Cousin Pons
Honoré de Balzac
COUSIN PONS
HONORÉ DE BALZAC was born at Tours in 1799, the son of a civil servant. He spent nearly six years as a boarder in a Vendôme school, then went to live in Paris, working as a lawyer’s clerk then as a hack-writer. Between 1820 and 1824 he wrote a number of novels under various pseudonyms, many of them in collaboration, after which he unsuccessfully tried his luck at publishing, printing and type-founding. At the age of thirty, heavily in debt, he returned to literature with a dedicated fury and wrote the first novel to appear under his own name, The Chouans. During the next twenty years he wrote about ninety novels and shorter stories, among them many masterpieces, to which he gave the comprehensive title The Human Comedy. He died in 1850, a few months after his marriage to Evelina Hanska, the Polish countess with whom he had maintained amorous relations for eighteen years.
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HERBERT J. HUNT was Senior Fellow at Warwick University. Educated at the Lichfield Grammar School and Magdalen College, Oxford, he was a Tutor and Fellow at St Edmund Hall from 1927 to 1944, then until 1966 he was Professor of French Literature and Language at London University. He has published books on literature and thought in nineteeth-century France as well as a biography of Balzac, and a comprehensive study of Balzac’s writings: Balzac’s ‘Comedie Humaine’ (1959, paperback 1964). Herbert J. Hunt died in 1973.
Honoré de Balzac
COUSIN PONS
PART TWO OF POOR RELATIONS
TRANSLATED AND INTRODUCED BY HERBERT J. HUNT
PENGUIN BOOKS
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This translation first published 1968
Copyright © Herbert J. Hunt, 1968
All rights reserved
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ISBN: 978-0-14-196120-0
Contents
Introduction
1 A glorious relic of Imperial times
2 Decline and fall of a prize-winner
3 The two ‘Nutcrackers’
4 One of a collector’s thousand thrills
5 One of the thousand insults a parasite has to swallow
6 The Concierge Species – male and female
7 ‘The Two Pigeons’: a fable come true
8 Prodigal sons from Frankfurt-am-Main don’t always end up with the husks of the swine
9 Pons brings the Présidente something better than a fan
10 A German whimsy
11 Pons under a landslide of gravel
12 ‘Why, what a god is gold!’
13 A treatise on the occult sciences
14 A character from Hoffman’s Tales
15 Tittle-tattle and tactics – elderly concierge style
16 Corruption in conference
17 How all careers begin in Paris
18 A ‘man of law’
19 Fraisier makes things clear
20 La Cibot at the theatre
21 The Fraisier blossoms forth
22 A warning to old bachelors
23 Schmucke climbs to the mercy-seat of God
24 A testator’s cunning
25 The spurious will
26 Re-enter Madame Sauvage
27 Death’s gloomy portals
28 Schmucke’s Via Dolorosa
29 When wills are opened all doors are sealed
30 The Fraisier bears fruit
Conclusion
Introduction
‘THE great events in my life,’ Balzac once wrote, ‘are my works.’ Yet the life-span of this robust, boisterous, indefatigable genius contains more than the normal ration of events comic, dramatic and pathetic. From his boyhood, much of which was spent at the Oratorian College of Vendôme, through his years as apprentice lawyer, apprentice writer, publisher, printer, through the years when, domiciled mainly at Paris, he was producing the voluminous series of works later to be arranged systematically in what he called his Human Comedy, in fact right through to his dying days, he was avid for experience of all sorts. Hence his incursions into the social life of his times, the merry-makings which compensated for his long and arduous sessions at his writing-desk, and his persistent quest for perfect satisfaction in love, which eventually and after long anguish led him to marriage with his Polish countess, Evelina Hanska – about five months before his death, in August 1850, at the age of fifty-one.
