Lost Illusions

by Honoré de Balzac

  EVE SÉCHARD TO LUCIEN

  My dear,

  We all cried as we read your letter. Let those noble hearts to which your guardian angel led you know this: a mother and a poor young woman will pray to God for them night and morning; and if the most fervent prayers rise to His throne, they will obtain some favours for all of you. Yes, dear brother, their names are engraved in my heart. Oh, I shall meet them some day! If I have to walk the whole way I will come and thank them for showing you such friendship, for it has poured balm on my open wounds. Here, my darling, we are toiling like poor workmen. My husband, that unknown great man whom I love more every day as I discover, moment by moment, new treasures in his heart, is neglecting his printing-office, and I can guess why: your destitution, as well as ours and Mother’s, worry him to death. Our beloved David is like Prometheus with grief, a yellow-beaked vulture pecking at his entrails. Noble as he is, he scarcely thinks of himself, for he is hoping to make a fortune. He spends all his time making experiments in the manufacture of paper; he has asked me to look after the business in his stead, but he gives me as much help with it as his preoccupation will allow. Alas, I am expecting a child. Such an event, which would have overwhelmed me with joy, makes me sad in our present situation. Our dear mother has become young again and found new strength for her tiring profession as sick nurse. Without our money troubles we should be happy. Old Séchard won’t give his son a farthing. David went to see him to borrow a few coppers in order to help you, for your letter brought him to despair. ‘I know Lucien’, David said, ‘he will lose his head and do something silly.’ I gave him a good scolding. ‘Would my brother fall short in any way?’ I replied. ‘Lucien knows I should die of grief.’ Mother and I, without David suspecting it, have pawned a few articles which Mother will redeem as soon as any money comes in. In this way we raised a hundred francs which I am sending by post. Don’t be cross with me, my dear, for not answering your first letter. We were in such a predicament that we worried night and day. Oh, I didn’t know I was so strong. Madame de Bargeton is a soulless and heartless woman; even if she no longer loved you, she owed it to herself to help and protect you after snatching you away from us and flinging you into the terrible ocean of Paris, where God’s blessing is needed for one to find true friends amid the rough seas of human self-interest. Have no regrets for her. I wanted you to have a devoted woman about you, a second myself; but now that I know you have friends who feel just as we do, my mind is easy. Spread the wings of your fine genius, darling. Our glory will be in you, as our love is already.

  EVE.

  My beloved child, after what your sister has written to you, I can only send you my blessing and assure you that my prayers and thoughts are all, alas, for you alone, to the detriment of those around me. There are some hearts for whom absent people are always in the right: so it is with the heart of

  YOUR MOTHER.

  Thus, two days later, Lucien was able to pay back to his friends the loan they had so gracefully made him. Never perhaps had life seemed more beautiful to him, but this prompting of self-respect did not elude the searching glances of his friends.

  ‘One would say that you were afraid of owing us something,’ Fulgence exclaimed.

  ‘Indeed,’ said Michel Chrestien, ‘the pleasure he manifests seems a grave thing to me. It confirms what I have already noticed: there is vanity in Lucien.’

  ‘He’s a poet,’ said d’Arthez.

  ‘Do you resent my having so natural a feeling?’

  ‘We must give him credit,’ said Léon Giraud, ‘for not hiding it from us; but I fear that later on he may be afraid of us.’

  ‘But why?’ asked Lucien.

  ‘Because we can read your heart,’ Joseph Bridau replied.

  ‘In you,’ said Michel Chrestien, ‘there is a diabolic spirit which will help you to justify in your own eyes things most contrary to our principles: instead of being a sophist in ideas you will be a sophist in action.’

  ‘Indeed, I fear so,’ said d’Arthez. ‘Lucien, you will hold admirable discussions with yourself which will make you feel big, but they will lead to blameworthy deeds… You will never be in tune with yourself.’

  ‘What are your grounds for making such an accusation?’ asked Lucien.

  ‘Is your vanity so great, my dear poet,’ exclaimed Fulgence, ‘that it enters even into your friendships? All vanity of that kind betokens fearful egoism, and egoism poisons friendship.’

  ‘Oh, good Heavens!’ cried Lucien. ‘So you don’t know what great love I have for you?’

