of the "strange woman," enforcing the Biblical view of that personage
with singular force and effectiveness. But her methods are coarser and
more commonplace than Becky's; she never could have long sustained
such an ordeal as the tenure of the house in Curzon Street without
losing even an equivocal position in decent English society; and it
must always be remembered that she was under the orders, so to speak,
of Lisbeth, and inspired by her.

Lisbeth herself, on the other hand, is not one of a class; she stands
alone as much as Becky herself does. It is, no doubt, an arduous and,
some milky-veined critics would say, a doubtfully healthy or
praiseworthy task to depict almost pure wickedness; it is excessively
hard to render it human; and if the difficulty is not increased, it is
certainly not much lessened by the artist's determination to represent
the malefactress as undiscovered and even unsuspected throughout.
Balzac, however, has surmounted these difficulties with almost
complete success. The only advantage--it is no doubt a considerable
one--which he has taken over Shakespeare, when Shakespeare 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