ABSTRACT
In Daumier's 1842 Pygmalion cartoon, the statue takes the sculptor by surprise by bending down to ask for a pinch of his snuff. 1 So much for the unthreatening, non-reciprocal objecthood of Pygmalion's beautifully stony work of art. In La Cousine Bette, the prostitute Valérie Marneffe briefly casts herself in the role of the sculptor's model in order to seduce the married sculptor. The subject matter, composition and significance of the Delilah group for which she models are her own invention. By taking control of the sculptor and his art, by stealing him from his wife and transforming him into a malleable gigolo who caters for her pleasure, Valérie overturns the structure that I have tracked through Balzac's Small corpus of artist stories.
