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As has been shown by Donald Adamson, Le Cousin Pons began its existence as a novella, or nouvelle, and was suddenly transformed into a full-length novel. This process of transformation necessitated certain inconsistencies and an uneasy transition from long-short story to fiction of sizeable proportions and complexity.
- Honoré de Balzac
- 1847
Balzac began, on the contrary, by writing Le Cousin Pons, which he then called Les Deux Musiciens. He wrote a first version, then stopped, gave up and began writing La Cousine Bette , which was an instant hit.
Cousin Pons, novel by Honoré de Balzac, published in 1847 as Le Cousin Pons. One of the novels that makes up Balzac’s series La Comédie humaine ( The Human Comedy ), Cousin Pons is often paired with La Cousine Bette under the title Les Parents pauvres (“The Poor Relations”).
- Honoré de Balzac
- 1847
Jun 4, 2019 · Balzac set himself against Sue’s socialism and his journalistic style – what he called in a letter to Madame Hanska of 16 June 1846, “bastard literature” (Maurois 1965: 559) – with La Cousine Bette and Le Cousin Pons.
- Jeremy Tambling
- jtambling1@gmail.com
The novella becomes a novel as Mme Camusot learns of the value of Pons's art collection and strives to obtain possession of it as the basis of a dowry for her daughter.
The book was originally published as a serial in Le Constitutionnel, but during 1847 it grew into a full-length novel, with a male poor relation, Pons, as its subject, (Cousine Bette describes a female poor relation.)
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Hemmings’ chapter 8, “The Dialectic,” presents an analysis of Cousin Pons, finding the late novel to be one of Balzac’s most pessimistic but also one of his most profound works. Levin, Harry.
