Cousin Bette tells the story of the fall of the house of Hulot, plotted and precipitated by Lisbeth Fischer, a poor relative, the ‘cousin Bette’ of the novel’s title. The Hulot family owes its standing in the fictional society of Balzac’s novel not to aristocratic ancestry but to the careers of two brothers. In the reign of Napoleon I, between 1805 and 1815, Hector Hulot had risen to a senior post in the military administration of Alsace, and his brother had fought with distinction in Napoleon’s armies. The two survive the fall of France but are under-employed for fifteen years; they can only re-establish themselves fully after the July Revolution of 1830. The colonization of Algeria provides them with the opportunity to accumulate wealth to add to the prestige with which the Napoleonic past now endows them. But there is a worm in the apple. As he grows into middle age, Hector Hulot becomes increasingly obsessed with sexual conquest. By playing on that passion, Lisbeth, called Bette like a child or a servant, a poor and powerless spinster, a mere hanger-on in the outwardly splendid Hulot household, brings the family almost to its ruin. Cousin Bette is both a vast fresco of Parisian life in the first half of the nineteenth century, and a sharply-focused study of two contradictory human impulses: sexual desire, and the desire for destruction. Sigmund Freud, in his later works, presented eros, the drive towards life, and sex, and thanatos, the drive towards death, and destruction, as the two sides of the same coin. Almost a century earlier, Balzac had imagined them as two members of the same family.
Cousin Bette was written and published between July and December 1846. Honoré de Balzac, aged 47, was in declining health and aware that he was growing old. He wrote nothing of substance after Cousin Bette, except to complete its twin novel, Cousin Pons, which he had begun first, and from which Cousin Bette had effectively sprung. In 1848 he left Paris for Wierzchowna, in the Ukraine, to live with Madame Hanska, whom he married in March 1850. He then returned to Paris with his wife, fell ill during the journey, took to his bed on arrival, and died on 19 August following. Cousin Bette and Cousin Pons had been his last great novels.
Balzac was born in 1799, and began writing commercial fiction in the 1820s as ‘Horace de Saint-Aubain’, ‘Lord R’Hoone’, and other invented or shared aliases, with little success. For a brief period he went into business as a publisher, printer, and type-founder, and incurred the substantial debts (the largest of them to his mother) which were to burden him for the rest of his life. The first of his works to appear under the name Honoré Balzac dates from 1828. Shortly after the liberal revolution of July 1830, which brought the ‘citizen king’ Louis-Philippe to the throne, Balzac published The Wild Ass’s Skin (La Peau de chagrin), a romantic and purportedly ‘philosophical’ novel which brought considerable notoriety to the name Honoré de Balzac, the name he would retain for the remainder of his life and work. For the following fifteen years Balzac wrote at a tremendous rate, working as much as sixteen hours a day, fuelling his imagination with coffee made from unroasted beans. From the start of his new career, he sought to connect his fictions to each other within larger structures. The Last Chouan was announced in 1828 as the first chapter in what would be a ‘picturesque history of France’—to rival Walter Scott’s Waverley novels, seen in France as a ‘picturesque’ history of Scotland. Balzac’s first collection of short stories about marriage in the middle classes was entitled Scenes of Private Life (1830), which prompted him to group subsequent works into ‘Scenes of Provincial Life’, then ‘Scenes of Parisian Life’. In 1833 he undertook an eight-volume series entitled Études de mœurs (‘Studies of Manners’), bringing under one roof, so to speak, many previously published ‘scenes’ together with new novels and stories, such as Eugénie Grandet, to balance the different sections. In 1835 he hit upon the idea of an overarching structure for all he had written and still had to write, and he entitled it The Human Comedy, nodding respectfully, if not modestly, towards Dante’s Divine Comedy. His individual works would be henceforth only chapters in this vast enterprise, the description of an entire society considered in its actual practice (in the section entitled, once again, ‘Studies of Manners’), in its causes (in the section entitled ‘Philosophical Studies’), and in its underlying principles (in the section entitled ‘Analytical Studies’). In fact, Balzac wrote little of the latter two sections: the bulk of The Human Comedy consists of ‘Studies of Manners’, divided into ‘Scenes of Private Life’, ‘Scenes of Parisian Life’, ‘Scenes of Provincial Life’, ‘Scenes of Country Life’, ‘Scenes of Political Life’, and ‘Scenes of Military Life’. Balzac filled in the slots created by his structure in a manner that looks somewhat haphazard; and the structure itself underwent many amendments over the years. From 1835 on, however, Balzac used more than section titles and groupings to weld his different subjects and stories together. He adopted what is known as the device of reappearing characters: characters who appear perhaps as incidental figures in the plot of one novel, and as the protagonists of a prior or subsequent fiction. Balzac’s ‘invention’ arose in the early stages of writing Père Goriot, and he was so taken with its potential for saturating an imaginary world constructed in the image of the real one that he rushed round to see his sister, Laure Surville, to tell her that he was ‘in the process of becoming a genius’. Although many later authors have sought to link series of novels through ‘sequential’ characters and casts, none has ever rivalled the inexhaustible complexity of Balzac’s fictional universe, which alone required and justified the invention of the reappearing characters.
