Cousin Bette

<p><strong><em>Cousin Bette</em> is one of Balzac's darkest and most powerful novels a Parisian story of jealousy revenge sexual appetite money and family destruction.</strong> Lisbeth Fischer known as Cousin Bette is poor unmarried resentful and long treated as a useful dependent by her richer relations. Nursing years of humiliation she joins forces with the beautiful and calculating Valérie Marneffe and together they begin to pull apart the respectable Hulot family through seduction debt vanity and carefully directed malice.</p><p>First published in 1846-1847 and forming part of Balzac's vast <strong><em>La Comédie humaine</em></strong> <strong><em>Cousin Bette</em></strong> is often regarded as one of his last great achievements. Set in Paris during the 1830s and 1840s it exposes a society in which desire status inheritance patronage and financial speculation corrupt nearly every human bond. The novel is realist in method but almost noir in moral atmosphere: a study of people who know exactly how to wound one another and of a world where private vice and public respectability feed on the same money. Oxford's edition describes it as a tale of violent jealousy and sexual passion and it remains a key work in Balzac's <strong>Human Comedy</strong>.</p>