Lost Illusions

by Honoré de Balzac

  ‘My boy,’ he said as Lucien came in again. ‘What on earth is going on? Are you in need of me?’

  ‘No, Monsieur,’ replied the poet.’ But as you are our friend, I can tell you the news: my mother has just consented to my sister marrying David Séchard.’

  Postel’s only reply was to shut his window with a bang: he was in despair at not having proposed to Mademoiselle Chardon himself.

  Instead of returning to Angoulême, David took the road to Marsac. He walked the whole way there and arrived at the vineyard running alongside his father’s house just as the sun was rising. He caught sight of the old ‘bear’ poking his head over the hedge under an almond-tree.

  ‘Good-day, father.’

  ‘Oh, it’s you, my lad. What brings you along so early? Go through there,’ said the vinegrower, pointing to a little wicket-gate. ‘My vines have all finished flowering, and not a single plant has been caught by the frost! They’ll yield more than twenty casks to the acre this year, but what a lot of manure they’ve had!’

  ‘Father, I’ve come to talk about an important matter.’

  ‘Well, how are our presses going? You should be making a pile of money.’

  ‘I shall do so, father. But at present I’m not rich.’

  ‘They all blame me for overdoing the manure!’ his father replied. ‘The big folk here, Monsieur le Marquis, Monsieur le Comte, Monsieur this and Monsieur that make out that I spoil the quality of the wine. What’s the good of education? It only gets you muddle-headed. Listen! These gentry get seven or sometimes eight casks to the acre and sell them at sixty francs each; and that comes to four hundred francs an acre at most in a good year. I get twenty casks and sell for thirty francs, making six hundred francs in all! Who are the simpletons? Quality, quality! What do I care about quality? Let these fine gentlemen keep their quality for themselves! Quality for me means money!… What were you saying?’

  ‘Father, I’m getting married. I came to ask you…’

  ‘Ask me for what? Nothing doing, my boy. Get married, all right. But as for giving you anything, I haven’t a penny. Dressing the vines has cost me a fortune. The last two years I’ve been paying out for top-dressings, taxes and all sorts of expenses. The government grabs the lot; the best of it goes to the government! We poor vine-growers have made nothing for two years. Things don’t look bad for this year. All right, but my miserable casks are already costing eleven francs apiece! It’s the cooper that gets the profit. – Why get married before the grape-harvest?’

  ‘Father, I have only come to ask for your consent.’

  ‘Oh, that’s different. Who are you reckoning to marry, by the way?’

  ‘Mademoiselle Eve Chardon.’

  ‘Who’s she? What’s she made of?’

  ‘She’s the daughter of the late Monsieur Chardon, the chemist of L’Houmeau.’

  ‘You’re marrying a girl from L’Houmeau, you, a well set-up business man? You, a printer by royal appointment? That’s what comes of education! Some good sending your sons to college! – Come now, my boy, she’s very well off then?’ said the old vine-grower approaching his son with an ingratiating leer. ‘For sure, if you’re taking a girl from L’Houmeau, she must be worth thousands and thousands! Good, you’ll be able to pay me your arrears of rent: two years and three months, my boy, and that makes two thousand seven hundred francs, and they’ll come in the nick of time for me to pay my cooper. For anyone but my own son I could charge you interest: after all, business is business; but I’ll let you off that. Well now, how much has she got?’

  ‘She has just what my mother had.’

  The old vine-grower nearly blurted out: ‘What! she has only ten thousand francs!’ But he remembered his refusal to render any account to his son, and he exclaimed: ‘She’s got nothing then!’

  ‘My mother’s fortune was her brains and her beauty.’

  ‘You go and sell that on the market, and you’ll see what you’ll get for it! God help us! What bad luck fathers have with their children! When I married, David, all I had was a paper cap and my two hands. I was a poor “bear”; but with the fine printing-works I’ve given you, with all your hard work and your know-how, you ought to marry a respectable girl from the town, a woman with thirty or forty thousand francs. Stop being love-sick, and I’ll find you a wife myself. A few miles away there’s a miller’s widow of thirty-two, worth a hundred thousand francs in property: that’s the match for you! You can join her lands to the Marsac lands, they run side by side. Oh, what a fine estate we should have, and how well I’d look after it! They say she’s going to marry Courtois, her chief hand, but you’re a still better bargain for her! I’d run the mill, while she lived like a lady in Angoulême.’