  ‘If you loved us as we love you, would you have made such haste and fuss about returning to us what we had had so much pleasure in giving you?’

  ‘Here we don’t lend money to one another, we give it,’ Joseph Bridau bluntly interposed.

  ‘Don’t think we are being harsh, my dear boy,’ said Michel Chrestien. ‘We are looking ahead. We are afraid that one day we may see you preferring the joys of petty requital to the joys of our pure friendship for you. Read Goethe’s Tasso, the greatest work of that fine genius, and you will see there that the poet loves gaudy clothes, banquets, triumphs, outward show: well, be a Tasso without his follies. Are the world and its pleasures calling you? Stay here. Transfer to the realm of ideas all that you expect to gain from vanity. Exchange one folly for another: put virtue into your actions and vice into your fictions; instead, as d’Arthez said, of thinking well and behaving badly.’

  Lucien let his head droop: his friends were right.

  ‘I confess I have not strength such as yours,’ he said, looking at them very appealingly. ‘My back and shoulders are not sturdy enough to hold up Paris, to struggle courageously. Nature has given us different temperaments and faculties, and you know better than I do the reverse side of vices and virtues. I admit that I am already tired.’

  ‘We will support you,’ said d’Arthez. ‘That is just what loyal friendship is for.’

  ‘The help I have just received is precarious and everyone in my family is as poor as the rest; need will soon be on my heels again. Chrestien, depending as he does on casual earnings, has no influence with the publishers. Bianchon is outside this sphere of affairs. D’Arthez is only in touch with firms producing scientific and specialized treatises, which cut no ice with publishers looking for novelty. Horace, Fulgence Ridal and Bridau work in a region of ideas which keeps them a hundred leagues away from publishers. I must come to some decision.’

  ‘Hold on to ours: endurance!’ said Bianchon. ‘Endure with courage and put your trust in hard work!’

  ‘But what is only endurance for you means death for me,’ Lucien quickly retorted.

  ‘Before the cock has crowed three times,’ said Léon Giraud with a smile, ‘this man will have betrayed the cause of hard work for that of sloth and the vices of Paris.’

  ‘How far has hard work taken you?’ asked Lucien with a laugh.

  ‘When you leave Paris for Italy, you don’t find Rome midway,’ said Joseph Bridau. ‘You seem to expect your green peas to grow already cooked and served up with butter.’

  ‘They only grow like that for the eldest sons of peers,’ said Michel Chrestien. ‘The rest of us sow them and water them and find them all the tastier.’

  The conversation turned to jests and the subject was dropped. These shrewd minds and delicate hearts tried to make Lucien forget this little quarrel, but henceforth he realized how difficult it was to deceive them. There soon came to him an inner despair which he carefully concealed from his friends, for he believed them to be implacable mentors. His southern temperament, so apt to run up and down the gamut of emotions, caused him to vacillate between the most contrary resolutions.

  On several occasions he talked of plunging into journalism, but his friends always said: ‘For Heaven’s sake don’t.’

  ‘That would be the end of the fine, gentle Lucien we love and know,’ said d’Arthez.

  ‘You wouldn’t be able to stand steadfast against the constant antagonism between pleasur
e and toil of which a journalist’s life consists, and steadfastness is the foundation of virtue. You would be so delighted to wield power, to pass sentence of life or death on the productions of thought, that you would become a hardened journalist in two months. To be a journalist is to become a proconsul in the republic of letters. The man who can say what he likes ends up by doing what he likes. This, as one might guess, was one of Napoleon’s maxims.’

  ‘But will you not still be with me?’ asked Lucien.

  ‘We shall no longer be with you,’ Fulgence exclaimed. ‘Once a journalist, you would no more think of us than a brilliant, idolized Opera singer in her silk-lined carriage thinks of her native village with its cows and clogs. You only too obviously possess the qualities of a journalist: brilliance and versatility of thought. You would never deny yourself a shaft of wit, even if it reduced a friend to tears. I meet journalists in the theatre foyers, and they horrify me. Journalism is an inferno, a bottomless pit of iniquity, falsehood and treachery: one can only pass through it and emerge from it unsullied if one is shielded as Dante was by the divine laurels of Virgil.’

