La Cousine Bette, the first part of the Poor Relations, is one of Balzac's most powerful late novels, a masterly study of jealousy and vice. Lisbeth Fischer, "Cousin Bette," a poor, ugly old maid of peasant origin, conceals beneath devoted appearances a tenacious hatred of her rich and brilliant relatives, the Hulots, who humiliate her by their superiority. Bette becomes the secret engine of their ruin. She has taken in and protected a gifted young Polish sculptor, Wenceslas Steinbock, whom she jealously regards as her own; when he marries her young cousin Hortense Hulot, Bette's jealousy turns into a thirst for vengeance. To destroy the family, she allies herself with a courtesan as beautiful as she is perverse, Valérie Marneffe, and turns against her own the vice of Baron Hector Hulot. The latter, an incorrigible and insatiable libertine, dissipates the family fortune to keep Valérie and other mistresses, dragging the Hulots into dishonor, misery, and crime — even driving his uncle, Marshal Hulot, to despair, and his wife, the saintly Adeline, to agony. Bette patiently orchestrates the catastrophe while playing the role of the devoted relative, and dies before her part is fully unmasked, carrying off the secret of her malice. Balzac paints with terrible intensity the resentment of the dispossessed, the destructive force of envy, and the fatality of vice embodied by Baron Hulot, a slave to his sensuality to the point of final degradation. The novel, teeming with characters and incidents, is a dark fresco of social and family corruption under the July Monarchy. The figure of Bette, a genius of evil beneath the mask of humility, is among the most striking creations of La Comédie humaine.