Lost Illusions

by Honoré de Balzac

  Anyone able to form some idea of the petty snobbery which for that matter is to be found in every social sphere will surely understand what deference was paid to the Bargeton household by the bourgeoisie of Angoulême. For the inhabitants of L’Houmeau, the majesty of this small-scale Louvre, the glory which radiated from this provincial Hôtel de Rambouillet were as remote from them as the sun itself. All the people who gathered there had the most pitiable mental qualities, the meanest intelligence, and were the sorriest specimens of humanity within a radius of fifty miles. Political discussions consisted of verbose but impassioned commonplaces: the Quotidienne was regarded as lukewarm in its royalism; Louis XVIII himself was considered to be a Jacobin. The women were mostly stupid, devoid of grace and badly dressed; every one of them was marred by some imperfection; everything fell short of the mark, conversation, clothes, mind and body alike. Châtelet would not have put up with it if he had not had designs on Madame de Bargeton. Nevertheless, comportment and class consciousness, gentlemanly airs, the arrogance of the lesser nobility, acquaintance with the rules of decorum, all served to cloak the void within them. Royalist feeling was much more real there than in the upper reaches of Parisian life: a noteworthy attachment to the Bourbons, whatever their shortcomings, was much in evidence. A social group like this one might be compared, if such a simile is permissible, to a service of silver plate, antiquated in design, tarnished, and yet solid. The very rigidity of its political opinions was a kind of loyalty. The distance kept between it and the bourgeoisie and its relative unapproachability, placed it as it were on a pinnacle and gave it museum-piece value. The inhabitants of Angoulême set a certain price on each of these noblemen, in much the same way as cowrie shells take the place of silver currency among the negroes of Bambarra. Several women to whom du Châtelet paid flattering attention and who discerned in him a superiority of parts which the men of their own circle lacked, appeased the insurrection provoked by wounded self-respect: they all hoped to be next in succession to her Imperial Highness. The social sticklers opined that one would meet the intruder in Madame de Bargeton’s salon, but that he would be received in no other house. He met with some impertinent treatment, but kept his end up by cultivating the clergy. Also he was indulgent to the defects which the social queen of Angoulême owed to her rural upbringing; he brought her all the latest books and read the newly-published poetry to her. They went into raptures together over the works of the young poets. Her raptures were genuine, but he was bored: he tolerated the Romantic poets, though, as a supporter of the Imperial school, he was incapable of understanding them. Madame de Bargeton, fired with enthusiasm for the literary renaissance due to Royalist influence, adored Monsieur de Chateaubriand for having hailed Victor Hugo as an enfant sublime. Saddened because she was only in remote touch with genius, she yearned for Paris, where all the great men resided. Monsieur du Châtelet then imagined it would be a marvellous thing to inform her that there existed in Angoulême yet another enfant sublime, a young poet whose brilliance, though he was not yet aware of the fact, outshone that of the new constellations that were rising in Paris. A budding genius had been born in l’Houmeau! The headmaster of the college had shown the Baron some admirable lines from Lucien’s pen. This poor and modest boy was positively a Chatterton, yet he had the right sort of political ideas and none of that ferocious hatred for social eminence which had prompted the English poet to lampoon his benefactors. Around Madame de Bargeton five or six persons clustered who shared her taste for art and letters, one of them because he could scrape the fiddle, another because his sepia drawings spoilt a good deal of blank paper, another in his capacity as president of the local Agricultural Society, and yet another because he had a bass voice which enabled him to sing Se fiato in corpo avete like a huntsman bawling a view-halloo. Amid these odd figures, she felt like a starveling at a stage banquet where every course is made of cardboard. And so her joy on hearing this piece of news was indescribable. She simply had to see this poet, this angelic being! She went into fits of ecstasy and raved about him for hours on end. Two days later the former diplomatic courier had arranged, through the headmaster, to introduce Lucien to Madame de Bargeton.

