Reading the first chapter of Cousin Bette is like entering a foreign city that seems eerily like our own—and turning a corner and coming upon a brutal mugging in progress. Few novels have more violent beginnings, though the violence is all psychological and, seen from a distance, by a casual observer, may even pass for polite conversation.
The fierceness of Balzac’s courage and his reckless determination to portray the human comedy precisely as he saw it become clear when we consider how few contemporary writers would risk beginning a work of fiction with a scene so repulsive, and so brave in its refusal to hint or promise that, by the novel’s conclusion, sin will be punished, virtue rewarded, and redemption freely offered to the wicked and the innocent alike.
Eloquently translated by Kathleen Raine, Cousin Bette portrays a world in which almost everyone will do anything to anyone if sex and money are at stake, a milieu in which sex is routinely traded for money, a society in which friendships and alliances are forged to advance the most immoral motives, and in which only fools and martyrs are deluded enough to follow the outmoded promptings of honor, loyalty, and conscience.
Published in 1847, Cousin Bette was composed (as always, at breakneck speed) near the end of a prodigiously prolific career that produced nearly a hundred novels, novellas, and short stories. By then, Balzac had mastered the technical skill and the brilliant, gleeful assurance with which, at the start of Cousin Bette, he portrays the meeting between Monsieur Crevel and the Baroness Adeline Hulot—two Parisians with little in common except for the rapidity with which their social status has changed.
The former owner of a perfume shop, Celestin Crevel is a vulgar opportunist and libertine who has manipulated the fluid political climate and new atmosphere of social mobility to propel his rise along the shady margins of Parisian society. By the time the novel opens, in 1838, Crevel is already an ex–deputy mayor and wears the ribbon of a chevalier of the Legion of Honor. At once more dramatic and more deserved, Adeline Hulot’s ascent has, alas, proved more temporary. For some years after her beauty and dignity persuaded the Baron Hulot to marry her, despite her lowly Alsatian-peasant origins, she enjoyed a brief interlude of marital bliss. But now her beloved husband has succumbed to a tragic flaw that today—when practically every child is conversant with the latest psychological syndromes—would doubtless be diagnosed as a world-class case of sexual addiction.
The baron’s obsessive tendency to fall madly in love with, and subsequently enslave himself to, paradoxically cheap and expensive women has brought his family to near ruin. And though Adeline is aware that “for twenty years Baron Hulot had been unfaithful,” she has “kept a leaden screen in front of her eyes” and has chosen not to know the details until Crevel visits her at home and puts his terms very plainly: unless Adeline (who, at forty-eight, is still a beauty) agrees to sleep with him, her adored daughter, Hortense, will never marry, because Crevel will let everyone know that the once distinguished, once prosperous Hulots cannot afford to provide her with a dowry. And in case the faithful, long-suffering Adeline wonders how this dire situation came about, the ever thoughtful Monsieur Crevel has come to explain:
Having tired of his lover, Jenny Cadine, whom he corrupted when she was thirteen, the baron has stolen Monsieur Crevel’s own mistress, Josépha, the “queen of the demimonde,” an insatiably avaricious “Jewess” who has not merely “fleeced” the baron but “skinned” him to the tune of more than a hundred thousand francs. But all is not lost. If Adeline agrees to become Crevel’s lover—for ten years!—Crevel will give her the money for Hortense’s dowry.
This scene of breathtaking cruelty and blackmail—essentially, a rape in which both parties remain fully clothed—introduces and prefigures the themes that Balzac will develop throughout the novel: heartlessness, self-interest, meretriciousness, greed, revenge, sexual competition. The unnerving conversation between Crevel and the baroness will resonate later in the book, its echo amplified by a series of events that parallel and outdo this one in their sheer awfulness—most notably, another meeting between Adeline and Crevel, three years after the opening scene.
In this variation on the introductory chapter, the now desperate Adeline can no longer afford the luxury of virtue. She tearfully agrees to accept Monsieur Crevel’s proposition, only to learn that what had originally inspired the former perfumer was not, in fact, love or lust (motives for which there is much to be said, though perhaps not in this instance) but rather the darker, unhealthier, and even less sympathetic desire for revenge: specifically, revenge on her husband for having stolen Josépha. And now that Crevel has liberally helped himself to the favors of the baron’s newest obsession—the scheming, ambitious, and apparently irresistible Madame Marneffe, a civil servant’s wife who turns out to be more skillful and greedier than the most successful courtesans—Crevel no longer feels the compulsion to seduce and possess the baron’s wife.
Such summaries omit the telling details, the sharp observations, the nearly unbearable conversations, the sudden switches in argument and reasoning that portray precisely the nature of both participants, and the clever parallels that connect apparently dissimilar incidents and characters. Having earlier observed Madame Marneffe completing her calculatedly seductive toilette, we subsequently watch Adeline attempt something similar, only to ruin it when she reddens her nose by crying a torrent of real tears, as opposed to the few attractive droplets that Madame Marneffe would have shed. Correspondences such as these serve as cornerstones in the novel’s satisfying and surprisingly (given its interest in the consequences of uncontrolled lust and passion) orderly formal structure.
Summarizing the two parallel scenes helps us see what underlies the architecture and the spirit of the novel: the resolve and, again, the sheer bravery required to begin a book with an example of repugnant behavior and then have the general tone of events and the prevailing standards of conduct go pretty much straight downhill from there. As the plot progresses, vengefulness, greed, and unfeeling ambition are passed, like some sort of evil baton, from one to another of the small but undeservedly successful group of schemers and villains, both minor and major, that populate the novel.