  ‘Father, I am committed.’

  ‘David, you don’t understand a thing about business. You’ll come to ruin. Sure enough, if you marry this girl from L’Houmeau, I’ll square accounts with you. I’ll sue you for my rent, for I can see no good coming of this. Ah! my poor presses! You needed money to grease the works, to keep you going and get things moving. After this, only a good vintage can give me peace of mind.’

  ‘Father, it seems to me that up to now I haven’t caused you much worry…’

  ‘And not paid much rent either,’ the vine-grower retorted.

  ‘I came to ask you not only to consent to my marriage, but also to build a second storey to your house and put up living premises above your penthouse.’

  ‘Nothing doing. I haven’t a sou, as you well know. Besides, it would be pouring money down the sink – what would it bring me in? So then, you got up at daybreak to come and ask me to do a building job that would bankrupt a king. I may have christened you David, but I’m not Solomon in all his glory. Are you crazy? You’re not my child, you’re a changeling.’

  He broke in on his own discourse to show David a vine-stock. ‘There’s one,’ he said, ‘which will be loaded with grapes. That’s the sort of child that doesn’t disappoint its parents: give it manure and it pays you back. I sent you to school. I paid through the nose to make a learned man of you, I sent you to study with the Didots. And what comes of all this humbug? You give me a daughter-in-law from L’Houmeau without a penny in her stocking. If you hadn’t studied, if I’d kept you here under my nose, you’d have done what I saw fit, and today you’d be marrying a miller’s widow with a hundred thousand francs and a mill into the bargain. Oh yes! You’re so brainy you think I’m going to foot the bill for these fine notions and build palaces for you!… To hear you talk, the house you’re living in has been a pig-sty for two hundred years and isn’t good enough for your girl from L’Houmeau to sleep in. Who is she? the Queen of France?’

  ‘Very well, father, I shall build the second storey at my own expense and the son will enrich the father. It’s the wrong way round, but it does happen sometimes.’

  ‘What, my lad, you’ve money enough to build, but not enough to pay your rent? You young fox, you’re trying to trick your father!’

  Stated this way, the problem became difficult to solve, for the old man was delighted to manoeuvre his son into a position which enabled him to give him nothing at all while still talking like a father. And so David could get nothing else from him but plain and simple consent to the marriage and permission to build, at his own expense and in his father’s own house, any accommodation he needed. The old ‘bear’, this paragon among thrifty sires, did his son the favour of not demanding the back rent and so not robbing him of the savings he had been so imprudent as to divulge. David returned home in a sad mood: he realized that if misfortune came he could not count on help from his father.

  4. Catastrophic sequels to provincial love

  THE Bishop’s unintended shaft and Madame de Bargeton’s retort were all that Angoulême could talk about. The slightest incidents were so distorted, exaggerated and improved upon that the poet became the hero of the moment. From the higher regions through which this rainstorm of scandal raged, a few drops fell down to middle-class levels. Whe
n Lucien passed through Beaulieu on his way to the Bargeton mansion, he noticed the envious attention with which several young men surveyed him, and his ear caught a few phrases which made him swell with pride.

  ‘There’s a lucky chap,’ said a solicitor’s clerk, an ugly young man named Petit-Claud, who had been at school with Lucien and with whom Lucien took on little airs of condescension.

  ‘True enough. He’s good-looking. He has talent and Madame de Bargeton is gone on him!’ replied a youth of good social standing who had been present at the reading.

  Lucien had waited impatiently for the time when he knew he could catch Louise by herself: this woman, who had become the arbiter of his destiny, had to be persuaded to accept his sister’s marriage. After the events of the previous evening, she might perhaps feel more tenderly disposed, and from this tenderness might spring a brief spell of happiness. He was not mistaken: Madame de Bargeton welcomed him with an effusiveness which for a novice in love was a touching sign of mounting passion. She yielded her beautiful golden locks, her hand and her head to the burning kisses of the poet who had suffered so much the evening before.