But all this was secondary to his real life-purpose: to achieve glory as a Napoleon of letters, as the historian of his own times, as the ‘secretary’ of French society. Long before he embarked upon the series of ‘studies’ – Studies of Manners, Philosophical and Analytical Studies – he had written, under various noms-de-plume, such a quantity of novels as might well have satisfied any normal man with an itch for scribbling. But he rightly discarded all these ‘pot-boilers’, written between 1820 and 1824, and in 1829 he launched upon the most ambitious project which a novelist (who claimed also to be a philosopher) had ever yet undertaken. The Human Comedy was the result of this. He only found a title for his collected works about 1840, and he only began to edit or re-edit them under this title from 1842. But he had the whole scheme roughed out at least as early as 1834. It was an ever-expanding project. Disease and death caught up with him before it arrived at completion. Yet, as it stands, it comprises about ninety-seven novels, short stories and other ‘studies’.
His ‘Studies of Manners’ are assigned to six compartments: Scenes of Private Life, in which the main interest is the exploration of emotional situations within or on the margin of family life; Scenes of Provincial Life, in which Balzac gives his attention to the more parochial and sometimes petty struggles taking place in what are, relatively speaking, ‘closed’ communities; Scenes of Parisian Life – Balzac both hated and adored Paris as the hub of the French universe, and the novels in this compartment generally present a terrible picture of human ruthlessness; Scenes of Political and Scenes of Military Life, categories which are perhaps less important because they were inadequately filled; and finally Scenes of Country Life, which establish a curious contrast between the normal animality of the French peasants (according to Balzac’s view) and the efforts made by benevolent reformers to improve their lot and thereby convert them into responsible human beings.
Of the ‘Philosophical Studies’, mainly important because they express more directly Balzac’s general outlook, The Exiles (1831), Louis Lambert (1832–5) and Séraphita (1834–5) are noteworthy examples. But in this respect two points should be noted: one is that Balzac’s ‘philosophy’ obtrudes even in the ‘Studies of Manners’, Cousin Pons forming no exception to this rule; the other is that the ‘Philosophical Studies’ include some of Balzac’s finest novels, for instance The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831) and The Quest of the Absolute (1834).
As for the ‘Analytical Studies’, Balzac never had time to deal adequately with this category, but it contains his amusing, and at the same time penetratingly critical disquisitions on relations between the sexes; The Physiology of Marriage (1829) an
d The Minor Vexations of Married Life (1830–46).
All this was a stupendous performance. Does it argue for quantity rather than quality? It might have done so with a lesser genius, and Balzac’s feverish method of composition did not allow for meticulous attention to niceties of style and finish. He was usually occupied with several novels at one and the same time, and he felt himself continually obliged to press on, not only thanks to the urgency of ever-mounting debts, but also in order to bring into being that ‘world’ – modelled upon the real world, but transformed by his particular vision – which was seething in his brain. Balzac has his own peculiar quality. He was, in the first place, a born storyteller. He had remarkable powers of observation and a prodigious memory. But he had something more: an astounding faculty for sympathetic divination, an intuitive vision of men and things which he himself, borrowing the term from Sir Walter Scott, called ‘second sight’.
His claim to be the ‘secretary’ of contemporary society was no vain one. Chronologically speaking, his novels and short stories cover the period of his own life, from 1799 to about 1847. When he came of age, France was emerging from the very troubled period of the Revolution and Empire, and was living through the uneasy years of the ‘Restauration’ (1814–30), with a whole set of social, religious and economic problems to face and solve. They were not solved, not even when Louis-Philippe, the ‘Citizen-King’, in 1830 seated himself on the Bourbon throne for eighteen no less uneasy years. The aristocracy, anxious to regain its former wealth and prestige, was being shouldered out of its privileged position by that indeterminate class of people known in France as the bourgeoisie – a new land-owning plutocracy, a Napoleonic noblesse largely consisting of civil servants and lawyers; functionaries, academics and legal luminaries; industrialists and manufacturers ‘on the make’; and even the shop-owning sections of the community. The Industrial Revolution in France, later than its counterpart in England, was just about to get under way, and ‘capitalism’ with its attendant evils – sweated labour not least among them – was in the offing. These evils, observed or foreseen, led to the formulation of many different pre-Marxist systems of socialist doctrine.
