Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics)

by Honoré de Balzac

  ‘And supposing she could not give up the theatre?’

  ‘I should die of disappointment, jealousy and a thousand other ills.’

  ‘But one cannot wrest love from one’s heart as if one were pulling out a tooth.’

  Lucien became sombre and pensive. ‘When they know that I tolerate Camusot, they’ll despise me,’ he was saying to himself.

  ‘Look now,’ the fierce republican said to him with cruel frankness. ‘You may become a great writer, but you’ll never be anything but a little humbug,’ and taking up his hat he went out.

  ‘He’s a hard man, Michel Chrestien,’ said the poet.

  ‘Hard and salutary like the dentist’s forceps,’ said Bianchon. ‘Michel foresees your future, and perhaps even now is weeping for you in the street.’

  D’Arthez was gentle and consoling and tried to cheer Lucien up. After an hour the poet left the Cénacle, tortured by his conscience which was crying out to him: ‘You’ll be a journalist!’ as the witch cries out to Macbeth: ‘Thou shalt be king hereafter.’

  From the street he looked up at the long-suffering d’Arthez’s casement window, through which shone a dim light, and returned to his room, sad at heart and unquiet of soul. A kind of presentiment told him that he had been clasped to the heart of his true friends for the last time. On entering the rue de Cluny via the Place de la Sorbonne, he caught sight of Coralie’s carriage. In order to see her poet for one moment and simply to wish him good-night, the actress had covered the distance from the Boulevard du Temple to the Sorbonne. Lucien discovered his mistress in tears at the sight of his garret; she wanted to share her lover’s destitution; she wept as she stowed away his shirts, gloves, cravats and handkerchiefs in the hideous lodging-house chest of drawers. Her despair was so genuine, so great, and expressed so much love that Lucien, who had been reproached for associating with an actress, thought of Coralie as a saint who would not hesitate to wear the hair-shirt of poverty. In order to come to him, this adorable creature had invented the pretext of informing her friend that Camusot, herself and Lucien were jointly to return hospitality to Matifat, Florine and Lousteau by giving them supper, also of asking Lucien if he had any invitation to suggest which might be useful to him. Lucien replied that he would talk it over with Lousteau. After a few moments the actress hurried off, without revealing that Camusot was waiting for her downstairs.

  21. A variety of journalist

  THE next morning at eight o’clock Lucien called on Etienne, found he was out and hurried over to Florine’s rooms. The journalist and the actress received their friend in the dainty bedroom in which they were conjugally installed, and all three had a splendid lunch.

  ‘Well, my boy,’ said Lousteau when they were at table and when Lucien had mentioned the supper to be given by Coralie. ‘I advise you to come with me to see Félicien Vernou, to invite him and to strike up a friendship with him in so far as one can do so with such a character. Félicien will perhaps get you into the political journal for which he concocts a daily feuilleton and in which you may be able to spread yourself in serious articles for the top columns. This news-sheet, like ours, belongs to the Liberal party: you’ll be a Liberal, that’s the popular party. Moreover, if you thought of going over to the ministerial side you’d join it to greater advantage for having shown them you’re a man to be reckoned with. – Haven’t you and Coralie been invited to dinner with Hector Merlin and his Madame du Val-Noble, whose salon is visited by a number of great lords, young dandies and millionaires?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Lucien. ‘You’ll be there too with Florine.’ We may note that Lucien and Lousteau, during their carousals at the Friday supper and the Sunday dinner, had arrived at the stage of ‘thouing’ each other.

  ‘Well, we shall meet Merlin at the editorial office: he’s a chap who’ll follow close behind Finot. You’ll do well to cultivate him and get him and his mistress to join you at the supper. He’ll perhaps be useful to you before long, for men who are haters need everybody, and he’ll be serviceable to you if he has your pen to call upon.’

  ‘Your first article caused enough sensation for you not to meet with any obstacle,’ Florine said to Lucien. ‘Lose no time in taking advantage of it, or else you’ll soon be forgotten.’

  ‘As for the deal,’ continued Lousteau, ‘the great deal has come off! This Finot, a man of no talent, is director and editor of Dauriat’s weekly, the owner of a sixth part of it which is costing him nothing, and he draws a salary of six hundred francs a month. As from this morning, my dear, I’m editor of the little paper. Everything happened as I presumed it would the other evening: Florine was splendid – she could give points to Prince Talleyrand.’

