Book description
Mild, harmless and ugly to behold, the impoverished Pons is an ageing
musician whose brief fame has fallen to nothing. Living a placid
Parisian life as a bachelor in a shared apartment with his friend
Schmucke, he maintains only two passions: a devotion to fine dining in
the company of wealthy but disdainful relatives, and a dedication to the
collection of antiques. When these relatives become aware of the true
value of his art collection, however, their sneering contempt for the
parasitic Pons rapidly falls away as they struggle to obtain a piece of
the weakening man's inheritance. Taking its place in the Human Comedy as
a companion to Cousin Bette, the darkly humorous Cousin Pons is among of
the last and greatest of Balzac's novels concerning French urban
society: a cynical, pessimistic but never despairing consideration of
human nature.
Balzac was born in 1799, the son of a civil servant. At the age of
thirty - heavily in debt and with an unsucessful past behind him - he
started work on the first of what were to become a total of ninety
novels and short stories that make up The Human Comedy. He died in 1850.
Translated and introduced by Herbert J. Hunt