  The more the Cénacle tried to turn Lucien away from this path, the more did his desire to brave the peril invite him to take the risk. He began to argue with himself: was it not ridiculous to let himself be once more overtaken by penury without doing anything to avert it? In view of the failure he had met with in regard to his first novel, Lucien felt little inclined to settle down to a second one. Besides, what would he have to live on while he was writing it? A month of privation had exhausted his stock of patience. Could he not do nobly what journalists did unworthily and without scruples of conscience? The mistrust of his friends was an insult to him, and he wanted to show them what mental vigour he had. Perhaps he might come to their help one day and be a herald of glory for them.

  ‘Anyway, what sort of friendship is it that shies at complicity?’ he asked one evening of Michel Chrestien as he was seeing him back home in company with Léon Giraud.

  ‘We shy at nothing,’ Michel answered. ‘If you had the misfortune to kill your mistress, I would help you to conceal the crime and could still feel some respect for you. But if you took to espionage I should shrink from you in horror, for you would be adopting treachery and infamy as a system. That, in a word, is what journalism does. Friendship condones mistakes and the rash impulses of passion, but it must be implacable to anyone who decides to barter away his soul, his intellect and his thought.’

  ‘Could I not take to journalism in order to sell my book of poems and my novel, and then give it up immediately?’

  ‘That is how Machiavelli would behave, but not Lucien de Rubempré,’ said Léon Giraud.

  ‘Very well,’ cried Lucien. ‘I will prove to you that I am as capable as Machiavelli!’

  ‘Ah!’ cried Michel, clasping Léon by the hand. ‘You have just sealed his doom.’ – ‘Lucien,’ he added, ‘You have three hundred francs, enough to live comfortably for three months. Very well, get to work, write a second novel. D’Arthez and Fulgence will help you to plan it, you will grow in stature, you will be a novelist. I instead will make my way into one of those mental brothels and become a journalist for three months. I will sell your books for you to some publisher after attacking his publications. I will write articles and get articles written about you. We will arrange a success for you, you will become a great man and you will still be our Lucien.’

  ‘You really must despise me if you think that I should come to grief and that you will come through it unscathed!’ said the poet.

  ‘Lord forgive him! He’s just a child!’ cried Michel Chrestien.

  7. A newspaper seen from outside

  AFTER limbering up his wits during the evenings spent in d’Arthez’s rooms, Lucien had studied the pleasantries and articles of the ‘petits journaux’.1 Sure that he could at least rise to the level of the wittiest contributors, he made secret attempts at these mental gymnastics, and sallied forth one morning with the exultant idea of requesting enlistment under one or other colonel of this light infantry of the Press. He put on his smartest clothes and crossed the Seine, thinking that authors, journalists, writers, in short the confraternity he hoped to join, would show more kindness and disinterestedness than the two types of bookseller-publishers who had previously dashed his hopes. He would meet congenial people and find something like the benign and benevolent affection he had enjoyed at the Cénacle of the rue des Quatre Vents. Assailed by, giving heed to, yet combating the flutter of presentiments which count so much with men of imagination, he arrived at the rue Saint-Fiacre, near the Boulevard Montmartre, in front of the building which housed the offices of the ‘little paper’ he had selected: the sight of it set his heart beating furiously like that of a young man entering a house of ill-fame. Nevertheless he climbed the stairs to the mezzanine in which the offices were situated. In the opening room, divided into two equal portions by a partition half-boarded and half-latticed up to the ceiling, he found a one-armed ex-soldier who with his only hand was supporting several reams of paper on his head and holding between his teeth the registration-book prescribed by the stamp-duty administration. This poor man, whose face had a sallow tint and a crop of red blisters – hence his nickname Colocynth – pointed to the Cerberus of the newspaper who was the other side of the lattice. This individual was a retired army officer, bemedalled, with grey side whiskers curling round his nose, wearing a black silk cap, and buried under an ample blue frockcoat like a tortoise under its shell.

  ‘From what date, Monsieur, do you wish your subscription to begin?’ the Imperial officer asked him.

