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.
【目录】
Introduction
1 A glorious relic of Imperial times
2 Decline and fall of a prize-winner
3 The two‘Nutcrackers’
4 One of a collector’s thousand thrills
5 One ofthe thousand insults a parasite has tO swallow
6 The Concierge Species—-male and female
7‘The Two Pigeons’:a fable come true
8 Prodigal 80118 from Frankfurt-am-Main don't always end up with the husks of the swine
9 Pons brings the Prdsidente something better than a fan
10 A German whimsy
11 Pons under a landslide of gravel
12‘Why,what a god is goldl’
13 A treatise on the occult sciences
14 A character from Hoffman's Tales
15 Tittle-tattle and tactics—elderly concierge style
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