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
_berquinade_, as those who like Balzac best when he is doing moral
rag-picking are apt to describe books like _Le Medecin de Campagne_
and _Le Lys dans la Vallee_, if not even like _Eugenie Grandet_. It
has a considerable variety of interest; its central figure is
curiously pathetic and attractive, even though the curse of something
like folly, which so often attends Balzac's good characters, may a
little weigh on him.
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