Lost Illusions

by Honoré de Balzac

  ‘Grateful pawnbrokers should drink a toast to great men!’ cried Blondet.

  ‘To want all is to owe all!’ said Bixiou.

  ‘No. To owe all is to have had all!’ retorted Des Lupeaulx.

  These viveurs succeeded in persuading the young man that his debts would be the magic spur with which he would prick on the steeds harnessed to the chariot of his fortune. Then Julius Caesar always came up with his forty millions of debt, Frederick the Great with the one ducat a month his father allowed him, and always the famous, demoralizing examples of great men extolled for their vices and not for the omnipotence of their courage and conceptions.

  Finally Coralie’s carriage, horses and furniture were distrained by various creditors for sums amounting to four thousand francs. When Lucien applied to Lousteau for the return of the thousand francs he had lent him, Lousteau showed him writs of distraint establishing in Florine’s flat a situation analogous to the one in Coralie’s; but Lousteau was grateful enough to propose taking the necessary steps for getting The Archer of Charles the Ninth accepted for publication.

  ‘But how has Florine got into such a situation?’ asked Lucien.

  ‘Friend Matifat got cold feet,’ Lousteau replied. ‘We’ve lost him. But if Florine feels like it we can make him pay dear for letting us down! I’ll tell you all about it.’

  33. A fifth variety of publisher

  THREE day’s after Lucien’s fruitless approach to Lousteau, lover and mistress were sadly eating their lunch by the fireside in their handsome bedroom; Bérénice had fried some eggs on the fire, for the cook, the coachman and other servants had gone. It was impossible to dispose of the furniture under distraint. The household no longer contained anything in gold or silver or anything of intrinsic value: for every object however there was a corresponding pawn-ticket, and all of these together would have made a very instructive little octavo volume. Bérénice had kept enough cutlery for two. The petit journal was rendering inappreciable services to Lucien and Coralie by maintaining the tailor, the milliner and the dressmaker, all of whom trembled at the thought of displeasing a journalist capable of bringing their establishments into disrepute.

  Lousteau arrived during lunch, shouting ‘Hurrah! Long live The Archer of Charles the Ninth! I’ve flogged a hundred francs’ worth of books. Let’s share out!’

  He handed fifty francs to Coralie and sent Bérénice out for a more substantial lunch.

  ‘Yesterday, Hector Merlin and I dined with some publishers, and we paved the way for the sale of your novel by making guileful insinuations. We said you’re negotiating with Dauriat, but that he’s being stingy and won’t give more than four thousand francs for two thousand copies, whereas you want six thousand francs. We made out you are twice as great as Sir Walter Scott. Indeed, we said, you have some incomparable novels up your sleeve: it’s not one book you’re offering, but a business proposition. You’re not the author of one more or less ingenious novel: you’ll produce a whole collection! The word ‘collection’ went home. So don’t forget your cue: you have among your manuscripts The Duchesse de Montpensier, or France under Louis XIV, Petticoat the First or The Early Years of Louis XV, The Queen and the Cardinal or Paris in the time of the Fronde, The Son of Concini or a Richelieu Plot!… These novels will be announced on the jacket. This manœuvre we call bluffing our way to success. You crack up your books on the jacket until they become famous, and thus you make a greater name by the books you haven’t written than by those you have. In the press is as good as a mortgage in literature! Come, aren’t you amused? Have some champagne. You can guess, Lucien, that our publishers had eyes like saucers… By the way, have you any saucers left?’

  ‘They are under distraint,’ said Coralie.

  ‘Point taken. I’ll go on. Publishers will believe in all your manuscripts if they see a single one. In the book-trade, they ask to see the manuscript and pretend they’re going to read it. Let’s allow the publishers their fatuous make-believe: they never do read any books, otherwise they wouldn’t publish so many! Hector and I have hinted that for five thousand francs you’d agree to three thousand copies in two editions. Give me the manuscript of The Archer. The day after tomorrow we’ll have lunch with the publishers and get them where we want them.’

  ‘Who are they?’ asked Lucien.

  ‘Two partners, two decent chaps, straight enough: Fendant and Cavalier. One of them was once a chief clerk in the Vidal and Porchon firm, the other’s the smartest travelling salesman in the Quai des Augustins. They’ve been going for a year. After losing a small amount of capital publishing novels translated from the English, these fellows are now wanting to exploit the home-grown product. Rumour has it that these two dealers in inky paper only risk other people’s capital, but I don’t imagine you’re going to bother about where the money they give you comes from.’

