Before You Begin

Before you begin.

In a handsome new house on the Rue de l'Université, a stout retired perfumer arrives in his National Guard uniform with a look that proclaims, "She is mine!" So opens Cousin Betty, and within a few pages Balzac has drawn the whole engine of his story: vanity, money, desire, and the quiet woman everyone overlooks. She is Lisbeth Fischer, called Betty, the plain country cousin of the beautiful and saintly Baroness Hulot. For thirty years she has bowed to the family that pitied her. She has not forgiven a single day of it.

Honoré de Balzac wrote this novel in 1846, near the height of his powers, as a centerpiece of The Human Comedy, his vast attempt to map an entire society. He is the great anatomist of money and ambition, the writer who saw that a Paris drawing-room could hold as much cruelty as any battlefield. Here he turns that gaze on a single family as it is slowly hollowed out from within — by an aging husband's ruinous appetites, by a charming young wife who makes men pay for their folly, and by a spinster's patient, devouring jealousy.

Cruel, funny, and pitilessly observed, Cousin Betty endures because it tells the truth about the people we trust and the people we ignore. Its passions are not Romantic flourishes but the everyday machinery of households: a marriage, a debt, an inheritance, a slight remembered too long. Once met, Betty herself is unforgettable — a woman whose loyalty and her revenge wear the very same face.

The illustrated gallery that follows maps the world of the novel, charts the tangled ties that bind these people together, and brings its central figures to life one by one. Step through, and enter the Paris of Cousin Betty.