Lost Illusions

by Honoré de Balzac

  This sinister accumulation of refuse, these windows grimy with rain and dust, these squat huts with rags and tatters heaped around them, the filthy condition of the half-built walls, this agglomeration reminiscent of a gypsy camp or the booths on a fair-ground – the sort of temporary constructions which Paris heaps about the monuments it fails to build – this contorted physiognomy was wonderfully in keeping with the teeming variety of trades carried on beneath these brazenly indecent hutments, noisy with babble and hectic with gaiety, and where an enormous amount of business has been transacted between the two Revolutions of 1789 and 1830. For twenty years the Stock Exchange stood opposite, on the ground-floor of the Palais-Royal. There then public opinion was formed, reputations were made and unmade, political and financial affairs discussed. People met in these galleries before and after Stock Exchange hours. The Paris of bankers and merchants often encumbered the court-yard of the Palais-Royal and swarmed inside the building for shelter in rainy weather. It had sprung up haphazard in such a way as to become strangely like a sounding-board. It rang through and through with bursts of laughter. No quarrel could be started at one end of it without people at the other end knowing what it was about. It was the home ground of publishers, poets, pedlars of prose, politicians, milliners and, lastly the prostitutes who roamed about it in the evenings. There news buzzed and books by both young and established authors abounded. There Parliamentary conspiracies were hatched and publishers concocted their mendacities. There were sold the latest novelties which the public refused to buy elsewhere. There in one evening were sold several thousand copies of this or the other pamphlet by Paul-Louis Courier or The Adventures of a King’s Daughter, the first broadside fired by the House of Orleans against the Charter of Louis XVIII. At the time when Lucien put in his first appearance there, a few shops had elegantly glazed front windows; but they belonged to the rows giving on to the garden or the courtyard. Until the day when this strange colony collapsed under the hammer of the architect Fontaine, the shops situated between the two galleries were entirely open and supported by pillars like booths in provincial fairs; the eye could see across the merchandise and the glass doors to the two galleries. Since heating was impossible, the shopkeepers had to put up with foot-warmers and were themselves responsible for the firemen’s service, for, in a mere quarter of an hour, any careless act could start a fire in this commonwealth of timber dried by the sun, already smouldering, as it were, with the heat of prostitution, littered with gauze, muslin, paper, and ventilated by frequent draughts rushing through it.

  The modistes’ shops were full of unimaginable hats which seemed to be intended less for sale than for show, hanging in their hundreds on wire holders with mushroom knobs and decking the galleries with their manifold colours. For twenty years people strolling through the galleries have been wondering whose heads these dusty hats at last adorned. Seamstresses, usually ugly but free of speech, accosted women with artful words, adopting the manners and diction of the Parisian Covent Garden. A milliner’s assistant, glib of tongue and bold of eye, would stand on a stool and harry passers-by: ‘Won’t you buy a pretty hat, Madame? Won’t you let me sell you something, Monsieur?’ Their rich and colourful vocabulary drew variety from their modulations of tone, the looks they gave and the jibes they made at passers-by. Booksellers and shopkeepers lived on good terms together. In the passage so pompously styled the Glazed Gallery the most singular avocations were to be found. There ventriloquists plied their trade, and charlatans of every kind, mountebanks who had nothing to show and others who showed you everything. There for the first time a man set up a concern by which he has made seven or eight thousand francs on the fair-grounds. The sign over his booth was a sun revolving in a black surround, and about it these words were inscribed in flaming red: Here man sees what God cannot see. Price one penny. The ‘barker’ never admitted one man by himself, nor ever more than two people. Once inside, you found yourself facing a large mirror. Suddenly a voice which might have terrified Hoffmann himself rang out like a mechanical contrivance when a spring is released: ‘You see here, gentlemen, what through all eternity God cannot see, namely a fellow-creature. God has no fellow-creature!’ You went out ashamed of yourself without daring to confess your stupidity. From behind every small door similar voices could be heard vaunting Cosmoramas, views of Constantinople, marionette shows, automata playing chess and dogs which could pick out the most handsome woman present. The ventriloquist Fitz-James had his heyday there, in the Café Borel, with Polytechnic students all around him, before he met his death in the fighting at Montmartre.