  ‘Oh well,’ said Florine, ‘we get hold of men through their pleasures, whereas diplomats only work on their self-conceit. The diplomats see men giving themselves airs and we see them making fools of themselves: so we get the best results.’

  ‘As he clinched the deal,’ said Lousteau, ‘Matifat perpetrated the only witticism he’ll ever utter in his career as a vendor of quackeries: “This affair,” he said, “remains in my line of business!”’

  ‘I suspect Florine of having prompted him,’ Lucien exclaimed.

  ‘And so, my dear boy,’ continued Lousteau, ‘you have your foot in the stirrup.’

  ‘You were born lucky,’ said Florine. ‘How many insignificant young people we see dragging along in Paris for years without getting an article into a paper! You will have pushed ahead like Emile Blondet. In six months from now, I can see you being all upstage,’ she added, using a phrase from her theatre slang and casting him a mocking glance.

  ‘Haven’t I been in Paris for three years?’ said Lousteau. ‘And only yesterday did Finot offer me a fixed stipend of three hundred francs a column and a hundred francs for a page in his weekly.’

  ‘Well now, have you nothing to say?’ Florine exclaimed, looking at him.

  ‘We shall see,’ said Lucien.

  ‘My dear,’ Lousteau answered with an air of pique. ‘I’ve arranged everything for you as if you were my brother. But I don’t answer for Finot. Finot will be got at by sixty rogues who’ll be offering their services to him at reduced prices in the next two days. I promised you the job: you’ll refuse it if you see fit. – You don’t know how lucky you are,’ he continued after a pause. ‘You’ll belong to a set whose members attack their enemies in various papers and look after one another’s interests.’

  ‘Let’s go and see Félicien Vernou first of all,’ said Lucien, in a hurry to get in touch with those redoubtable birds of prey.

  Lousteau sent for a cab and the two friends went to the rue Mandar, where Vernou lived in a house along an alley, in a second-floor flat. Lucien was very astonished to find this sour, disdainful, strait-laced critic in a dining-room of extreme vulgarity, hung with nasty, cheap wallpaper in imitation brickwork blotched at equal intervals with patches of mildew, decorated with aquatint engravings in gilt frames, at table with a woman who was too ugly not to be his lawful wife and two infants perched on very high chairs with bars to keep the little rascals in. Taken by surprise in a dressing-gown made out of pieces left from one of his wife’s printed calico dresses, Félicien did not look very pleased.

  ‘Have you had lunch, Lousteau?’ he asked, offering Lucien a chair.

  ‘We have just left Florine’s apartments,’ said Etienne, ‘and we lunched there.’

  Lucien could not take his eyes off Madame Vernou. She looked very like a fat cook, tolerably clean, but superlatively common. She was wearing a scarf over a sleeping-bonnet tied so tightly that her cheeks bulged. Her dressing-gown, which had no girdle and was fastened at the neck by a button, fell round her in great folds and was so ill-fitting that it was impossible not to compare her to a boundary-stone. She looked exasperatingly healthy, had almost purple cheeks and hands with fat, pudgy fingers. At the sight of this woman, the reason for Vernou’s embarrassed attitude in social gatherings became clear to Lucien. This writer, nauseated wi
th married life, too weak-willed to leave his wife and children but imaginative enough always to feel ashamed of them, was bound to resent other people’s success and be discontented with everything while still remaining discontented with himself. Lucien now understood the sour expression which chilled this envious countenance, the harshness of the repartees with which the journalist punctuated his conversation and the acerbity of his remarks, as pointed and elaborately-wrought as a stiletto.

  ‘Come into my study,’ said Félicien, getting up from table. ‘No doubt you want to talk about literary matters.’

  ‘Yes and no,’ Lousteau replied. ‘Old boy, it’s a matter of a supper.’

  ‘I came,’ said Lousteau, ‘to invite you on Coralie’s behalf…’

  At this name Madame Vernou raised her head.

  ‘… to come to supper this day week,’ Lucien continued. ‘You’ll meet the same company as at Florine’s, with Madame du Val-Noble, Merlin and a few others in addition. There will be cards.’

