Poor Relations

La Cousine Bette was perhaps the last really great thing that Balzac did—for Le Cousin Pons , which now follows it, was actually written before—and it is beyond all question one of the very greatest of his works. It was written at the highest possible pressure, and (contrary to the author's more usual system) in parts, without even seeing a proof, for the Constitutionnel in the autumn, winter, and early spring of 1846-47, before his departure from Vierzschovnia, the object being to secure a certain sum of ready money to clear off indebtedness. And it has been sometimes asserted that this labor, coming on the top of many years of scarcely less hard works, was almost the last straw which broke down Balzac's gigantic strength. Of these things it is never possible to be certain; as to the greatness of La Cousine Bette , there is no uncertainty.
In the first place, it is a very long book for Balzac; it is, I think, putting aside books like Les Illusions Perdues , and Les Celibataires , and Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes , which are really groups of work written at different times, the longest of all his novels, if we except the still later and rather doubtful Petits Bourgeois . In the second place, this length is not obtained—as length with him is too often obtained—by digressions, by long retrospective narrations, or even by the insertion of such padding as the collection business in Le Cousin Pons . The whole stuff and substance of La Cousine Bette is honestly woven novel-stuff, of one piece and one tenor and texture, with for constant subject the subterranean malignity of the heroine, the erotomania of Hulot and Crevel, the sufferings of Adeline, and the pieuvre operations of Marneffe and his wife,—all of which fit in and work together with each other as exactly as the cogs and gear of a harmonious piece of machinery do. Even such much simpler and shorter books as Le Pere Goriot by no means possess this seamless unity of construction, this even march, shoulder to shoulder, of all the personages of the story.