The Human Comedy contains more than two thousand named characters, of whom about five hundred appear in several different novels; of those five hundred, several dozen major and minor characters reappear in over a score of stories and novels. Balzac’s reader is therefore always more or less aware of a great hinterland of fiction lying behind or around the story being read. The result is a magical paradox. Balzac’s world is potentially entirely knowable; it is in principle a grid completely filled in. But because characters and plots are not like crossword puzzles, every ‘solution’ provided by a reappearance of the same character raises more questions than it solves, and the gaps in Balzac’s world—in the reader’s experience of it—grow in geometrical proportion to the number of connections made. The paradox is that a device designed to give solidity to a vast panorama of social life actually gives it what is perhaps its most life-like feature—inexhaustible fragmentariness. Balzac’s world opens on to infinity through the central device that first appeared as a means of closing it off.
Balzac’s novels began to appear in a sixteen-volume work entitled The Human Comedy in 1842, and over the following four years the writer laboured to fill in the gaps by writing more novels and by expanding, amending, and correcting the already written works to make them fit better into the pyramid. By 1846, volume sixteen was done, and in the press, and Balzac’s great work was in principle complete. The Hercules of the novel might well have expected to be in a position to rest on well-earned laurels at that point in his middle age. However, he had not earned the respect that he knew was due to him, and, in the years during which the volumes of The Human Comedy had appeared, his name had been overshadowed by another: Eugène Sue, the author of unprecedentedly popular serial novels published in the daily press.
The publication of new fiction by instalments in daily and weekly newspapers was a relatively recent innovation. In Britain Dickens’s Pickwick Papers and in France Balzac’s The Old Maid had both appeared in 1836 as the first serials in their respective countries. However, Balzac’s procedure was to write books in the first place and to cut them up into episodes subsequently. It was not until the early 1840s that French fiction was first composed in instalments, and the first of these truly ‘serial’ novels, Sue’s Mysteries of Paris, brought its author more substantial rewards than the whole of The Human Comedy had yet brought Balzac. Sue pandered to his large and by definition uncultivated readership with great technical skill. Each episode of his serial ends on a moment of narrative suspense; each episode contains an appeal to readers’ sentimentality, and also to their curiosity; and many episodes echo the contents of Sue’s post-bag of readers’ letters, giving voice, in particular, to pleas for greater social equity and to what the monarchist Balzac regarded as socialist propaganda. Sue’s second serial, The Wandering Jew (1844-5), repeated the formula, and reaped similar rewards.
‘The present situation requires me to write two or three masterful works which will topple the false gods of this bastard literature, and which must demonstrate that I am a younger, fresher, and greater writer than ever before!’, Balzac wrote to Madame Hanska on 15 June 1846. Balzac met the challenge that Sue had set him, that he had set himself. From the heroic resolve expressed to Madame Hanska came two novels, Cousin Pons and Cousin Bette, collectively entitled Poor Relations, which were first published in serial form in a daily newspaper and then added to The Human Comedy in a supplementary seventeenth volume in 1847. They are not so much additions to the pre-existing Human Comedy as entire ‘human comedies’ of their own, using some familiar and some quite new techniques to give expression to a vision of the social and moral order that is distinctly blacker than that of Balzac’s earlier work.