  There were fruit-sellers and flower girls, and a famous tailor whose military embroideries glimmered through the dusk like so many stars. In the mornings, until two-thirty in the afternoons, the Wooden Galleries were mute, sombre and deserted. The shopkeepers chattered among themselves as if they were at home. The Paris population only began to congregate there at about three o’clock, when the Stock Exchange opened. Once the crowd arrived, young people hungry for literature but out of cash did their reading – gratis – at the booksellers’ shopwindows. The assistants employed to watch over the books exposed for sale charitably allowed these poor young men to go on turning the pages. When it was a matter of a 12-mo volume of two hundred pages, as with Smarra, Pierre Schlemilh, Jean Sbogar or Jocko, it was devoured in two sessions. At that time there were no free public reading-rooms: one had to buy a book to read it, and so the number of volumes then sold would seem fabulous today. There was therefore something typically French in this charity shown to the juvenile intelligence, avid and poverty-stricken. As evening fell, this terrible bazaar became resplendent in its poetry. From every adjacent street there came and went a large number of prostitutes who were allowed to walk up and down without charge. From every direction street-walkers were hurrying along to ‘do the Palais-Royal’. The Stone Galleries belonged to privileged brothels which paid for the right to parade gaudily dressed creatures between such and such an arcade and in the garden square into which they opened; but the Wooden Galleries were a happy hunting-ground for the commoner kind: they were supereminently ‘The Palais’, which at that time meant that they were the temple of prostitution. A woman could arrive there, go off with her capture and take him wherever she thought fit. Consequently, every evening, these women attracted so considerable a crowd to the Wooden Galleries that it was only possible to move along at a snail’s pace, as in a procession or at a fancy-dress ball. This slow progress worried no one since it gave an opportunity for gaping. The clothes worn by these women are now a thing of the past. Their habit of wearing dresses cut low at the back and very low also in front; their quaint hair-styles devised to draw attention, here perhaps a Norman and there a Spanish coiffure; one street-walker all in curls like a poodle, another with sleek hair parted down the middle; legs enclosed in tight-fitting white stockings and displayed in various ways, but always to advantage: all this inglorious poetry has gone. The licentiousness of invitation and response, the open-air cynicism so in keeping with the locality are no longer to be found, not even in fancy-dress balls or the notorious public dances of our times. It was horrible but gay. The gleaming flesh of shoulders and bosoms stood out amid the almost invariably sombre hues of male costumes, producing the most magnificent contrasts. The hum of voices and the sound of pattering feet made a hubbub which could be heard from the middle of the garden as one continuous bass note punctuated with the shrill laughter of the prostitutes or shouts raised in occasional squabbles. Respectable persons and men of the greatest consequence rubbed shoulders with people who looked like gallows-birds. These monstrous gatherings had an indefinable piquancy which affected even the most insensitive persons. That is why the whole of Paris congregated there right up to the last moment and paced along the wooden flooring with which the architect of the new construction covered his basements. The demolition of these ignoble wooden erections aroused wide-spread and unanimous regret.

  A few days previously the publisher Ladvoca
t had set up his premises at the corner of the passage running through the middle of the Galleries, opposite those of Dauriat, a now forgotten but very enterprising young man who blazed the trail which his rival so brilliantly followed. Dauriat’s shop stood in one of the rows which gave on to the garden; Ladvocat’s shop faced the court. Dauriat’s shop was divided into two parts, one of which provided him with a vast storehouse for his books while the other served as his office. Lucien, arriving there that evening for the first time, was stunned at the sight of it, so irresistible was the impression it made on provincials and young men. He had soon lost touch with his guide.

  ‘If you were as handsome as that boy over there, I’d return your love!’ a trollop said to an old man as she pointed to Lucien.

  This made Lucien as shy as a blind man’s dog; he followed the torrent of people in a state of stupefaction and excitement difficult to describe. Harassed by the ogling of the women, tempted and dazzled by the white rotundity of shamelessly-exposed bosoms, he clung to his manuscript and held it tight against him for fear, poor innocent, of having it stolen!

  ‘What do you want, sir?’ he exclaimed as someone took hold of his arm – he thought that his poetry might have aroused some author’s curiosity.

  Then he recognized his friend Lousteau, who said to him: ‘I knew very well you’d come this way in the end!’

  12. A publisher’s bookshop in the Wooden Galleries

  LUCIEN was actually at the door of Dauriat’s shop and Lousteau showed him in: it was full of people waiting to speak to the high and mighty Prince of the book-trade. Printers, paper-makers and cartoonists grouped round the assistants were questioning them about matters in hand or in prospect.

  ‘Look. There’s Finot, the director of my paper, chatting with a talented young man, Felicien Vernou, a little rascal who’s as nasty as an unmentionable disease.’

  ‘Well now, you’ve a first performance on tonight, old chap,’ said Finot as he and Vernou came up to Lousteau. ‘I’ve disposed of your box.’

  ‘You’ve sold it to Braulard?’

  ‘Well, why not? You’ll find a seat. What have you come to ask Dauriat for? By the way, it’s agreed that we cry up Paul de Kock: Dauriat has taken over two hundred copies of his book and now Victor Ducange is refusing him a novel. Dauriat says he wants to build up a new author in the same line. So you’ll put Paul de Kock over Ducange.’

  ‘But Ducange and I have a play on at the Gaieté,’ said Lousteau.

  ‘All right, you’ll tell him I wrote the article. You’ll make out I did a savage review and that you toned it down: he’ll be grateful to you.’

