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 always united suffrages from very
different classes of admirers. In the first place, it is not
"disagreeable," as the common euphemism has it, and as _La Cousine
Bette_ certainly is. In the second, it cannot be accused of being a