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In Cousin Pons (1848) Balzac develops, with astonishing virtuosity, the theme of family relationships that he explored in Cousin Bette but from an entirely different angle. Whereas Bette was the incarnation of deliberate vindictiveness, Cousin Pons is a gentle, well-meaning old man whose relations treat him with an unjustified spite and contempt. Balzac plays on the reader's pity and sympathy for Pons, particularly in the lugubrious account of Pon's physical collapse and death, but the story contains some exquisite touches of humour and irony, which raise it from sentimentality to the great Balzacian level of contemplation (pessimistic but never despairing) of human nature. Written just two years before the author's death, Cousin Pons takes its place in the Human Comedy as one of the best examples of Balzac's extraordinary sociological and psychological insight.
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