Balzac, Cousin Pons

Synonyms

Balzac; Paris; Parisian

Introduction

Le Cousin Pons, sometimes considered a “novel of friendship,” comes, along with La Cousine Bette, at the end of Balzac’s series of novels: Cousin Pons being the last completed one. First planned in 1844, and set in that year, so giving an entirely contemporary history, its plot concerns Pons, the old bachelor and musician and collector of art works and bric-à-brac, which was a new word of the 1840s and which reflects the interest in “commodities,” which motivates so much of the nineteenth century, according to Walter Benjamin, reading the Paris Arcades. The novel shows the tragedy of his life and death. He is seen on the first page as a Parisian type, as a hangover from the times of Napoleon’s Empire, an anachronism exciting Parisian mockery, but not serious curiosity.

The Plot

Pons’s weakness is his gluttony, which makes him a parasite at every middle-class table he can get to: ten in all (42). He lives with a German musician, Schmucke, in...