  Two days after, the two journalists were invited to lunch in the rue Serpente, in the quarter where Lucien had formerly lived and where Lousteau still kept his room in the rue de La Harpe. Lucien picked his friend up there and saw that it was in the same state as on the evening of his introduction to the literary world. But he was not astonished: his education had initiated him into the vicissitudes of a journalist’s life, which held no further secrets for him. Our great provincial had pocketed, gambled with and lost the advance fee for more than one article while also losing the desire to write it; he had written many a column according to the ingenious recipes that Lousteau had prescribed as they had walked down from the rue de La Harpe to the Palais-Royal. Having become dependent on Barbet and Braulard, he trafficked in books and theatre-tickets; by now he had no scruples about eulogizing or attacking; at the moment he was feeling quite gleeful at the thought of getting the most he could out of Lousteau before turning his back on the Liberals, whom he was planning to attack the more effectively for having studied them closely. As for Lousteau, he was extracting – to Lucien’s prejudice – the sum of five hundred francs in cash from Fendant and Cavalier, as a kind of commission for having procured this future Walter Scott for the two publishers in quest of a French Scott.

  The firm of Fendant and Cavalier was one of those publishing houses founded without any sort of capital, like many which were then being founded and will still be founded while paper-manufacturers and printers persist in giving credit to the book-trade for as long as it takes to deal out seven or eight of those rounds of cards called publications. Then as today, works were bought from authors in bills drawn to fall due in six, nine or twelve months’ time – a payment based on the nature of the sale which publishers settle among themselves by means of even longer-termed values. The publishers paid the paper-manufacturers and the printers in the same currency; in this way the latter had on their hands, unre-muneratively, a whole library of anything from a dozen to a score of works. Reckoning on two or three successes, the profit from the sound propositions paid for the bad ones, and they kept going by grafting one book on to another. If all their operations were dubious or if, by bad luck, they happened upon good books which could only be sold after being savoured and appreciated by the real public; if the discounts levied on their bills were onerous, if creditors of theirs became bankrupt, they calmly filed their petitions without turning a hair, being prepared in advance for such a result. Thus every chance was in their favour, since they staked other people’s funds, not their own, on the big green baize cloth of speculation. Fendant and Cavalier were in this situation, Cavalier having contributed his practical experience and Fendant his cunning. Their ‘corporate’ funds richly deserved this title, for they consisted of the few thousand francs their mistresses had painfully saved, out of which both men had each assigned themselves fairly substantial emoluments: they very scrupulously spent them on dinners offered to journalists and writers, or on theatre shows at which, they alleged, business was transacted. These semi-scoundrels, it was admitted, both knew their way about, but Fendant was more wily than Cavalier. True to his name, Cavalier travelled in books, whil
e Fendant looked after the Paris end of the business. This partnership was what such partnerships will always be between two publishers: a duel.

  The two partners occupied the ground-floor of one of the old houses in the rue Serpente; their office was situated at the far end of vast salons which had been converted into shops. They had already published many novels, such as A Tour in the North, The Merchant of Benares, The Well in the Sepulchre, Takeli, and the novels of Galt, an English author who had no success in France. Walter Scott’s success was drawing the attention of the book-trade so strongly to English productions that publishers, like true Normans, were giving all their thought to the conquest of England: they were on the lookout for Walter Scotts, just as, later on, speculators were to look for asphalt in shingly terrain, bitumen in marshes, and so draw profit from the railroads then being planned. One of the major stupidities of Parisian commerce is that it hopes to achieve success by sticking to the same lines of enterprise as have paid off before, whereas success goes by contraries. In Paris more than anywhere, success kills success. And so, under the title of such a work as The Strelitz Family or Russia in the last century, Fendant and Cavalier boldly inserted in capital letters, ‘after the manner of Walter Scott’. Fendant and Cavalier were athirst for success: one good work could help them to get rid of their stocks of paper, and they had been tempted by the prospect of having reviews in the newspapers. At that time sales were absolutely dependent on this, for very rarely is a book bought for its intrinsic value, having almost always been published for other reasons than its merit. As far as Fendant and Cavalier were concerned, Lucien was a journalist, and his book was a commodity whose early sales would tide them over their end-of-the-month obligations.

  Lousteau and Lucien found the partners in their office with the contract ready and the bills of exchange already signed. Lucien marvelled at such promptitude. Fendant was a skinny little man of sinister physiognomy: he looked like a Kalmuck with his small receding forehead, his squat nose, his tight mouth, his tiny alert eyes, the tortured contours of his face, his coarse complexion and his voice which sounded like a cracked bell. To sum up, his entire appearance was that of a consummate rogue; but these defects were compensated by the honeyed tone of his utterance, for it was by his discourse that he attained his ends. Cavalier, a bluff individual whom one would have taken for a stage-coach driver rather than a publisher, had reddish hair, a wine-flushed complexion, the thickset build and the volubility of a commercial traveller.

  ‘There’s nothing to discuss,’ said Fendant to Lucien and Lousteau. ‘I’ve read the book; it has literary qualities and suits us so well that I have already sent the manuscript to the press. The contract is drawn up on the agreed basis; for that matter, we never deviate from the terms we have stipulated. Our drafts are payable in six, nine or twelve months; you’ll find it easy to get them discounted and we shall repay you the discount. We have reserved the right to give the work a different title. We don’t like The Archer of Charles the Ninth: it isn’t enough to excite the reader’s curiosity. There were several kings named Charles and so many archers in the Middle Ages! Why now, if you said A Soldier of Napoleon! But The Archer of Charles the Ninth?… Cavalier would have to give a course of lectures on French history in order to sell a single copy in the provinces.’