  You alone, poor provincial helots for whom social gaps yawn wider than in Paris, where they are narrowing from day to day, you, whom inexorable barriers exclude from that fine world within which each social group anathematizes and cries Raca to the rest, you alone will understand what a turmoil seethed in Lucien Chardon’s head and heart when his headmaster portentously announced that the doors of the Bargeton mansion were about to be opened to him! It was his fame that had made them turn on their hinges! He was to receive a warm welcome in that house whose ancient gables attracted his attention whenever he took his evening walks in Beaulieu with David, telling himself that never perhaps would their two names reach the ears of people who were deaf to science when it was of too lowly origin. His sister alone was let into the secret. Thanks to her careful housekeeping and her angelic foresight, she was able to draw a few gold coins from her savings-box in order to buy Lucien an elegant pair of shoes from the best shoe-maker in Angoulême and a new suit from the most fashionable tailor. She embellished his best shirt with a frill which she laundered and pleated herself. What joy she felt at seeing him thus accoutred! How proud she was of her brother! How much advice she gave him about all the stupid niceties of social behaviour which she was able to divine! Absorbed in meditation, Lucien had acquired the habit of putting his elbows on the table whenever he sat down, and he even used to pull the table towards him and lean on it. Eve warned him against such off-hand ways in the aristocratic holy-of-holies. She went with him as far as the Porte Saint-Pierre, and when they had arrived almost opposite the Cathedral, her eyes followed him as he walked down the rue de Beaulieu towards the Promenade where Monsieur du Châtelet was waiting for him. Then, poor girl, she stood there in such a state of emotion as if some great event had come about. It seemed to her that Lucien’s admission to Madame de Bargeton’s house heralded the dawn of prosperity. The saintly creature little knew that when ambition comes it puts an end to natural feeling.

  When Lucien arrived at the rue du Minage, he found nothing striking in the external appearance of this ‘Louvre’ which his imagination had magnified. It was a house built in the soft stone peculiar to the region; time had given it a golden tint. It looked fairly gloomy from the street, and its inner aspect was very simple: a provincial courtyard, austere and neat; a sober, almost monastic style of architecture, but well preserved. Lucien walked up the old staircase with chestnut banisters; its stone treads changed to wooden ones once the first floor was reached. Crossing a shabby little anteroom and a large drawing-room, dimly lit, he found his sovereign lady in a small salon with wainscots of wood, carved in eighteenth-century style and painted grey. The upper parts of the door were painted in camaieu. The panelling was decorated with old red damask, poorly matched. The old-fashioned furniture was apologetically concealed under covers in red and white check. The poet caught sight of Madame de Bargeton seated on a couch with a thinly-padded quilt, in front of a round table covered with green baize, on which an old-fashioned, two-candled sconce with a shade above it cast its light. The queenly lady did not get up, but she very graciously twisted round in her seat, smiling at the poet, who was much impressed by this serpentine contortion, which he thought distinguished.

  Madame de Bargeton was struck by Lucien’s exceptionally good looks, his shy demeanour and his voice. The poet was already poetry incarnate. By means of discreet side-glances the young man studied this woman whose appearance seemed to tally with her reputation. She was wearing, in conformity with the latest fashion, a slashed beret in black velvet, a kind of head-dress reminiscent of the Middle Ages and impressive to a young man because, so to speak, it made a woman more womanly still. From it there escaped a profusion of fairish red hair, golden where the light fell on it and auburn where it curled. The noble lady had the milk-white complexion which atones for the suppose
d disadvantage of such flaming hair. She had sparkling grey eyes under a white expanse of forehead which was bold in contour though it already showed some lines. The skin circling these eyes had a mother of pearl quality, and on either side of the nose two blueish veins emphasized the whiteness of this delicate surround. Her nose had a Bourbon curve which gave extra animation to her long face: a salient feature suggestive of a regal impetuosity akin to that of the Condés. Her hair did not completely hide her neck. Her dress, negligently crossed, afforded a glimpse of snowy flesh and gave the promise of a perfectly-shaped bosom. With her tapering, carefully-manicured, but rather bony fingers, she amiably beckoned the young poet to take the nearest chair. Monsieur du Châtelet sat down in an armchair. Lucien then perceived that the three of them were alone together.

