La Cousine Bette (pronounced [la kuzin bɛt]) is a novel written by the renowned French author Honoré de Balzac in 1846. It is set in mid-19th-century Paris and tells the story of a middle-aged, unmarried woman who considers destroying her extended family.
Bette teamed up with a married young lady by the name of Valérie Marneffe, who had a quite unhappy marriage. Together, they were looking to seduce and then torment multiple men. Baron Hector Hulot was among these men. Hulot was married to Bette’s cousin Adeline, and he sacrificed his good name and entire family fortune to please Valérie. However, she leaves him for Crevel, a wealthy tradesman.
The Humane Comedy (La Comédie humaine)
La Cousine Bette is part of Balzac’s “Scènes de la vie parisienne,” a novel sequence by the author titled “The Human Comedy” (“La Comédie humaine”). The serial format (referred to as the roman-feuilleton) was very popular across France in the 1840s; the best-known and most acclaimed were the socialist pieces by the author Eugène Sue.
Balzac sought to challenge the supremacy of Sue and proved himself one of the best and most successful feuilleton authors in France. He wrote with intense focus and produced La Cousine Bette (though one of his longest works) in a very short timeframe: just two months, and in 1846, the novel was published in “Le Constitutionnel,” to be collected the following year with a companion work titled “Le Cousin Pons.”
Characters of highly contrasting morality
In “La Cousine Bette,” Balzac portrayed characters of highly contrasting morality, from the disingenuous Valérie and vengeful Bette on one side to the patient Hortense and her merciful mother Adeline on the other.
Meanwhile, the Hulot family’s patriarch is obsessed with his own sexual desires. Polish exile Wenceslas Steinbock, Hortense’s husband, is the personification of artistic genius, succumbing to uncertainty, however, and lack of any motivation. Partly, Balzac based Bette’s character on his mother Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, a well-known poet in her days. Probably, there’s at least one scene in the novel that involving Baron Hulot that was based on a real-life event in the life of one Balzac’s friends, the novelist and publicist Victor Hugo.
The novel ‘La Cousine Bette” is widely considered to be Balzac’s last impressive work. The usage of a combination of a panorama with contrasting characters in a realistic setting with realist details is characteristic for Balzac from earlier novels.
Turning point
Quite a few critics hailed “La Cousine Bette” as a turning point in Balzac’s career, while others called it a highly typical naturalist text, and the novel has been compared to Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Shakespeare’s Othello. The novel is all about exploring the themes of virtue and vice, as well as how the French society was influence by money.
Bette’s and Valérie’s relationship is also regarded as a critical exploration of themes of homoerotic nature. Over the years, several movie versions have been made based on the novel, including a BBC mini-series (with Helen Mirren and Margaret Tyzack) in 1971. In 1998, a movie was released with the title role for Jessica Lange.