Cousin Bette
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Condition: Good to fair. Paperback. Page Condition: Good - possible tanning. Markings: possible previous owner inscription.
A masterwork of French realist fiction, Cousin Bette stands as one of the crowning achievements of Honoré de Balzac's monumental La Comédie Humaine sequence. The novel chronicles the bitter, calculated vengeance of Lisbeth Fischer — the plain, overlooked country cousin — against the wealthy Hulot family whose glamour and social privilege she has secretly despised for decades. With razor-sharp psychological insight, Balzac lays bare the corrupting forces of desire, jealousy, and ambition that simmer beneath the respectable surface of Parisian bourgeois society in the 1830s and 1840s. The narrative moves with the pace of a thriller, as Bette engineers a web of manipulation, drawing in artists, courtesans, and aristocrats alike in her merciless campaign of destruction. Rich in social observation and darkly satirical in tone, this is an unflinching portrait of human nature at its most self-serving and treacherous.
Author: Balzac
Format: Paperback
Published: 1965, Penguin Classics
Genre: Classic fiction
Condition remarks:
Condition: Good to fair. Paperback. Page Condition: Good - possible tanning. Markings: possible previous owner inscription.
A masterwork of French realist fiction, Cousin Bette stands as one of the crowning achievements of Honoré de Balzac's monumental La Comédie Humaine sequence. The novel chronicles the bitter, calculated vengeance of Lisbeth Fischer — the plain, overlooked country cousin — against the wealthy Hulot family whose glamour and social privilege she has secretly despised for decades. With razor-sharp psychological insight, Balzac lays bare the corrupting forces of desire, jealousy, and ambition that simmer beneath the respectable surface of Parisian bourgeois society in the 1830s and 1840s. The narrative moves with the pace of a thriller, as Bette engineers a web of manipulation, drawing in artists, courtesans, and aristocrats alike in her merciless campaign of destruction. Rich in social observation and darkly satirical in tone, this is an unflinching portrait of human nature at its most self-serving and treacherous.