Title: Cousin Bette
Rating: 4 Stars
Balzac was quite the prolific author. In a writing career spanning twenty years, he cranked out more than 40 novels, not to mention a bunch of novellas and short stories. Writing within a grand design called The Human Comedy, his goal was to dissect and describe all parts of post Napoleon French society. He would wake up at midnight and write from one to eight every morning, fueled by endless cups of coffee.
Cousin Bette is one of the novels in The Human Comedy. It is from the poor relations part.
It’s the story of Bette, a plain cousin to the much more attractive Adeline. Even growing up, Bette was put to work in the fields and doing drudgery work while Adeline was pampered. Eventually Adeline made a marriage to the Baron Hulot. A hero of the Napoleonic era, Hulot assumes a prominent place in society. Bette, now looked upon as a poor cousin, is consumed with envy and rage. Her one project is to ruin the Hulot family and their children.
Fortunately, Baron Hulot makes it easy on her. A profligate womanizer, he squanders his entire fortune, acquires ruinous loans, and finally commits fraud against the state to keep to keep his lover happy.
The lover, Madame Marneffe, is the perfect tool for Bette’s revenge. A merciless coquette, she effortlessly wraps the Baron around her finger and demands ever greater gifts from him.
Marneffe becomes pregnant. She somehow manages to simultaneously convince Hulot, his son-in-law (the feckless sculptor Wenceslas Steinbock), Hulot’s daughter’s father-in-law (the wealthy retired merchant Crevel), and some random Brazilian dude that they’re each actually the father.
By the time Bette and Marneffe are done, Hulot is jobless, homeless and on the run from debt collectors, his virtuous wife is shaking with palsy from all of the emotional blows that she’s suffered, his daughter has been abandoned by her husband, and his son is hopelessly in debt.
At 500 pages, I was worried that this nineteenth century French novel would be dry or plodding. It was a needless worry. It is a potboiler melodrama, full of fainting fits, shouts of anger, true love, calculating love, turns of fortune, and deaths by poison, suicide, and shame. The plot was propelled from page to page.
One major theme appeared to be that all men are scum. Nearly without exception, men behave without honor. If there’s a woman involved, the men lose their head and promptly begin behaving irrationally. Hulot is the worse of the lot. Even into his seventies, when he is living in a hovel estranged from his family, he manages to carry on an affair with a sixteen year old girl. When his wife rescues him from poverty, he plaintively asks her if he can take the girl with him. Um, no, you can’t.
Looking at it from the year 2021, there are unfortunate racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic attitudes expressed. Polish and Jewish stereotypes are called out as fact. The Brazilian has mysterious ‘Negro’ practices. It’s a blot on the text that has to be acknowledged.
Another issues is that it was definitely written to portray a certain class of life in France in the 1830s and 1840s. That’s well and good, but it includes some very topical references to that time and place. Balzac mentions styles, major figures, and artists that have long since faded from scene. This is a common problem to all literature that take place in the here and now. References that pull today’s reader directly into the story will repel tomorrow’s readers that will have no context. I’ve mentioned this before, but this might keep some modern authors from becoming ageless. For example, even now there are many references in Joyce’s Ulysses that are now lost. Gravity’s Rainbow, deeply immersed in World War II and its immediate aftermath, is another novel that will be interesting to see how it stands the test of time.
Cousin Bette is the personification of revenge. She is a Fury determined to pursue the Hulots to their doom. In her implacable hatred, I see echoes of both Othello’s Iago and Titus Andronicus’ Aaron the Moor. In all cases, operating purely on instinct responding to ever evolving facts on the ground, they are all vehicles of single minded destruction.
However, Bette does not measure up to Iago or Aaron. The novel, not being a tragedy, refuses to leave the Hulots to their horrific fate. Hulot’s uncle, who Bette is on the verge of marrying so that she can truly lord herself over the family, dies from shame of Hulot’s actions before the ceremony. Madame Marneffe, on the verge of her victory, dies a horrible, disfiguring death as a result of poison administered by the Brazilian. From all of this death, the Hulot family inherits great riches and manages to escape all of the traps that have been laid by Bette.
In fact, Bette doesn’t even get a villain’s death. In both Titus and Othello, the respective villains are caught and will clearly be viciously tortured and murdered. Aaron, knowing that his fate is sealed, at least has the villain’s courage of saying that although he’s done 1,000 evil things, his only regret is that he did not have time to do 10,000 more (paraphrase, but that was the gist).
No such moment of negative heroics for Bette. Dying of some consumptive disease, all of the Hulots gather around her with tears in their eyes at the death of who they perceive to be their benefactress. They never do learn that she has been the engine for all of their misfortune. As she lies dying, she doesn’t even get to enjoy their scorn.
My rating for this novel might be affected by low expectations, but I really enjoyed reading it. It was a fast scenery chewing, moving, larger than life novel. This is one of those novels where you re-learn that many what are now considered to be classic novels were first of all, extremely popular in their time.
dorkenstein 