  ‘If you could have seen yourself as you were reading’ – she used the affectionate ‘thou’, for they had reached that stage the evening before, when Louise, sitting on her sofa, had wiped away the drops of moisture gleaming like pearls on the brow on which she would have liked to set a wreath of laurels. ‘Your lovely eyes were flashing, while from your lips I saw the golden chains unwind, the chains of words that poets use to bind men’s hearts to them. You shall read me the whole of Chénier; he is the poet for lovers. You shall suffer no more, I will not allow you to! Yes, dear angel, I will put an oasis around you and in it you will live your poet’s life – active, languid, indolent, industrious, pensive turn by turn. But never forget that you will owe your laurels to me, and that will be the splendid reward I shall reap for the pains I shall have to endure. Dear, dear boy, society will not spare me any more than it spares you – it takes its revenge for any happiness it does not share. Yes, I shall always be envied – did you not see that yesterday? How quickly those gadflies swarmed round to slake their thirst with blood from the pricks they had made! But how happy I was! I really lived! How long it is since every chord of my heart felt such vibrations!’

  Tears were streaming down Louise’s cheeks. Lucien took her hand, and the long kiss he gave it was his only reply. And so the poet’s vanity was flattered by this woman as it had been by his mother, his sister and David. All those about him persisted in lifting him higher than ever on his imaginary pedestal. Everything, the adulation of his friends and the fury of his enemies, fanned the flame of his delusions and ambition; the atmosphere he moved in was bright with mirages. The imagination of young people is so inclined to eulogize, to foster such notions, and circumstances seem so eager to serve a handsome young man with a future before him, that more than one bitter and chilling lesson is needed to dissipate such illusions.

  ‘So then, my beautiful Louise, you are willing to be my Beatrice – but a Beatrice who will let herself be loved?’

  She raised her beautiful eyes – until then they had been drooping – and replied, with an angelic smile which gave the lie to her words:

  ‘If you deserve it… later! Are you not happy? To have someone whose heart is yours! To be able to confide completely in someone you are sure will understand you! Surely that is happiness?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, but with the wry expression of a frustrated lover.

  ‘Child that you are!’, she said, teasingly. ‘Come now, haven’t you something to tell me? You looked quite worried as you came in, my Lucien.’

  Lucien shyly told his darling of David’s love for his sister, his sister’s love for David, and the proposed marriage.

  ‘Poor Lucien,’ said Louise. ‘He’s afraid of being beaten and scolded, as if it were he who was getting married!’

  ‘But what harm is there in that,’ she continued, running her hands through his hair. ‘What does your family matter to me, since you are so much above it? If my father married his servant, would it worry you? Dear child, lovers are a whole family to themselves. Have I any interest in the world other than my Lucien? Become a great man, find the way to glory: that’s all that concerns us!’

  This egoistic response made Lucien the happiest man in the world. But just as he was listening to the extravagant arguments by which Louise was proving to him that they were alone in the world, Monsieur de Bargeton came in. Lucien knitted his eyebrows and seemed taken aback. Louise made him a sign, begged him to stay to dinner, and asked him to read some Chénier until the card-players and other regular visitors arrived.

  ‘You will not only be giving her pleasure,’ said Monsieur de Bargeton, ‘but me as well. Nothing suits me better than to listen to reading after dinner.’

  And so, coaxed by Monsieur de Bargeton as well as Louise, with the servants showing him the respect that servants feel for their employers’ favoured guests, Lucien stayed on, accepting as his due all the enjoyments attached to a fortune which was to be his for the using. By the time the drawing-room had filled up, he felt so fortified by Monsieur de Bargeton’s stupidity and so confident of Louise’s love that he assumed a dominating attitude which his beautiful mistress encouraged and savoured the pleasures of the despotic power which Naïs had acquired and which she willingly shared with him. In short, he did his best during this soirée, to play the role of a country town ‘lion’. Taking note of Lucien’s new attitude, a few persons decided that he was, to use an old-fashioned expression, ‘on the best possible terms’ with Madame de Bargeton. Amélie, who had arrived with Monsieur du Châtelet and had joined the group of jealous and envious people gathered in a corner, affirmed that the worst had happened.