  Madame de Bargeton’s conversation intoxicated the poet. The three hours he spent near her were like a dream one would wish to last for ever. This woman seemed to him to be slim rather than thin, made for love but not in love, and delicate in spite of the strength in her. Her defects, exaggerated by her mannerisms, appealed to him, for young men begin by loving exaggeration, the kind of falsehood to which exalted souls are prone. He did not notice that her cheeks had lost their bloom and that there were flushed patches on her cheekbones to which vexations and suffering had imparted a bricklike tinge. What first seized his imagination was the flame of her gaze, her elegant curls shimmering in the light and the gleaming whiteness of her brow: luminous points in which he was caught like a moth in a candle. Also there was too much spiritual sympathy between them for him to appraise her as a woman. The liveliness of her feminine enthusiasm, the vivacity she put into the somewhat outmoded utterances which she had been repeating for so long but which he thought original, fascinated him all the more because he wanted to approve of everything in her. He had brought no poems to read out, but the question did not arise: he had left his poetry behind so that he might have cause to return, while Madame de Bargeton had not mentioned it so that she might persuade him to give a recital another day. Was this not tantamount to an initial understanding between them? Monsieur du Châtelet was displeased at her reception of Lucien. Belatedly, he sensed a rival in this handsome young man, and he escorted him back as far as the first slope turning down from Beaulieu with the idea of bringing his diplomacy into play. Lucien was more than mildly astonished to hear the Director of Taxes boasting of having introduced him and giving him advice on the strength of it.

  ‘Heaven send that you may be better treated than I have been.’ Thus Monsieur du Châtelet began. People at Court were less impertinent than this coterie of numskulls which inflicted deadly slights and meted out appalling disdain. The Revolution of 1789 would break out afresh if such people did not mend their ways. As for himself, if he still went to that house, it was because he was attracted to Madame de Bargeton, the only tolerable woman in Angoulême: he had paid court to her for want of occupation and then fallen madly in love with her. It could not be long before he won her, for there was every sign that she loved him. The subjugation of this haughty queen was the only vengeance he would exact from this stupid collection of minor gentry.

  Châtelet expressed his passion like a man capable of killing any rival he found in his path. The old Imperial butterfly came down as heavily as possible on the poor poet by trying to crush him under the weight of his self-importance and to intimidate him. He puffed himself out by relating – and exaggerating – the perils he had encountered on his travels; but if this made its mark on the imagination of Lucien the poet, it certainly did not frighten Lucien the lover.

  From that evening onwards, notwithstanding the threats and murderous scowls of this dandified old bourgeois, Lucien continued to visit Madame de Bargeton, first of all with the discretion proper to a denizen of L’Houmeau; then he began to take for granted what he had first of all looked on as an enormous favour and multiplied his visits. The people who frequented her circle regarded the chemist’s son as a person of no consequence. If, in the early days, some gentlemen or a few ladies calling on Naïs encountered Lucien, they all treated him with the overwhelming politeness which correct people show to their inferiors. They all seemed very gracious at first to Lucien; but later on he became aware of the feeling which prompted their show of consideration. It was not long before he detected certain airs of condescension which stirred his bile and confirmed him in a resentful republicanism which many patricians-to-be adopt at their first contact with high society. But how many sufferings would he not have endured for the woman he heard addressed as Naïs – for among themselves the intimate members of this clan, both male and female, like the grandees of Spain and the cream of Viennese society, called one another by their Christian names: the motive behind this latest subtlety being to set up a distinction in the very heart of the Angoulême aristocracy.