  ‘But, my dear,’ said Vernou’s wife, ‘That’s the day we have to go to Madame Mahoudeau.’

  ‘Well, what does that matter?’ said Vernou.

  ‘If we didn’t go, she’d be hurt, and you’re glad enough to get her to discount your publisher’s notes of hand.’

  ‘My friends, here’s a wife who doesn’t understand that supper beginning at midnight doesn’t prevent one attending a soirée which ends at eleven. Madame Mahoudeau and I work together,’ he added.

  ‘You have a fertile imagination!’ Lucien replied, and by this single remark he made a mortal enemy of Vernou.

  ‘All right,’ Lousteau continued. ‘You’ll come. But that’s not all. Monsieur de Rubempré is joining us, so push him in your paper. Introduce him as a young fellow capable of writing serious literature so that he can get in at least two articles a month.’

  ‘Yes, if he wants to be one of us, attack our enemies as we shall attack his and stand by our friends, I’ll speak for him this evening at the Opera.’

  ‘Very good, see you tomorrow, my boy,’ said Lousteau, shaking Vernou’s hand with every sign of lively friendship. ‘When does your book come out?’

  ‘Well’, said the paterfamilias, ‘that depends on Dauriat. I’ve finished it.’

  ‘Are you satisfied?…’

  ‘I am and I’m not…’

  ‘We’ll give it a good write-up,’ said Lousteau as he rose and and bowed to his colleague’s wife.

  This abrupt departure was necessitated by the bawlings of the two children who were squabbling, hitting one another with the spoons and throwing bread pudding in each other’s face.

  ‘You have just met, my child,’ said Etienne, ‘a woman who, unwittingly, will do a lot of damage in the literary world. Poor Vernou! He can’t forgive us for the wife he has. We ought to rid him of her – in the public interest of course – and then we should be spared a deluge of ferocious articles and epigrams aimed at everybody who’s successful and doing well. What prospects has he with such a wife and two such horrible brats? Have you seen Rigaudin in Picard’s play: La Maison en loterie? Well, like Rigaudin, Vernou won’t do any fighting but he’ll make others fight; he’s capable of cutting off his nose to spite his best friend’s face. You’ll see him treading on every corpse, smiling at everyone’s misfortune, attacking princes, dukes, marquises and nobles because he’s a plebeian; attacking the reputation of celibates because he’s married himself, and always moralizing and pleading in favour of domestic joys and civic duties. In short this very moral critic can be kind to no one, not even children. His life in the rue Mandar is divided between a woman who could take the part of the Grand Panjandrum in Molière’s Would-be Gentleman and two ugly, scruffy little Vernous; he likes to sneer at the Faubourg Saint-Germain in which he’ll never set foot and he makes duchesses talk like his wife. That’s the man who’ll howl at the Jesuits, insult the Court, accuse it of wanting to re-establish feudal dues and the law of primogeniture, and preach some sort of crusade in favour of equality, while he won’t have it that anybody else is his equal. If he were a bachelor, if he mixed with society, if he could swagger along like a royalist poet with a pension and the cross of the Legion of Honour, he’d be an optimist. There are a thousand cases of journalists starting off like that. Journalism’s a huge catapult with petty hatred to let it off. – After all that, do you feel like marrying? Vernou no longer has a heart: he’s bursting with bile. Consequently he’s the journalist par excellence, a two-legged tiger whose claws rend everything as if his pen had rabies.’

  ‘A misogynist,’ said Lucien. ‘Has he any talent?’

  ‘He has the wit necessary for turning out articles. Vernou secretes articles, he’ll always produce articles and nothing but articles. No amount of dogged toil will ever enable him to graft a book on to his prose. Félicien is incapable of turning out a work, co-ordinating its constituent parts and grouping his characters in a well-balanced plot which begins, develops and moves forward to a climax; he has ideas, but no knowledge of facts; his heroes will be two-legged abstractions, philosophical or liberal; lastly, he labours after originality of style, but his inflated periods would collapse under the pinpricks of criticism, And so he goes in deadly fear of the newspapers, like all those who need bladders and blarney to keep their heads above water.’

  ‘You’re composing quite an article!’ cried Lucien.

  ‘One can say such things, my boy, but one must never write them down.’