  ‘I have not come to take out a subscription,’ Lucien replied, looking towards a card on the door opposite the one through which he had entered: on it was written EDITORIAL OFFICE, with ‘No admittance to the public’ underneath.

  ‘A complaint no doubt,’ the Napoleonic soldier rejoindered. ‘Yes indeed, we were hard on Mariette. Believe me, I still don’t know why. But if you are demanding satisfaction I am ready,’ he added, with a glance at an array of foils and pistols, an up-to-date panoply, bundled together in a corner.

  ‘That still less, Monsieur. I have come for a word with the editor.’

  ‘There’s never anyone here before four.’

  ‘Look here, Giroudeau old chap. My count is eleven columns, and at five francs each that makes fifty-five francs. I’ve only had forty, therefore you still owe me fifteen francs as I said…’

  These words came from a small, weasel face as pale as the white of an undercooked egg, from which gleamed two soft blue though alarmingly malicious eyes. They belonged to a slim young man concealed behind the ex-soldier’s opaque body. This voice chilled Lucien to the marrow: it was a cross between the miaowing of a cat and the asthmatic choke of a hyena.

  ‘Yes, my little militiaman,’ the retired officer answered. ‘But you are counting in the titles and the blanks. Finot told me to add up the total number of lines and divide it by the number required for each column. I have performed this garrotting operation on your article and find it is three columns short.’

  ‘He doesn’t pay for the blanks, the old screw, but he charges his partner for them in the overall cost of his copy. I’m going to see Etienne Lousteau, Vernou, and…’

  ‘I can’t go against orders, young man,’ said the officer. ‘What! For a matter of fifteen francs you bite the hand that feeds you – and you can toss off an article as easily as I can smoke a cigar! Come now, you’ll stand your friends one bowl of punch less or win one game of billiards more, and all will be square!’

  ‘Finot’s cheese-parings will cost him dear,’ the journalist retorted as he got up and went out.

  ‘You’d think he was Voltaire and Rousseau rolled into one,’ the cashier murmured to himself, casting his eyes on the provincial poet.

  ‘Monsieur,’ said Lucien, ‘I will return at four o’clock.’

  During the discussion, he had seen hanging on the walls the portraits of Benjamin Cons
tant, General Foy, the seventeen illustrious spokesmen of the Liberal party and a medley of caricatures attacking the Government. Above all, he had been looking at the door of the sanctum in which, no doubt, was concocted the witty news-sheet which amused him every day, enjoying as it did the right of ridiculing kings and the gravest events of the day, in short of using a bon mot to call everything into question. He wandered along the boulevards – a new pleasure for him, but one so attractive that he saw the clock-hands in the jewellers’ shops pointing to four without noticing that he had had no lunch. The poet promptly turned back down the rue du Fiacre, climbed the stairs, opened the door, found that the old officer had gone and saw the disabled pensioner sitting on his stamped paper munching a crust of bread and keeping watch over the editorial bureau as resignedly as he had formerly done his fatigue-duty, and having no more idea of what it was all about than he had understood the why and wherefore of the rapid marches ordered by the Emperor. The bold idea came to Lucien of stealing a march on this redoubtable functionary: he passed by him with his hat on and opened the door of the sanctum as if he belonged to the staff. The editor’s office offered to his eager gaze a round table covered with a green cloth and six cherry-wood chairs with straw seats which were still new. The floor of this room was stained but not yet polished; it was however clean, and this indicated that few people were allowed in it. On the mantelpiece stood a mirror, a cheap clock covered with dust, two sconces into which two tallow candles had been carelessly thrust and, finally, a scattering of visiting cards. On the table rumpled old newspapers lay about an ink-stand in which the ink was dried as hard as lacquer and the quills on it twisted into circles. He read a few articles written in an illegible and almost hieroglyphic script on grubby scraps of paper torn length-wise by the printing-press compositors, for whom this serves as an indication that an article has been set up. Also, here and there, he gazed admiringly at witty caricatures sketched on grey paper by people who no doubt had sought to kill time by killing something else to keep their hand in. On the cheap, sea-green wall-paper were pinned nine different pen-and-ink sketches burlesquing Le Solitaire, a novel whose unprecedented success at that time was giving it a European reputation and whose abuse of inversions must have wearied the journalists.