When Balzac conceived the last two novels of his career, he was in a strange emotional position. He had been engaged for thirteen years in a mostly (but not exclusively) epistolary romance with a wealthy Polish noblewoman living in the Russian part of Ukraine. His letters to Madame Hanska constitute a running commentary on his life and works throughout the 1830s and 1840s, and, if they are to be believed absolutely, in 1846 Balzac was deeply in love with his eastern muse and intent upon marrying her. At the same time he was living in Paris with Louise Breugniot, who kept house for him. The servant-mistress became increasingly jealous of Balzac’s devotion to his distant love, stole a set of her letters to him, and threatened to blackmail the pair of them. Bálzac was forced to inform Madame Hanska of the threat; the crisis was resolved when he bought the letters back from Louise, and then burned them. In his letters to Madame Hanska Balzac describes Louise as a hideous creature, but it seems, from other sources, that she was an intelligent and charming person. Balzac’s emotions in this affair are unclear: was he truly fond of Louise, but intent on marrying Madame Hanska for her status and wealth? Was the theft of the letters a put-up job? Or was Balzac exactly what he said he was: the manipulated victim of a vile woman intent on bringing him down? Cousin Bette is not a directly autobiographical novel, and the character of Lisbeth Fischer is the product of Balzac’s imagination. That imagination was certainly fed by Balzac’s personal experiences—and by his own feelings about his mother, without a doubt—but it would be unwise to jump to the conclusion that in Lisbeth Fischer Balzac has only portrayed his own image of the woman he was living with.
Balzac began Cousin Pons in the summer of 1846. It is the story of a poor relation hounded to his grave by relatives far richer than he who covet his one treasure, a collection of works of art. But when he was still only drafting the first sketch of Cousin Pons, Balzac hit upon the idea of that novel’s ‘twin’, the story of a female ‘poor relation’ who would be not the victim but the perpetrator of a campaign of persecution. Balzac’s imagination frequently worked by the creation of opposite or complementary pairs: Cousin Bette arose as an opposite, and it is itself structured almost entirely by opposing and complementary doublets.
Both of the Poor Relations were written to beat Eugène Sue at his own game, and both were therefore designed for serial publication. Bette began to appear in the daily Le Constitutionnel on 8 October 1846; Balzac had fourteen days’ copy in hand. He went to Germany from 9 to 17 October, and on his return he soon found he had the printers breathing down his neck. He was obliged to write chapters that were set in type immediately and published the following day. He made superhuman efforts to race ahead of the newspaper, writing and correcting up to eight sheets of ‘copy’ per day, living and sleeping on a camp-bed at the printing works. He still found time to scribble letters to Madame Hanska, and never ceased to calculate how many days’ work remained on Cousin Bette—but his calculations undershot, not because he worked too slowly for his own ambitions, but because the subject kept on growing. On 3 November he reported: ‘There are some tremendous scenes in it, believe me! I didn’t know what I was doing, but now I do.’ Four days later: ‘It’s one of the finest of my finest works.’ And a few days after that: ‘I am out on my own, more brilliant, more youthful, more fertile than ever I was before.’ It took another three weeks before the manuscript was complete, and in its entirety Cousin Bette fully justifies Balzac’s trumpet-blasts in advance. It is a triumph over the nightmarish conditions of its composition; it is a triumph for Balzac in competition with his contemporaries; but most of all, Cousin Bette is one of the great triumphs of the novel form.
