Bellos David - Cousin Bette

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS
COUSIN BETTE

HONOR BALZAC was born in 1799 at Tours, the son of a civil servant. Put out to nurse and sent later to boarding school, he had, except between the ages of 4 and 8, little contact with home. In 1814 the family moved to Paris, where Honor continued his boarding-school education for two years, and then studied law at the Sorbonne. From 1816 to 1819 he worked in a lawyers office, but having completed his legal training he knew he wanted to be a writer. While his family gave meagre financial support he wrote a play, Cromwell, but it was a complete failure. He also collaborated with other writers to produce popular novels. During the 1820s he dabbled in journalism, and tried to make money in printing and publishing ventures, whose lack of success laid the foundation for debts that plagued him for the rest of his life.

In 1829 Balzac published his first novel under his own name, Le Dernier Chouan (later Les Chouans), and La Physiologie du mariage. In 1830 came a collection of six stories called Scnes de la vie prive. Self-styled de Balzac, he became fashionable in the literary and social world of Paris, and over the next twenty years, as well as plays and articles, wrote more than ninety novels and stories. In 1842 many of these were published in seventeen volumes as La Comdie humaine. Important works were still to come, but ill-health interfered with his creativity and marred the last years of his life.

In 1832, in his extensive fan-mail, Balzac received a letter from the Polish Countess Hanska, whose elderly husband owned a vast estate in the Ukraine. The next year he met Madame Hanska in Switzerland, and in 1835 the couple agreed to marry after Count Hanskis death. For seventeen years, with intermissions, they conducted a voluminous correspondence, until their marriage finally took place in March 1850. Balzac died three months later in Paris.

DAVID BELLOS is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. He is the author of George Perec. A Life in Words (Harvill, 1993) and is currently preparing a study of the film-maker Jacques Tati.

SYLVIA RAPHAEL taught French language and literature at the universities of Glasgow and London, specializing in nineteenth-century literature. Her translations include a selection of Balzacs short stories and his Eugnie Grandet and La Cousine Bette, as well as Sands first novel, Indiana. Sylvia Raphael died in 1996.

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

HONOR DE BALZAC

Translated with Notes by
SYLVIA RAPHAEL

With an Introduction by
DAVID BELLOS

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Translation and notes material Sylvia Raphael 1992
Introduction and Appendix David Bellos 1992

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First published as a Worlds Classics paperback 1992
Reissued as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 1998

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Balzac, Honor de, 1799-1850.
[Cousine Bette. English]
Cousin Bette / Honor de Balzac : translated by Sylvia Raphael.
p. cm.(Oxford worlds classics)
Translation of: La cousine Bette.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Raphael, Sylvia. II. Title. III. Series.
PQ2165.C5E5 1992 843.7dc20 9124417
ISBN 0192836684
5 7 9 10 8 6 4

Printed in Great Britain by
Cox & Wyman Ltd.
Reading, Berkshire

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 novels title. The Hulot family owes its standing in the fictional society of Balzacs 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 Napoleons 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