devised
Iago, is that of making Mademoiselle Fischer a person of low birth,
narrow education, and intellectual faculties narrower still, for all
their keenness and intensity. The largeness of brain with which
Shakespeare endows his human devil, and the largeness of heart of
which he does not seem to wish us to imagine him as in certain
circumstances incapable, contrast sharply enough with the peasant
meanness of Lisbeth. Indeed, Balzac, whose seldom erring instinct in
fixing on the viler parts of human nature may have been somewhat too
much dwelt on, but is undeniable, has here and elsewhere hit the fault
of the lower class generally very well. It does not appear that the
Hulots, though they treated her without much ceremony, gave Bette any
real cause of complaint, or that there was anything in their conduct
corresponding to that of the Camusots to the luckless Pons. That her
cousin Adeline had been prettier than herself in childhood, and was
richer and more highly placed in middle life, was enough for Lisbeth
--the incarnation of the Radical hatred of superiority in any kind.
And so she set to work to ruin and degrade the unhappy family, to set
it at variance, and make it miserable, as best she could.

The way of her doing this is wonderfully told, and the various
characters, minor as well as major, muster in wonderful strength. I do
not know that Balzac has made quite the most of Hector Hulot's vice
--in fact, here, as elsewhere, I think the novelist is not happy in
treating this particular deadly sin. The man is a rather disgusting
and wholly idiotic old fribble rather than a tragic victim of
Libitina. So also his wife is too angelic. But Crevel, the very
pattern and model of the vicious bourgeois who had made his fortune;
and Wenceslas Steinbock, pattern again and model of the foibles of
_Polen aus der Polackei_; and Hortense, with the better energy of the
Hulots in her; and the loathsome reptile Marneffe, and Victoria, and
Celestine, and the Brazilian (though he, to be sure, is rather a
transpontine _rastaqouere_), and all the rest are capital, and do their
work capitally. But they would not be half so fine as they are if,
behind them, there were not the savage Pagan naturalism of Lisbeth
Fischer, the "angel of the family"--and a black angel indeed.

One of the last and largest of Balzac's great works--the very last of
them, if we accept _La Cousine Bette_, to which is pendant and
contrast--_Le Cousin Pons_ has