There really is nothing like Cousin Bette in English literature. Tolstoy is perhaps the only other writer who rivals Balzac’s ability to portray a whole society and its momentum; and Dostoevsky’s great novels of good and evil are constantly reminiscent of the technique, the intensity, and the world-view of Balzac, and especially of Cousin Bette. Like Dostoevsky in The Idiot, Balzac wished to portray good in a contemporary and real setting. In Cousin Bette, the vehicle of that portrayal is Hector Hulot’s wife Adeline, Bette’s cousin and childhood companion. Adeline is beautiful, with a nobility that comes from her soul, not from her ancestry. She is intelligent, but not an educated intellectual. She is faithful to her husband, and intensely loyal to him, despite the liberties he takes with his marriage vows; and she is motivated in all her actions by Christian faith. For those reasons she is also, for many readers, a failure as a fictional character: flat, in E. M. Forster’s terms, or boring, to put it less politely, as some of Balzac’s contemporary critics did. To the modern reader she may seem unbelievably spineless; to the feminist reader (or even just to women readers generally), she may seem repellently acquiescent in the asymmetric social, financial, and sexual rights of nineteenth-century males. But Balzac the novelist is actually more subtle, and more cynical, than Balzac the propagandist of conservative values. The novel opens with the attempted seduction of Adeline by Crevel, Hulot’s comic rival and comrade-in-skirts; the plot reaches its climax when Adeline, in order to save her own uncle from a disgrace of which her profligate husband Hector is the real culprit, offers herself to Crevel for 200,000 francs. It is a terrible moment. Adeline is doing what offends her sensibilities to the utmost out of love, and out of a Christian doctrine of self-sacrifice. She fails, having miscalculated her timing and her price. In Cousin Bette, as in life, the professionals do it better. Adeline is emotionally ruined, and her humiliation leaves her with a disfiguring facial twitch, a parody of the stigmata of the cross. Balzac shows the goodness of a good person; he takes it, as he takes everything in this sombre novel, to a fantastical, but plausible extreme; and in its extremity, Adeline’s goodness becomes its opposite—naïveté, foolishness, self-delusion, clumsiness, and plain bad behaviour. Readers who object to Adeline are not necessarily critics of Balzac; Adeline’s cruellest critic is the author himself.
Balzac plays similar tricks of moral perspective with Bette, the incarnation of negativity. She has taken under her wing a fey Polish émigré, Wenceslas Steinbock, whom she nurtures, more as mother than mistress. Steinbock is an artist; without Bette’s strict protection he would have dissipated his energies on ordinary life—on women, and vanity, and social climbing. Balzac takes a very special view of energy. In his mind, it is almost a physical substance, which individuals possess in finite quantity. To achieve any worthwhile result, energy must be concentrated on a single target, and it is to Bette alone that Steinbock owes that lesson, and its strict imposition. Steinbock’s first significant work is a bronze statuette of Samson tearing a lion to death—a mythological representation of the male strength which Bette has given him. The young man then gives it as a love-offering to Hector Hulot’s daughter, Hortense, and commits an unpardonable crime. From Bette’s point of view, Steinbock’s gift is less a betrayal than a theft, for it removes from her with quite transparent symbolism the only thing that was truly hers: not her feminine self (for she is the least feminine of women), but the virile power she can muster by force of concentration. Bette’s campaign of revenge on the Hulot household is not arbitrary, nor is it merely an expression of jealousy. In her unappealing person Balzac concentrates all the revenge of the dispossessed, and all their energy. The propagandist in Balzac would like Bette to be all evil; the novelist in him makes the issue infinitely more complex.
Behind the material, emotional, and sexual transactions of recognizably middle-class members of Parisian society in the 1840s Balzac sketches in reminiscences of older stories, which lend Cousin Bette some of its strange power. Balzac hesitated over displaying the use he makes of the parable of the Prodigal Son (in some editions, Cousin Bette begins with a sub-title, Tart One: The Prodigal Father’, and in others, such as the one used for this translation, ‘The Return of the Prodigal Father’ is used as a chapter-title). In Luke 15, the Prodigal Son’s return is greeted with forgiveness and joy: ‘It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad; for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found’. In Balzac’s story, the prodigal father Hector Hulot has ‘wasted his substance with riotous living’; and forgiveness is extended to him by his wife Adeline. She accepts the return of Hector three times: in 1838, when he is thrown out by the courtesan Josépha; in 1841, when he is forced to abandon his altogether more rapacious mistress Valérie Marneffe and to resign from the War Ministry; and again in 1845, when he is found living in squalor under the name of Pére Vyder (an anagram of d’Ervy). We do not know what happens after the celebration of the return of the Prodigal Son in the biblical parable; but in Balzac’s modern inversion of it, forgiveness has lost its purchase. Hector simply goes on, his sexual monomania unabated, and in the end he causes the death of the person who forgave him three times, perhaps three times too often. When Adeline overhears him, at the age of 75, offering to make the kitchen-maid the second Baroness Hulot, she dies of shock. It is not just her heart that is finally broken, but her Christian beliefs also. Balzac reverses the shape of the parable and therefore its meaning. The biblical myths that hover over the world of Cousin Bette make it clear that it is a world bereft of goodness.