  ‘Don’t make Naïs responsible,’ said Châtelet, ‘for the vanity of a silly youth puffed up with pride at finding himself in company to which he never expected to be admitted. Can’t you see that this Chardon is taking the gracious utterances of a society lady as advances? He hasn’t yet learnt to distinguish between the silence of real passion and the patronizing language merited by his good looks, youth and talent I Women would be greatly to be pitied if they were blamed for all the desires they inspire in us. He is certainly in love, but as for Naïs…’

  ‘Oh! as for Naïs,’ the perfidious Amélie repeated, ‘Naïs is very happy to have inspired this passion. At her age, a young man’s love has so many attractions to offer! His youthfulness is contagious; a woman becomes a girl again and takes on the scruples and affectations of a girl without realizing how ridiculous it is… Just fancy! An apothecary’s son strutting about as if he were master in Madame de Bargeton’s house!’

  Love’s eyes are closed to social distances,

  Adrien softly hummed.

  The next day there was no house in Angoulême in which the degree of intimacy between Monsieur Chardon, alias de Rubempré, and Madame de Bargeton was not a matter for discussion. At most they had exchanged a kiss or two, and society was already accusing them of the most guilty relations. Madame de Bargeton was paying the penalty for her pre-eminence. Which of us has not observed the eccentricities peculiar to polite society, the capriciousness of its judgements and the extravagance of its demands? To some persons everything is permissible; their conduct may go far beyond the bounds of reason; all their actions are seemly; they are justified by all and sundry. But there are others to whom society is incredibly severe: they must make no mistakes, never falter or even utter a foolish remark. They are like venerated statues which are removed from their pedestals once the winter frost has nipped off a finger or chipped a nose; they are allowed no human feelings and must for ever remain god-like and perfect. A single glance at Lucien from Madame de Bargeton was equivalent to the twelve years’ happiness enjoyed by Zizine and Francis. One hand-clasp was certain to bring down all the thunders of the Charente valley on the amorous couple.

  David had brought back from Paris a secret nest-egg wh
ich he was earmarking for his wedding expenses and the construction of a second floor in his father’s house. It was after all in his own interests to enlarge this house. It would come to him sooner or later, since his father was seventy-eight. And so the printer had Lucien’s rooms half-timbered so as not to overload the cracked walls of this old building. He took pleasure in decorating and elegantly furnishing the first-floor flat in which his lovely Eve was to spend her days. It was a period of unmixed joy and happiness for the two friends. Weary as he was of the mean dimensions of provincial existence, tired as he was of the sordid economy which made a five-franc piece an enormous sum, Lucien uncomplainingly endured the cheese-paring and privation which poverty entails. The gloomy melancholy of his expression had given place to the radiancy of hope. A star was shining above his head; he had dreams of a bright future and was staking his happiness on the demise of Monsieur de Bargeton, who from time to time had stomach troubles and the happy mania of regarding his after-dinner indigestion as an ailment which after-supper indigestion could cure.

  By the beginning of September, Lucien was no longer a proof-reader: he was Monsieur de Rubempré, sumptuously lodged in comparison with the wretched dormer-windowed attic the insignificant Chardon had occupied in L’Houmeau. He was no longer a man from L’Houmeau: he lived in Upper Angoulême and dined about four times a week with Madame de Bargeton. My Lord Bishop was friendly with him and received him at his palace. His occupations put him on a level with persons of the loftiest degree. In fact he was expected one day to rank among the most illustrious figures in France. Assuredly, as he paced through his elegant sitting-room, his charming bedroom and his tastefully decorated study, he could forgive himself for levying thirty francs a month on the painfully earned wages of his sister and mother, for he could look forward to the day when the historical novel at which he had been working for two years – The Archer of Charles the Ninth, and a volume of verse entitled The Mar guerites – would spread his renown through the world of literature and bring him enough money to pay his debt to his mother, sister and David. And so, feeling greater in stature, already hearing his name echoing down the corridors of the future, he was now accepting these sacrifices with a noble self-assurance: he could smile at the straits he suffered and enjoy his last days of poverty.