POOR RELATIONS BY HONORE DE BALZAC INTRODUCTION _La Cousine Bette_ was perhaps the last really great thing that Balzac did--for _Le Cousin Pons_, which now follows it, was actually written before--and it is beyond all question one of the very greatest of his works. It was written at the highest possible pressure, and (contrary to the author's more usual system) in parts, without even seeing a proof, for the _Constitutionnel_ in the autumn, winter, and early spring of 1846-47, before his departure from Vierzschovnia, the object being to secure a certain sum of ready money to clear off indebtedness. And it has been sometimes asserted that this labor, coming on the top of many years of scarcely less hard works, was almost the last straw which broke down Balzac's gigantic strength. Of these things it is never possible to be certain; as to the greatness of _La Cousine Bette_, there is no uncertainty. In the first place, it is a very long book for Balzac; it is, I think, putting aside books like _Les Illusions Perdues_, and _Les Celibataires_, and _Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes_, which are really groups of work written at different times, the longest of all his novels, if we except the still later and rather doubtful _Petits Bourgeois_. In the second place, this length is not obtained--as length with him is too often obtained--by digressions, by long retrospective narrations, or even by the insertion of such "padding" as the collection business in _Le Cousin Pons_. The whole stuff and substance of _La Cousine Bette_ is honestly woven novel-stuff, of one piece and one tenor and texture, with for constant subject the subterranean malignity of the heroine, the erotomania of Hulot and Crevel, the sufferings of Adeline, and the _pieuvre_ operations of Marneffe and his wife,--all of which fit in and work together with each other as exactly as the cogs and gear of a harmonious piece of machinery do. Even such much simpler and shorter books as _Le Pere Goriot_ by no means possess this seamless unity of construction, this even march, shoulder to shoulder, of all the personages of the story. In the second place, this story itself strikes hold on the reader with a force not less irresistible than that of the older and simpler stories just referred to. As compared even with its companion, this force of grasp is remarkable. It is not absolutely criminal or contemptible to feel that _Le Cousin Pons_ sometimes languishes and loses itself; this can never be said of the history of the evil destiny partly personified in Elizabeth Fischer, which hovers over the house of Hulot.