as wrong with the society came out of the ideas of the people in it. In the plot of Cousin Bette, the main character, moves from the country to Paris, and she is never happy. Her "ideas" have that "that strange aspect which is noticeable in natures that have developed very late in life, in savages, who think much and speak little" (Balzac, 1897, p. 52). Bette's envy of her richer relations is characterized as "a pestilential germ which may come to the surface and lay waste a city, if one opens the fatal bale of wool in which it is confined" (Balzac, 1897, p. 52). The envy is strong because, according to Balzac, society under the bourgeois king Louis-Philippe worships the god of wealth. The poor do not achieve strong morality on account of their misfortune. Instead, they perceived themselves as being victims of injustice, and that enables them to try to destroy others, as Bette does.
In 1844, following the publication of both Bette and Notre-Dame de Paris, there appeared in France the completion of a novel of social criticism that was thematically in ke
...