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Cousin Bette
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Cousin Bette
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Poor, plain spinster Bette is compelled to survive on the condescending patronage of her socially superior relatives in Paris: her beautiful, saintly cousin Adeline, the philandering Baron Hulot and their daughter Hortense.
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Description
'Envy remained hidden in her heart, like a plague germ which may come to life and devastate a city.'
Poor, plain spinster Bette is compelled to survive on the condescending patronage of her socially superior relatives in Paris—her beautiful, saintly cousin Adeline, the philandering Baron Hulot, and their daughter Hortense. Already deeply resentful of their wealth, when Bette learns that the man she is in love with plans to marry Hortense, she becomes consumed by the desire to exact her revenge and dedicates herself to the destruction of the Hulot family, plotting their ruin with patient, silent malice.
Cousin Bette is a gripping tale of violent jealousy, sexual passion, and treachery, and a brilliant portrayal of the grasping, bourgeois society of 1840s Paris. The culmination of La Comédie humaine, Balzac's epic chronicle of his times, it is one of his greatest triumphs as a novelist.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9780140441604
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 02 December 2004
Country: United Kingdom
Imprint: Penguin Classics
Contributors:
- Translated by Marion Crawford
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 20.0mm
Width: 129.0mm
Height: 197.0mm
Weight: 325g
Pages: 464
About the Author
Honore de Balzac was born in Tours in 1799 to a bourgeouis family. His first success with writing came with the publication of Les Chouans in 1829 which was followed by a vast collection of novels and short stories of which Cousin Bette, first published in 1847, is one of the chief novels. He died in 1850 only a few months after his marriage to the Polish countess Evelina Hanska, with whom he had conducted a romantic correspondence for 18 years. Marion Crawford translated two other titles for Penguin; Old Goriot and Eugenie Grandet before her death in 1973.
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