Balzac’s Cousin Pons is one of his two books devoted to the subject of Poor Relations. An aged musician, a celebrity in his past, an honest and noble toiler, whiles the time away in obscurity and misery. All he has are his relatives, though contemptuously regarding his poverty, humiliating and deriding him in every way possible; and collection of antiques. Having learnt what treasure Pons possesses, they start a furious hunt for the inheritance. Honorable, seemingly, people are prepared for anyt
...hing to get the riches of the dying lonely man. This novel displays spiritual impoverishment and limitation of the “respectable” bourgeois, which turn art values, unselfish pleasure for Pons, into a source of profit, object of vanity.
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