Cousin Bette

By - Balzac, Honoré de

Floor - Floor 3

Published - Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1965

ISBN 10 - 0140441603

ISBN 13 - 9780140441604

Book Status - 1 Qnty Available with us.

Subject - France--Paris

Shelf No - 10

Call Number - 843.7 BLA

Physical Description - 443 pages ; 19 cm.

Book Information

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 the Comédie humaine, Balzac's epic chronicle of his times, it is one of his greatest triumphs as a novelist.

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