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History

La Cousine Bette (Cousin Bette) is an 1846 novel by French author Honoré de Balzac. Set in mid-19th century Paris, it tells the story of an unmarried middle-aged woman who plots the destruction of her extended family. Bette works with Valérie Marneffe, an unhappily married young lady, to seduce and torment a series of men. One of these is Baron Hector Hulot, husband to Bette's cousin Adeline. He sacrifices his family's fortune and good name to please Valérie, who leaves him for a tradesman named Crevel. The book is part of the Scenes from Parisian life section of Balzac's novel sequence La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy).

The novel's characters represent polarities of contrasting morality. The vengeful Bette and disingenuous Valérie stand on one side, with the merciful Adeline and her patient daughter Hortense on the other. The patriarch of the Hulot family, meanwhile, is consumed by his own sexual desire. Hortense's husband, the Polish exile Wenceslas Steinbock, represents artistic genius, though he succumbs to uncertainty and lack of motivation. Balzac based the character of Bette in part on his mother and the poet Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. At least one scene involving Baron Hulot was likely based on an event in the life of Balzac's friend, the novelist Victor Hugo.

La Cousine Bette is considered Balzac's last great work. His trademark use of realist detail combines with a panorama of characters returning from earlier novels. Several critics have hailed it as a turning point in the author's career, and others have called it a prototypical naturalist text. It has been compared to William Shakespeare's Othello as well as Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace .

By 1846 Honoré de Balzac had achieved tremendous fame as a writer, but his finances and health were deteriorating rapidly. After writing a series of potboiler novels in the 1820s, he published his first book under his own name, The Chouans (The Chouans), in 1829. He followed this with dozens of well-received novels and stories, including La peau de chagrin (The Magic Skin), in 1831, Le Père Goriot(Father Goriot) in 1835, and the two-volume Illusions Perdues (Lost Illusions), in 1837 and 1839. Because of his lavish lifestyle and penchant for financial speculation, however, he spent most of his life trying to repay a variety of debts. He wrote tirelessly, driven as much by economic necessity as by the muse and black coffee. This regimen of constant work exhausted his body and brought reprimands from his doctor.

The mid-19th century was a time of profound transformation in the French government and society. The reign of King Charles X ended in 1830 when a wave of agitation and dissent forced him to abdicate. He was replaced by Louis-Philippe, who named himself "King of the French", rather than the standard "King of France" – an indication that he answered more to the nascent bourgeoisie than the aristocratic Ancien Régime. The change in government took place while the economy in France was moving from mercantilism to industrial development. This opened new opportunities for individuals hoping to acquire wealth and led to significant changes in social norms. Members of the aristocracy, for example, were forced to relate socially to the nouveau riche, usually with tense results. The democratic spirit of the French Revolution also affected social interactions, with a shift in popular allegiance away from the church and the monarchy.

In the mid-19th century, a new style of the novel became popular in France. The serial format known as the roman-feuilleton presented stories in short regular installments, often accompanied by melodramatic plots and stock characters. Although Balzac's La Vieille Fille (An Old Maid), 1836, was the first such work published in France, the roman-feuilleton gained prominence thanks mostly to his friends Eugène Sue and Alexandre Dumas, père. Balzac disliked their serial writing, however, especially Sue's socialist depiction of lower-class suffering. Balzac wanted to dethrone what he called "les faux dieux de cette littérature bâtarde" (the false gods of this bastard literature). He also wanted to show the world that, despite his poor health and tumultuous career, he was "plus jeune, plus frais, et plus grand que jamais" (younger, fresher, and greater than ever). His first efforts to render a quality feuilleton were unsuccessful. Even though Splendeurs Et Miseres Des Courtisanes A Harlot High and Low), published in segments from 1838 to 1847, was celebrated by critics, Balzac complained that he was "doing pure Sue". He tried again in 1844 with Modeste Mignon, but public reactions were mixed. Two years later Balzac began a new project, determined to create something from his "own old pen again".

After resting for a week in June 1846 at the Château de Saché in Tours, Balzac returned to Paris and began working on a short story called "Le Parasite", which he eventually developed into the novel Le Cousin Pons (Cousin Pons). He intended from the start to pair it with another novel, collecting them under the title Les Parents pauvres (Poor Relations). He based the second book on a story his sister Laure Surville had written called "La Cousine Rosalie" and published in 1844 in Le Journal des enfants. Writing intensively, he produced the entire novel, named La Cousine Bette after the main character, in two months. This was a significant accomplishment owing to his bad health, but its length made Balzac's writing speed especially remarkable One critic calls the writing of Les Parents pauvres Balzac's "last explosion of creative energy". Another suggests that this effort was "almost the last straw which broke down Balzac's gigantic strength".

Balzac's usual mode of revision involved vast, complicated edits made to galley proofs he received from the printer. When creating La Cousine Bette, however, he submitted the work to his editor piece by piece, without viewing a single proof. The book was serialized in Le Constitutionnel from October 8 to December 3 and Balzac rushed to keep up with the newspaper's rapid printing schedule. He produced an average of eight pages each day, but was struck by the unexpected enormity of the story as it evolved. Balzac was paid 12,836 francs for the series, which was later published with Le Cousin Pons as a twelve-volume book. The first collected edition of La Cousine Bette was organized into 132 chapters, but these divisions were removed when Balzac added it to his massive collection La Comédie humaine in 1848.

(Critical) Reception

If Balzac's goal was (as he claimed) to write a realist novel from his "own old pen" rather than mimic the style of Eugène Sue, history and literary criticism have declared him successful. William Stowe calls La Cousine Bette "a masterpiece of classical realism" and David Bellos refers to it as "one of the great achievements of nineteenth-century realism", comparing it to War and Peace. Some sections of the book are criticized for being melodramatic, and Balzac biographer V. S. Pritchett even refers to a representative excerpt as "bad writing". Most critics, however, consider the moralistic elements of the novel deceptively complex, and some point out that the roman-feuilleton format required a certain level of titillation to keep readers engaged. Others indicate that Balzac's interest in the theatre was an important reason for the inclusion of melodramatic elements.

from wikipedia