Balzac’s Women and the Impossibility of Redemption in Cousin Bette

Abstract

Cousin Bette by Honoré de Balzac is a novel about a socially superior family and their poorer cousin who feels patronised and maligned by them. The eponymous cousin Bette consequently expends a malevolent, lago-like energy to bring about the ruin of her more colourful and wealthy relations. Bette works in tandem with a bitter and discontented young woman—Valérie Marneffe—in order to seduce and ruin the patriarch of the family, the aristocratic Baron Hector Hulot. As Bette and Valérie bleed the Baron dry, he loses both his fortune and name, and his family is decimated in the process. He is reduced to corruption in order to support Valérie’s avarice in her role as his mistress. Bette and Valérie, however, are able to triumph only because the Baron is presented as having a naive and flawed but essentially noble and generous nature. He is a lover of beauty. His aristocratic disposition disposes him to fine wine and women. But above all, he is unable to fathom the scheming and acquisitive natures of those whom fate has set into motion in order to work against him.