  ‘Why not? You’re an editor now,’ said Lucien.

  ‘Where do you want me to set you down?’ asked Lousteau.

  ‘At Coralie’s.’

  ‘Ah! we’re in love,’ said Lousteau. ‘It’s a mistake! Do with Coralie what I do with Florine: treat her as a housekeeper, but be as free as a mountain goat!’

  ‘You’d bring the saints to damnation!’ said Lucien, laughing.

  ‘Demons are past being damned,’ Lousteau replied.

  His new friend’s light and brilliant tone, the way he reacted to life, his paradoxes mingled with the characteristically Machiavellian maxims current in Paris, had their effect on Lucien without his knowing it. In theory, the poet recognized the danger underlying such thoughts, but he found them useful for application. When they arrived at the Boulevard du Temple, the two friends agreed to meet again, between four and five, in the newspaper office, where no doubt Hector Merlin would be found.

  22. Boots can change one’s way of life

  LUCIEN was effectually in the grip of the sensual delights afforded by genuinely enamoured courtesans, who fasten on to the tenderest parts of the soul, lend themselves with incredible pliancy to each and every desire and favour the habits of lax self-indulgence from which they draw their strength. He was already thirsting for the pleasures of Paris: he loved the ease, abundance and sumptuousness of life in the actress’s flat. On arriving he found Coralie and Camusot in transports of joy. The Gymnase theatre had proposed, as from the coming Easter, an engagement on clearly defined terms which went beyond Coralie’s expectations.

  ‘This triumph is due to you,’ said Camusot.

  ‘Oh, undoubtedly,’ said Coralie. ‘But for him The Alcalde would have failed; there would have been no review, and I should have been stuck in a boulevard theatre for six more years.’

  She flung her arms round his neck in front of Camusot. There was an indescribable gracefulness and sweet impetuosity in the actress’s swift, effusive gesture: she was in love! Like all men at moments of great sorrow, Camusot lowered his gaze to the floor and discerned, along the seam of Lucien’s boots, the coloured thread used by fashionable shoemakers which stood out in deep yellow against the glossy blackness of the uppers. The special colour of this thread had captured his attention during his silent reflections on the inexplicable presence of a pair of boots in front of Coralie’s hearth. He had read in black letters printed on the soft white leather of the lining the address of a celebrated shoemaker of the period: ‘Gay, rue de la Michodière.’

&
nbsp; ‘Monsieur,’ he said to Lucien. ‘You have a fine pair of boots.’

  ‘Everything he has is fine,’ Coralie rejoindered.

  ‘I should very much like to get my boots from the same shop.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Coralie. ‘How much that smacks of the rue des Bourdonnais to ask for tradesmen’s addresses! Are you going to wear young men’s boots? A fine figure you’d cut! Stick to your top-boots. They’re just the thing for a staid man with a wife, children and a mistress.’

  ‘In short, if this gentleman would pull off one of his boots he would be doing me a signal service,’ said the obstinate Camusot.

  ‘I couldn’t put it on again without a button-hook,’ said Lucien, turning red.

  ‘Bérénice will fetch one; it won’t be out of place here,’ said the merchant with an unpleasant leer.

  ‘Papa Camusot,’ said Coralie, throwing him a look of scathing contempt. ‘Don’t be afraid to show what a coward you are! Come on, speak your mind. You think this gentleman’s boots are like mine, don’t you? I forbid you to take off your boots,’ she said to Lucien. ‘Yes, Monsieur Camusot, yes: these boots are the very ones which were standing empty in front of my fire-place the other day. This gentleman was hidden in my dressing-room waiting to put them on: he had spent the night here. That’s what you think, isn’t it? All right, that’s what I want you to think. It’s the simple truth. I’m deceiving you. So what? That suits me down to the ground.’

  She sat down without anger and with the airiest manner, looking straight at Camusot and Lucien, neither of whom dared to look at the other.

  ‘I’ll only believe what you want me to believe,’ said Camusot. ‘Don’t make fun of me. I was in the wrong.’

  ‘Either I’m a shameless hussy who has suddenly fallen for this gentleman, or I’m a poor, wretched creature who for the first time has felt that true love which all women long for. In either case, you must leave me or accept me as I am.’ This she said with an imperious gesture which made the merchant cower.