The principal comic character in the novel, Crevel, declares that the France of the 1840s has ‘returned to biblical times’—that is to say, to the times of Exodus 32, when the Hebrews worshipped the Golden Calf. France now worships the five-franc coin above King and constitution, he claims, and his words are borne out by the novel’s action. In the end Adeline, the emblem of moral virtue, offers to sell herself to him for a pot of gold.
The myths of the Prodigal Son and the Golden Calf are used in Cousin Bette to give the gravity of biblical prophecy to Balzac’s moral pessimism, and thereby to constitute his political reply to Eugène Sue. However, the myth-figure which lies at the centre of this novel is that of Napoleon Bonaparte, ‘the little corporal who came to rule the world’, protected in battle (according to popular legend) by a pact with God. Hector Hulot is a man of common stock who rose to eminence in the military administration of Alsace under the reign of Napoleon, who ennobled him for his services. Hulot’s early career conforms to an important element in the myth of the Napoleonic golden age, that of the ‘career open to talent’. He meets and marries Adeline, and raises her from ‘her village mud’ to the splendid heights of the Imperial court, explicitly likened to paradise. Their marriage (‘like an Assumption’) is productive and successful, as is Hulot’s career until Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815. When the novel opens in 1838, the Napoleonic era is a memory of past happiness, of a time of social, conjugal, and professional integration. Hulot’s sexual extravagances begin only after the fall of the Empire: they are the signs of a fallen world.
From his first presentation, Hulot harks back to the Napoleonic past. He wears a blue jacket with gold buttons and a black cravat, and his deportment and self-possessed stride make him an obvious ‘Empire man’, just as a table might be an obvious piece of Empire furniture. Other characters provide contextual props for this historical and mythical identification: Josépha sees Adeline as Hector’s Empress Josephine, and Marneffe, the repugnant husband of Hulot’s mistress Valérie, remarks pointedly that ‘Empire men’ suffer the delusion that they are immortal. When Hulot is summoned by the Minister of War for a disciplinary interview, he falls into his own trap: ‘But, Prince, the Imperial Guard is immortal!’
Hulot is not a latter-day Napoleon, but an affectionate and cruel portrayal of the Napoleonic myth still present in French society in the 1840s. In Balzac’s approach to it, the myth still has the beauty of a ruined monument, like the Roman ruin that Hulot has begun to resemble as the senile hair sprouting from his nostrils and on his fingers resembles the moss on long-abandoned but ‘almost eternal’ stone walls. It is not by narrative accident that Hulot is the only character of his generation to live on beyond the novel’s conclusion. The apparent immortality of the rake is the characteristic which links him most closely to the Napoleonic myth, which included, in popular imaginations, the belief that the Emperor was still alive and would return to save France again one day. But Hulot’s life-story also demonstrates the degradation of an ideal into vice and venality. Twenty years after, the fabled comradeship of the old guard has become no more than a squalid old-boy network, with no more nobility than a bunch of crooks. It breaks the heart of the real old soldier, Hulot’s brother, the Maréchal.
Balzac’ achievement is to have given us a double vision. He makes us believe in the past as a projection of our present myths (the myth of the golden age in general, of the glory of the Napoleonic era in particular), whilst also convincing us that the novel’s present is a shabby simulacrum of the mythical past. With Cousin Bette, Balzac finally makes fiction the meeting point of history and myth, inventing and almost exhausting the potential of what Fredric Jameson has called ‘allegorical realism’.
Cousin Bette does not begin (as Père Goriot does) with a guided tour of a town, a quarter, a building, and its rooms before introducing characters and action: it jumps almost immediately into dialogue; the dramatic construction is maintained throughout; and for that reason Cousin Bette seems to mark the point beyond which the novel must give way to theatre or to grand opera. In the original or in translation, each character in the cast of Cousin Bette speaks with a different, marked voice—from the pidgin-French of the German banker to the pompous vulgarity of the well-to-do shopkeeper, from the meek elegance of Adeline to the sulphurous directness of Bette Fischer herself. The old soldiers use old soldiers’ set phrases, the courtesans use the authentic slang of their trade, and the working classes, who make their piteous appearance in the closing stages of Hulot’s downfall, speak with only slightly modified working-class vocabulary and syntax. Cousin Bette is a pageant of characters created by varieties of speech, and the comical, dramatic effect of that technique makes it Balzac’s most Dickensian novel by far.