In his religious, political and social views Balzac was a reactionary, but in diagnosing the ills of his own times he laid his finger on two outstanding features: the reign of unbridled individualism – ‘Get out and make place for me!’ – and the worship of money – ‘the only God people believe in today’. So, in ranging through the classes and sub-classes of the early nineteenth century – from the hereditary aristocracy downwards to shopkeepers and tradespeople, in Paris and the provincial towns, and the half-civilized, grasping peasantry of the countryside – he showed generally that idealism, human-kindness and all the traditional virtues were being pounced upon and destroyed by the forces of acquisitiveness and ambition. His allegorical ‘Philosophical Study’ of 1831, The Wild Ass’s Skin, gives a remarkable general diagnosis, particularized in such novels as Gobseck (1830–35), which shows a usurer sitting like a spider at the centre of his web and asserting his power over the ‘socialites’ and ne’er-do-wells who come to him for loans; Eugénie Grandet (1833), which traces the rise to affluence and domination of a man who had started life, before the Revolution, as an insignificant cooper and vine-grower; Old Goriot, which is one of Balzac’s first revelations of Paris as a jungle wherein human nature is no less ‘red in tooth and claw’ than the animal nature from which it derives; the Rise and Fall of César Birotteau (1837), which gives the life-story of an honest but stupid manufacturer of cosmetics who, thanks to his social and financial ambitions, becomes a prey to a group of blood-sucking bankers and speculators; and La Rabouilleuse (a nickname – ‘fisher in troubled waters’ – given to the provincial-town trollop who occupies the centre of the story) : in this novel, written in 1841–3, is laid before us the struggle for an inheritance undertaken by a Napoleonic veteran soldier whose movements and stratagems afford us a vivid picture of life both in Paris and the stagnating town of Issoudun.
Balzac’s conscious purpose as the social historian of his country and times should not of course blind us to the human interest in his tales. He certainly spends a lot of time describing the material background against which the action of his tales is set. Readers of Cousin Pons will see for themselves how many pages are devoted to basic atmosphere and initial characterization before we are allowed to witness the opening scene between Pons and the Camusot mother and daughter. They will also notice that he reaches almost half-way before arriving at the essence of his story:
And here begins the drama, or if you prefer, the terrible comedy of the death of a bachelor delivered over by the force of circumstances to the rapacity of covetous people assembled round his bed [page 181].
But though description abounds, there is action in plenty, and action of an intensely dramatic nature. Balzac’s long preparations lead up to a sequence of ‘scenes’ in which we are shown the real stuff of human nature as he saw it: all his invented creatures (many of them modelled on people he knew), good, bad and indifferent, pursuing their various ends – and as a rule the good fare ill in the rough-and-tumble of life.
Balzac’s conception of character is an interesting one. Thanks to a peculiar ‘philosophy’ which he had largely drawn from the writings of Mesmer – his weakness for the less reputable ‘sciences’ of his age is well illustrated in Chapter 13 of this novel – he believed that all men and women are endowed from birth with a certain measure of ‘vital fluid’ or energy which they may spend as they will. Some husband it carefully, some expend it recklessly, some direct it exclusively to a chosen end: to the acquisition of wealth and the advantages wealth brings, like Gobseck, Félix Grandet and the bankers Nucingen and Du Tillet; to the (questionable) welfare of their children, like Jean-Joachim Goriot; to personal vengeance, like ‘Cousin Bette’; or even to the advancement of science, like Balthazar van Claës in The Quest of the Absolute (1834). Such direction or misdirection of energy accounts for the many ‘monomaniacs’ to be found in the Human Comedy in general, and in the Poor Relations in particular: ‘Cousin Bette’ thinks only of destroying the family on whose condescending patronage she has been for so long forced to live; ‘Cousin Pons’ has made the search for succulent dinners his main purpose in life. As with the ‘tableau-mane’ Elias Magus – and, to some extent, with Balzac himself in the 1840s – the pursuit of antiques has become a second ruling passion. Though in these cases exceptionally violent, this élan vital is a common feature in Balzac’s characters, great or small. As the great French poet, Baudelaire, an ardent admirer of Balzac, wrote: ‘All his characters are endowed with the same vital flame which was burning within himself.’
