Cousin Bette: An Essay

Cousin Bette has spent her whole life in the shadow of her prettier, richer relations. She has learned to smile. She has also learned to wait.In the Paris of the 1840s, the poor spinster Lisbeth Fischer - "Cousin Bette" to the wealthy Hulot family who condescend to keep her - nurses a lifetime of slights into a cold and patient hatred. When the follies of the philandering Baron Hulot give her an opening, she becomes the unseen engine of the family's ruin, orchestrating seductions, bankruptcies, and betrayals with the cunning of a great general, her chief weapon the beautiful and utterly amoral Madame Marneffe.Written in 1846, near the end of Balzac's life, La Cousine Bette is among the darkest and most powerful novels of the Comédie Humaine - a merciless anatomy of envy, desire, and the money that moves everything. This Northlume Library edition presents James Waring's classic translation, freshly set behind an original mixed-media cover illustration by JVB Atelier Designs.