It is also, by design, melodramatic to a degree. Balzac’s conscious aim was to appeal to the readers who had lapped up Sue’s pot-boiling serials, so as to lead them to a proper understanding of the great issues of good and evil, and to convince them of the need for absolute monarchy and the reimposition of the Catholic religion. Baron Montès de Montéjanos, the sleek-haired, jealous Brazilian lover with his phial of curare, comes straight out of popular theatre, as do the stereotypes of many of the novel’s major characters—the long-suffering wife, the evil hag, the femme fatale, the bourgeois buffoon, the tart with the heart of gold, and her protector, the aristocrat of unlimited wealth. Balzac’s drama takes its elements from a kind of popular entertainment not so far removed from the soap operas of today; but it takes them much further. Whilst every detail of the plot remains meticulously plausible, and every date correctly inscribed into a real history of France, every character is heightened, overlit, rendered more intense, more fantastical, more extreme, and infinitely more ambiguous than nineteenth-century melodrama or contemporary soap opera could ever permit.
Despite Balzac’s intentions, Cousin Bette is not a moral tract, and it raises questions that are far more interesting than the answers it seeks to give in occasional ‘nuggets’ of inserted propaganda. Is the ‘rule of money’ inherently incompatible with the rule of morality? Balzac shows the older generation (Bette, Hulot, Crevel, and Adeline) morally destroyed by the market economy of the 1830s and 1840s, and has his spokesman Bianchon declare that the ‘deep-seated evil’ comes directly ‘from the lack of religion and the pervasion of finance’. But things are not so clear to the reader of Balzac’s work. Hulot’s son Victorin, who has grown up not in the France of Napoleon but in the France of Louis-Philippe, re-establishes the fortunes of a family his father has ruined by skilful and honest use of the new rules of life’s game. Balzac’s novel ends not with a cataclysm or a hecatomb, but with the transfer of authority from a discredited generation to a new and passably competent and honest one. Sober realism gets the better of Balzac’s melodramtic intentions.
Bette’s campaign of destruction does not really succeed. She may be characterized as an erupting volcano, a hissing snake, and just short of the devil incarnate, but her plotting still requires the concomitant help of unplanned historical circumstances in order to bring Hulot to ruin. Bette dies before the novel’s end; Valérie Marneffe and Crevel die in horrible agonies for their sins, very like the protagonists of Dangerous Liaisons: Adeline dies, despite and also because of her virtue. Hulot alone, the ineradicably irresponsible skirt-chaser, the cause of infinite woe to his family and to his old comrades, lives on beyond them. Humiliated professionally and socially, he survives like some Protean figure of desire, taking on pseudonyms (all of them anagrams of his real name), attaching himself to one then another teenage mistress in ever more squalid corners of the city, reduced to nothing but his desire, and thus magnified into Desire itself. Hulot is certainly repulsive as a human being, but there is something magnificent about his unwavering devotion to a single passion: sexual passion untarnished and undeterred by sentiment, by social life, by anything outside of itself—not even by the ugliness of an overweight scullery maid. Good and evil simply dissolve, at the conclusion of Cousin Bette, in the face of the force of life itself.
Hulot is not really like any of Balzac’s other ‘monomaniac’ characters—Grandet the passionate miser, Goriot the absolute father, Bridau the painter, Claes the alchemist, David Séchard the inventor, and so on—for by the end of the novel it has to be understood that Hulot’s sexual obsession is abstract, infinite, quite useless, and fundamentally asocial. It is the opposite of the negative passion of his defeated enemy, Lisbeth Fischer, but in its extremity more like it than it is like any of the lesser social passions of the other characters on stage. Is it eros or thanatos which constitutes the driving force behind the action of the novel? Is it love or hatred which structures Balzac’s vision of the world in his last recreation of it? If the answer had been clear to the author, he would probably have written a far less probing work than this one which, in its rich ambiguity, allows every reader to explore his or her own imagination of what life is really like.
David Bellos