In the Library
Cousin Bette
Honoré de Balzac, 1846
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 11 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by James Waring
- Chapters
- Chapters 10
- Length
- Length 153k words
£1.99
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Virtue cuts off your head; vice only cuts off your hair.
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- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
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If you like this, try
Father Goriot
Honoré de Balzac
Father Goriot does the same thing, but in reverse, showing a parent destroyed by love for children who take everything and give nothing back.
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Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray
Vanity Fair does the same thing, but through a scheming outsider clawing her way into society rather than one plotting quietly to burn it down.
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Dangerous Liaisons
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
Dangerous Liaisons does the same thing, but earlier and colder, watching two aristocrats engineer other people's ruin purely for the pleasure of it.
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About the book
Lisbeth Fischer has spent thirty years hemming linen and minding children for a family that has never once wondered what she wants, swallowing every kindness they hand her wrapped in condescension. Her cousin Adeline is beautiful, adored, and married to a Baron who cannot stop ruining her for the sake of younger women. Bette has watched this marriage rot from the inside for so long that patience has curdled into something closer to appetite. When a hard, hungry courtesan named Valérie Marneffe needs an accomplice, Bette finally finds a use for everything she has swallowed, and sets about dismantling the Hulots with the same quiet competence she once brought to their linen closets. Balzac wrote the novel in under two months and it shows in nothing but the ferocity: every page moves like a hand closing around a throat. Few books understand so exactly how an unloved woman's devotion can be the most dangerous thing in the house.