When he was composing it, his health was failing. He was still making a frantic effort to achieve solvency in order to marry his Polish countess, now a widow. He himself had suffered from hepatitis in earlier years. He was subject to a form of chronic meningitis, and already the cardiac disease which was to carry him off was showing alarming symptoms.

And so, in the lugubrious account of Pons’s physical collapse and death, and all the attendant funereal circumstances, there is probably more than a presentiment of the fate which was shortly to overtake him. Therefore the blending of sentimentality with a calm, even ironic acceptance of the world and its evil ways has a notable significance. The composition of this novel is not perfect, but it betrays no falling-off in creative power. In fact, Cousin Pons is at once a great contribution to Balzac’s sociological studies – he has moved forward in time and is writing of Paris in the 1840s – and also one of the best examples, of his rueful contemplation, pessimistic but not despairing, of human nature at an age, and in a milieu, when the blackest crimes were blandly committed under a cloak of legality.

As published in Le Constitutionnel, Cousin Pons consisted of thirty chapters and a Conclusion. In 1848 the editor Pétion published it in book form, with seventy-seven chapters and a Conclusion. In November 1848 it was again published as part of the Human Comedy, and now, for reasons of economy, all chapter divisions were suppressed. In fact, since that time, readers of Balzac have had to cope with editions in which no pause or relief is vouchsafed from the beginning to end, though in present-day editions the tendency is to revert to the original chapter divisions. This translation adopts the divisions and titles of the Le Constitutionnel version, with asterisks inserted within chapters to indicate where further divisions were made in the Pétion edition.

As nearly always in Balzac’s novels, money is an important, if not a paramount consideration. Balzac loved to make financial computations and calculations, and he tended to deal in enormous figures, largely perhaps to compensate himself in imagination for his failure to acquire – by his work, by speculative ventures, and, in the middle 1840s, by the purchase of antiques – the large sums he himself needed to put his affairs in order: so that the value of the Pons collection (the ‘heroine’ of the story!) is, in the text, reckoned to be not much less than a million francs. If we take the exchange value which remained relatively stable until the First World War, namely twenty-five francs to the pound, a million francs would be equivalent to £40,000 sterling. But, since 1918, currency values have declined at least to one-fifth of what they were. And so the Pons collection would have been worth no less than £200,000 in our present inflated currency!

One of the most intriguing devices in the Human Comedy is the system, invented round about 1834, of introducing ‘reappearing characters’: the same people recur, now in the foreground, now in the background of the various novels and short stories. This was one of the ways by which Balzac sought to create the impression of a closely-knit society in which, as in real life, the reader would be continually coming upon people he had met before. Not of course in chronological sequence – one novel may bring such and such a character on to the stage of the Human Comedy when he has reached the peak of his attainment, the next novel in which he figures may show him in his obscure or humble beginnings, while others will enable the reader to fill in the gaps and form for himself a picture of that individual’s complete career. This device has inspired two compilations – the Repertory of Cerfberr and Christophe in 1887 and the Dictionary of Fernand Lotte in 1956 – thanks to which any curious reader may look up the ‘biography’ of any character in whom he is interested.

Naturally Cousin Pons conforms to this practice. Pons, Schwab, Brunner, the Cibots, Madame Sauvage, Poulain, Fraisier and Topinard are all new inventions. But the Camusots, the Popinots, the Berthiers, the Cardots, Crottat, Hannequin, Gaudissart, Bixiou, Madeleine Vivet, Héloïse Brisetout, Madame Fontaine, Magus, Schmucke himself and others are recurrent – some of them even familiar – figures in the Human Comedy. ‘Madame la Présidente Camusot de Marville’ had begun life as an art student in The Vendetta (1830); her astounding ignorance about art in Cousin Pons is explained by the fact that Balzac had, in a later edition of The Vendetta, substituted her name for that of the original character, a practice he often adopted in working out these life-schemes. Thereafter, in various novels, he had shown her marrying the rather stupid and incompetent Camusot and pushing him upwards in a legal career which, as will be seen in Cousin Pons, still does not satisfy her ambitions. As for Schmucke, only one of his other appearances – in A Daughter of Eve – has much importance. Gaudissart had first come to life in 1833 (The Illustrious Gaudissart) as a jovial, pushing but gullible commercial traveller. In César Birotteau Anselme Popinot, the future politician and count, had given him a helping hand by employing him as a publicity agent for the sale of a cosmetic product. In Cousin Pons, thanks to the same man’s benevolence, he has become a theatre manager, but is sighing for new worlds to conquer.

Finally, a word on certain peculiarities of diction in the present translation. Balzac makes Schmucke talk a curious brand of Germanized French (he does the same with his Alsatian banker, the Baron de Nucingen). This is purely phonetic, for Schmucke’s French is otherwise normal in grammar, syntax and idiom. In this translation the same principle is followed. The utterances of Rémonencq, a native of Auvergne, reproduce, but only for a certain number of pages, the charabia of that region: it consists mainly, in Balzac’s text, of the substitution of ‘sh’ for ‘s’.