  ‘Couldn’t you get Dauriat’s cashier to discount this little hundred francs bill for me?’ Etienne asked Finot. ‘You know we’re having supper together for the house-warming of Florine’s flat.’

  ‘Oh of course, you’re standing treat,’ said Finot, pretending to be making an effort of memory. ‘Here, Babusson,’ he added, taking Barbet’s note of hand and presenting it to the cashier. ‘Give this man ninety francs for me. – Endorse it, old chap.’

  Lousteau took the cashier’s pen while the latter was counting out the money and signed it. Lucien, all eyes and ears, lost not one syllable of this conversation.

  ‘There’s something else, my dear friend,’ Etienne continued. ‘I won’t thank you: I’m yours through thick and thin. But I want to introduce this gentleman to Dauriat, and you might well get him to listen to us.’

  ‘What about?’ asked Finot.

  ‘A collection of poems,’ Lucien answered.

  ‘Oh!’ said Finot with a shrug.

  ‘This gentleman,’ said Vernou, looking towards Lucien, ‘hasn’t had much to do with the book-trade, otherwise he would already have locked his manuscript up in the remotest recesses of his domicile.’

  At this moment a handsome young man, Emile Blondet, who had just made a beginning on the staff of Le Journal des Débats with articles of far-reaching importance, came in, shook hands with Finot and Lousteau and gave a light nod to Vernou.

  ‘Come and have supper with us, at midnight, in Florine’s flat,’ said Lousteau to Blondet.

  ‘Fine,’ said the young man. ‘But who’ll be there?’

  ‘Oh!’ said Lousteau. ‘Florine and Matifat the druggist, Du Bruel, the dramatist who gave Florine her first part; a little old man, Cardot senior and his son-in-law Camusot; also Finot…’

  ‘Does he do things decently, your druggist?’

  ‘He won’t feed us on drugs,’ said Lucien.

  ‘Monsieur is very witty,’ said Blondet, keeping a straight face as he glanced at Lucien. ‘Will he be at the supper, Lousteau?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We shall have fun!’

  Lucien had blushed up to the ears.

  ‘How long are you going to be, Dauriat?’ asked Blondet, knocking on the window-pane through which one could look down on Dauriat’s writing-desk.

  ‘My friend, I’m just coming.’

  ‘Good,’ said Lousteau to his protégé. ‘This young man, almost as young as you, is on the staff of the Journal des Débats and he’s already a star critic: he commands respect, Dauriat will come and butter him up, and then we shall be able to state our business to this Pasha of vignettes and printing. Otherwise even at eleven o’clock we should still be waiting our turn. He’ll be giving audience to more and more people as time goes on.’

  Lucien and Lousteau then drew close to Blondet, Finot and Vernou went to form a group at the other end of the shop.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ Blondet asked of Gabusson, the head assistant, who stood up to greet him.

  ‘He’s buying a weekly journal which he wants to ginger up to counteract the influence of the Minerve Française which is too devoted to Eymery’s interests, and that of the Conservateur which is too blindly Romantic.’

  ‘Will he pay well?’

  ‘Of course, as always… too well!’ said the cashier.

  Just then there entered a young man who had recently published a magnificent novel which had sold quickly and met with brilliant success: a second edition of it was being printed for Dauriat. This young man, got up in the quaint and extraordinary clothing which distinguishes the artistic temperament, made a vivid impression on Lucien.

  ‘This is Nathan,’ Lousteau whispered to the provincial poet.

  Nathan, despite the independence and pride imprinted on his countenance, which was then in the bloom of youth, approached the journalists hat in hand and presented an almost humble demeanour to Blondet whom so far he only knew by sight. Blondet and Finot kept their hats on.

  ‘Monsieur, I am glad of the opportunity which an opportune moment offers me…’

  ‘He’s so flustered he’s committing pleonasms,’ said Félicien to Lousteau.

  ‘… of expressing my gratitude for the fine article you wrote about me in the Journal des Débats. Half the success of my book is due to you.’

  ‘No, no, my friend,’ said Blondet with an air of condescension disguised as geniality. ‘You are a man of talent, damn it, and I am delighted to make your acquaintance.’

  ‘Since your article is out, I shall not appear to be seeking your favour: we can now be on unconstrained terms with one another. Will you do me the honour and the pleasure of dining with me tomorrow? Finot will join us – and you, Lousteau, old man, you won’t refuse me?’ As Nathan said this he gave a handshake to Etienne. ‘Oh indeed, Monsieur,’ he said to Blondet, ‘you’ve a fine career before you. You’re carrying on the work of such men as Dussault, Fiévée, Geoffroi. Hoffmann was talking about you to Claude Vignon, one of my friends who was his pupil, and he told him he could die in peace, for the Journal des Débats would live for ever. They must pay you an enormous amount?’