This energy is usually devoted to selfish or malevolent purposes – as it is by the venomous ‘Présidente’, Madame Camusot, the concierge Madame Cibot, once the demon of greed has seized hold of her, the relentless Fraisier, once he discovers a way of redeeming himself from a shady past, and the poisoner Rémonencq, anxious to set up as a dealer in antiques and to acquire ‘the comely oyster-girl’ as his consort. Relatively few of Balzac’s characters – Dr Benassis in The Country Doctor, Judge Popinot in The Interdiction, or Véronique Graslin in The Village Priest – direct their will to a good end. His rank and file, in so far as they are ‘good’, are generally the dupes or victims of the ‘go-getters’, as will be seen in Cousin Pons with regard not only to the main characters, the ‘delicate-souled’ Pons and the ‘innocent’ Schmucke, but also to Topinard, La Cibot’s husband, Dr Poulain and perhaps also the lawyer Villemot.
Cousin Pons, as the Conclusion to the novel (page 331) makes clear, has a sort of ‘twinship’ with Cousin Bette. For long Balzac had thought of including in his scheme a series of novels dealing with ‘Poor Relations’. An earlier work, Pierrette (one might compare this novel with Dickens’s Oliver Twist), had told of the tribulations an orphan child met with at the hands of the cruel cousins who adopted her as a household drudge. But he relegated Pierrette
to another category (The Celibates), and only in 1846 and 1847 returned to the ‘Poor Relations’ idea. The heroine of Cousin Bette, of which a translation by Marion Ayton Crawford appeared in 1965 in the Penguin Classics, is the very incarnation of competent vindictiveness. Cousin Pons offers a diametrically opposite case – a mild, harmless old man who is treated with spiteful contempt by his well-to-do relations. The latter novel hung fire for a while, and the former one was published first. Balzac turned his attention to Cousin Pons in the later months of 1846, and published it first of all as a serial novel in a contemporary periodical, Le Constitutionnel, in the spring of 1847. As was usual with him, he expanded it considerably in course of composition; having intended it first of all merely as a study of a man contemned and repudiated by his kinsfolk and their satellites, he decided to enrich it with two new themes – the friendship theme (Pons and Schmucke as a nineteenth-century Orestes and Pylades) and the inheritance theme: the determination of Madame Camusot, once she has discovered that the despised ‘cousin’ has a rich collection of antiques, to assert family ‘rights’ and graso his estate for herself. As usual, Balzac was writing in a hurry. Had he lived long enough, no doubt he would have ironed out the minor inconsistencies that readers will discern in the novel. When he was composing it, his health was failing. He was still making a frantic effort to achieve solvency in order to marry his Polish countess, now a widow. He himself had suffered from hepatitis in earlier years. He was subject to a form of chronic meningitis, and already the cardiac disease which was to carry him off was showing alarming symptoms.
And so, in the lugubrious account of Pons’s physical collapse and death, and all the attendant funereal circumstances, there is probably more than a presentiment of the fate which was shortly to overtake him. Therefore the blending of sentimentality with a calm, even ironic acceptance of the world and its evil ways has a notable significance. The composition of this novel is not perfect, but it betrays no falling-off in creative power. In fact, Cousin Pons is at once a great contribution to Balzac’s sociological studies – he has moved forward in time and is writing of Paris in the 1840s – and also one of the best examples, of his rueful contemplation, pessimistic but not despairing, of human nature at an age, and in a milieu, when the blackest crimes were blandly committed under a cloak of legality.
