Read more
Sylvain Pons is a kind man and musician with two distinct passions: his art collection and his taste for gourmet dining. Other than his loyal friend and fellow musician Wilhelm Schmucke, the people in Pons’ life generally disdain him. His cousins, the wealthy and vain M. and Mme. Camusot de Marville, dread his regular visits, but nevertheless entertain him with good food and polite conversation. When the value of his paintings is discovered, however, a scramble to win favor amongst Pons’ family and acquaintances ensues, pushing his kindness and patience to their very limit. Cousin Pons is a classic of world literature and a story of greed as timely as it is familiar.
About the author
Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) was a French novelist, short story writer, and playwright. Regarded as one of the key figures of French and European literature, Balzac’s realist approach to writing would influence Charles Dickens, Émile Zola, Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, and Karl Marx. With a precocious attitude and fierce intellect, Balzac struggled first in school and then in business before dedicating himself to the pursuit of writing as both an art and a profession. His distinctly industrious work routine—he spent hours each day writing furiously by hand and made extensive edits during the publication process—led to a prodigious output of dozens of novels, stories, plays, and novellas. La Comédie humaine, Balzac’s most famous work, is a sequence of 91 finished and 46 unfinished stories, novels, and essays with which he attempted to realistically and exhaustively portray every aspect of French society during the early-nineteenth century.
Summary
Cousin Pons (1847) is a novel by French author Honoré de Balzac. One of the final works in Balzac’s La Comédie humaine sequence, Cousin Pons originally began as a novella before being extended to the length of a novel. It serves as both a beautiful meditation on the nature of Platonic male friendship and a vitriolic condemnation of the vanity and greed of the French bourgeoisie. In typical fashion, however, Balzac also turns a critical eye to the lower class, ensuring his uniquely holistic vision of French society spares no one—and leaves no stone unturned.
When he isn’t performing with a Parisian boulevard orchestra, Sylvain Pons can be found in deep conversation with his good friend Wilhelm Schmucke, admiring his collection of paintings, or enjoying a gourmet meal with his cousins, M. and Mme. Camusot de Marville, whose food he greatly prefers to that of his landlady’s, Mme. Cibot. Pons’ life and company are of little interest to anyone other than his friend Wilhelm—by family and acquaintances, he is treated at best with tolerance, and at worst with disdain. After failing to find a suitable match for their daughter Cécile—which Pons attempts as a form of repayment for his shared meals with the Camusots—his cousins dispel him from their home and lives for good. But when they discover the value of his art collection—as do Mme. Cibot and several shady characters of the lower classes—a mad scramble ensues that threatens Sylvain Pons’ gentle nature as well as his life.
Cousin Pons, a subtle and underrated novel by Honoré de Balzac, takes an unforgiving look at the consequences of greed as well exposes the imbalance between the economic and aesthetic values of art.
With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Honoré de Balzac’s Cousin Pons is a classic of French literature reimagined for modern readers.
