his weakness for the less reputable ‘sciences’ of his age is well illustrated in Chapter 13 of this novel – he believed that all men and women are endowed from birth with a certain measure of ‘vital fluid’ or energy which they may spend as they will. Some husband it carefully, some expend it recklessly, some direct it exclusively to a chosen end: to the acquisition of wealth and the advantages wealth brings, like Gobseck, Félix Grandet and the bankers Nucingen and Du Tillet; to the (questionable) welfare of their children, like Jean-Joachim Goriot; to personal vengeance, like ‘Cousin Bette’; or even to the advancement of science, like Balthazar van Claës in The Quest of the Absolute (1834). Such direction or misdirection of energy accounts for the many ‘monomaniacs’ to be found in the Human Comedy in general, and in the Poor Relations in particular: ‘Cousin Bette’ thinks only of destroying the family on whose condescending patronage she has been for so long forced to live; ‘Cousin Pons’ has made the search for succulent dinners his main purpose in life. As with the ‘tableau-mane’ Elias Magus – and, to some extent, with Balzac himself in the 1840s – the pursuit of antiques has become a second ruling passion. Though in these cases exceptionally violent, this élan vital is a common feature in Balzac’s characters, great or small. As the great French poet, Baudelaire, an ardent admirer of Balzac, wrote: ‘All his characters are endowed with the same vital flame which was burning within himself.’

This energy is usually devoted to selfish or malevolent purposes – as it is by the venomous ‘Présidente’, Madame Camusot, the concierge Madame Cibot, once the demon of greed has seized hold of her, the relentless Fraisier, once he discovers a way of redeeming himself from a shady past, and the poisoner Rémonencq, anxious to set up as a dealer in antiques and to acquire ‘the comely oyster-girl’ as his consort. Relatively few of Balzac’s characters – Dr Benassis in The Country Doctor, Judge Popinot in The Interdiction, or Véronique Graslin in The Village Priest – direct their will to a good end. His rank and file, in so far as they are ‘good’, are generally the dupes or victims of the ‘go-getters’, as will be seen in Cousin Pons with regard not only to the main characters, the ‘delicate-souled’ Pons and the ‘innocent’ Schmucke, but also to Topinard, La Cibot’s husband, Dr Poulain and perhaps also the lawyer Villemot.

Cousin Pons, as the Conclusion to the novel (page 331) makes clear, has a sort of ‘twinship’ with Cousin Bette. For long Balzac had thought of including in his scheme a series of novels dealing with ‘Poor Relations’. An earlier work, Pierrette (one might compare this novel with Dickens’s Oliver Twist), had told of the tribulations an orphan child met with at the hands of the cruel cousins who adopted her as a household drudge. But he relegated Pierrette to another category (The Celibates), and only in 1846 and 1847 returned to the ‘Poor Relations’ idea. The heroine of Cousin Bette, of which a translation by Marion Ayton Crawford appeared in 1965 in the Penguin Classics, is the very incarnation of competent vindictiveness. Cousin Pons offers a diametrically opposite case – a mild, harmless old man who is treated with spiteful contempt by his well-to-do relations. The latter novel hung fire for a while, and the former one was published first. Balzac turned his attention to Cousin Pons in the later months of 1846, and published it first of all as a serial novel in a contemporary periodical, Le Constitutionnel, in the spring of 1847. As was usual with him, he expanded it considerably in course of composition; having intended it first of all merely as a study of a man contemned and repudiated by his kinsfolk and their satellites, he decided to enrich it with two new themes – the friendship theme (Pons and Schmucke as a nineteenth-century Orestes and Pylades) and the inheritance theme: the determination of Madame Camusot, once she has discovered that the despised ‘cousin’ has a rich collection of antiques, to assert family ‘rights’ and graso his estate for herself. As usual, Balzac was writing in a hurry. Had he lived long enough, no doubt he would have ironed out the minor inconsistencies that readers will discern in the novel.