Lurking on the edges of the Hulot family parlor, a room that stubbornly clings to gentility despite the frayed upholstery that Crevel helpfully points out, is Cousin Bette, a vengeful and resentful relative of Adeline’s. Unimpressed and unmollified by the sexual, marital, and financial humiliations to which her cousin is at the moment being subjected, the poor relation is utterly consumed by envy of Adeline’s privileged existence. Balzac dispatches Cousin Bette in a few swift, brutal strokes:
Lisbeth Fischer . . . was far from being a beauty like her cousin; for which reason she had been tremendously jealous of her. Jealousy formed the basis of her character, with all its eccentricities. . . . A Vosges peasant woman in all senses of the word—thin, dark, her hair black and stringy, with thick eyebrows meeting in a tuft, long, strong arms, flat feet, with several moles on her long simian face—such, in brief, was the appearance of this old maid.
Though she long ago “gave up all idea of competing with or rivaling her cousin . . . envy remained hidden in her secret heart, like the germ of a disease that is liable to break out and ravage a city if the fatal bale of wool in which it is hidden is ever opened.”
In fact, Bette proves capable of one of the book’s few acts of generosity and devotion: her support of, and attachment to, the gifted and impecunious Polish sculptor Wenceslas Steinbock. Thus she shows herself to be, like so many of Balzac’s most memorable characters, full of contradictions, immensely complex, and capable of great extremes—that is to say, she is a recognizable, plausible human, whose humanity we must acknowledge, however much we might wish to disown it.
In any case, when Bette’s outwardly disinterested but, at heart, possessive love for Wenceslas is thwarted, the “germ” does eventually break out, and the scorned Cousin Bette unleashes a fury that indeed outdoes hell’s. Bette sets in motion her evil plans for the unfortunate Hulot family—a campaign whose chances for success are dramatically improved when Bette’s neighbor, Madame Marneffe, realizes that the erotomaniacal Hulot is the perfect stepping-stone to assist her on her way to great wealth and social position, at least in the demimonde.
Thus Balzac demonstrates that greed and wickedness are equal opportunity employers, willing to make use of the services of a pretty married woman, an unattractive unmarried one, and an assortment of male characters, from the insufferable Crevel to the pathetic Monsieur Marneffe, who readily prostitutes his wife in the hopes of a modest career advancement.
From various motives, none of them good, these men and women conspire to impoverish and destroy Baron Hulot and his family. Of course, none of their schemes could succeed were it not for the baron’s own weakness. Yet Balzac seems to display a certain, perhaps grudging or involuntary, sympathy for a lover of women whose taste runs the gamut from hardened courtesans to preadolescent girls. Or perhaps the scene in which we watch Madame Marneffe prepare to make her conquests, and the rapidity with which even the uxorious Wenceslas succumbs to her charms, is meant to imply that no male (least of all one like Hulot) can successfully hope to resist the meticulously constructed, accurately targeted sexual allure of certain women.
One almost suspects that Balzac can’t help admiring a man who, like himself, possesses monumental appetites and energies, however misdirected. This suspicion reminds us, in turn, of the profound ambivalence that drove Balzac, who may have been the most obsessive shopper, collector, speculator—and (with the possible exception of Dostoyevsky and his gambling losses) debtor—in the history of world literature, to condemn, in novel after novel, a society that overvalues and worships the power of money. Balzac’s personal familiarity with the vice against which he most vehemently railed cannot help but add to the reader’s impression that the failings of his most unforgivable characters are, finally, only human.
Ultimately, what’s most shocking and inspiring about Cousin Bette is its sheer relentlessness, the steely mercilessness on the part of the author, which echoes and at moments even exceeds the pitiless schadenfreude of its title character. What hope does the novel offer? Not much, at least not for these individuals and their society. Throughout the book, women steal each other’s husbands, men steal each other’s mistresses, and everyone—male and female alike—conspires to steal one another’s money. Generosity and virtue are repaid with humiliation, betrayal, and the opportunity to discover some devastating piece of personal information. Certainly that is Adeline’s fate, from that first interview with Crevel to the book’s conclusion, when—having devoted herself to a form of charitable social work that furthers the institution of marriage, an institution that has ruined her life—she receives, as her earthly reward, the chance to see for herself the depths to which her husband has descended.
Nowadays, when critics make sure that the novelist understands the crucial importance of creating characters the reader can sympathize and identify with, approve of and like, when the book-buying public insists upon plots in which obstacles are overcome and hardships prove instructive, in which goodness and kindness are recognized and rewarded, few novelists would have the nerve to author a book as unsparing (and, for that reason, as exalting) as Cousin Bette. Reading Balzac’s masterpiece reminds us of the reasons why we need great literature: for aesthetic pleasure and enjoyment, beauty and truth, for the opportunity to enter the mind of another, for information about the temporal and the eternal. And for the opportunity to read about things that we may be reluctant to acknowledge but that we recognize, despite that reluctance, as true.
So much of what Balzac tells us has by now become much more difficult, indeed practically impossible (or impermissible), for us to admit to ourselves, or to say: the fact that the poor and the ugly might envy the beautiful and the rich, that our craving for sex and money is so powerful and so anarchic that it can defeat, with hardly a struggle, our better instincts and good judgment. Balzac, who knew about all these things from personal experience, continues to remind us, in novels such as Cousin Bette, what we humans are capable of—that is to say, what we are.