  ‘If you knew the people we have to deal with!’ cried Cavalier.

  ‘The Saint Bartholomew Massacre would be better,’ continued Fendant.

  ‘Catherine de Medici or France under Charles the Ninth,’ said Cavalier.

  ‘Well, we’ll decide that when the work is printed,’ Fendant concluded.

  ‘As you will,’ said Lucien, ‘provided the title suits me.’

  When the contract was read, signed and duplicates exchanged, Lucien put the bills of exchange in his pocket with unparalleled satisfaction. Then all four went up to Fendant’s apartment where they ate the coarsest kind of lunch: oysters, beef-steaks, kidneys done in champagne and Brie cheese; but these foods were accompanied by exquisite wines procured by Cavalier, who knew a traveller in wines. As they were sitting down to table the printer commissioned for the novel turned up and gave Lucien a surprise by bringing him the first two proof-sheets of his book.

  ‘We want to get on with it,’ said Fendant to Lucien. ‘We’re counting on your book and we’re badly in need of a success.’

  The lunch had begun at midday, but it was not over until five o’clock.

  ‘Where can we cash the bills?’ Lucien asked Lousteau.

  ‘Let’s go and see Barbet,’ Etienne replied.

  The two friends, somewhat heated with wine, went down towards the Quai des Augustins.

  34. Blackmail

  ‘CORALIE’S extremely surprised to hear of Florine’s loss. Florine only told her about it yesterday and blamed you for this misfortune: she seemed embittered to the point of leaving you,’ said Lucien to Lousteau.

  ‘True enough,’ said Lousteau, casting prudence aside and unburdening himself to Lucien. ‘My friend – you, Lucien, are really my friend, for you lent me a thousand francs and so far have only once asked for them back – beware of gambling. If I didn’t gamble I should be happy. I’m in debt to all and sundry. At this moment I have the bailiffs on my heels. In short I’m obliged, when I go to the Palais-Royal, to double some dangerous capes.’

  In viveur slang, ‘doubling a cape’ in Paris means making a detour, either in order not to come upon a creditor or to avoid the places where one might meet him. Lucien, who himself had to be careful about what streets he went through, was familiar with this manœuvre without knowing what it was called.

  ‘So you owe a lot?’

  ‘A paltry amount!’ replied Lousteau. ‘Three thousand francs would put me right. I wanted to go steady and give up gambling, and in order to get solvent I tried a bit of chantage.’

  ‘What’s chantage?’ asked Lucien who had not met this word.

  ‘Blackmail: an invention of the English press recently imported into France. Blackmailers are people in a position to manipulate the newspapers. A newspaper director or editor is never supposed to dabble in blackmail, and so he employs people like Giroudeau or Philippe Bridau. These ruffians approach a man who, for certain reasons, doesn’t want to be talked about. Many people have peccadilloes – more or less original ones – on their conscience. Many fortunes in Paris are suspect, having been acquired by methods of questionable legality and often by criminal practices. Delightful anecdotes could be told about them. For instance, Fouché’s gendarmes closing in on spies employed by the commissioner of police who, not having been let into the secret of the forging of English bank-notes, was about to arrest the printers who, with the connivance of Fouché as Minister of Police, were illicitly producing them. Then there’s the story of Prince Galathione’s diamonds, the Maubreuil affair, the Pombreton legacy, etc. The blackmailer has laid hands on some paper, some important document, and makes an appointment with the man who’s feathered his nest. If the man thus compromised doesn’t pay a certain sum, the blackmailer points out that the Press is ready to set to work on him and unmask him. The rich man is frightened and pays up: the trick’s done. You embark on some sticky operation which a series of articles can bring to failure: a blackmailer is detailed to propose that you buy them off. There are some Ministers to whom blackmailers are sent and who stipulate with them that the paper shall only attack their political acts and not their persons; or they may deliver up their persons and cry quarter for their mistresses. That nice little master of requests, Des Lupeaulx whom you know, is perpetually busy carrying out negotiations of that sort with journalists. The rogue has already made a wonderful position for himself among the powers that be through his relationships: he’s at once the Press mandatory and the ministers’ ambassador; he has shady dealings with people who don’t want to lose their reputations; he even extends this commerce to political affairs, buys the newspapers’ silence about such and such a loan, such and such a concession granted without competition or p
ublicity in which the Liberal banking sharks are given their share. You did a bit of blackmail with Dauriat, who gave you three thousand francs to stop you from running Nathan down. In the eighteenth century, when journalism was in its infancy, blackmail was operated by means of lampoons which royal favourites and great lords paid to have destroyed. The inventor of blackmail was Aretino, a very great Italian who levied imposts on kings just as in our days such and such a newspaper levies imposts on actors.’

  ‘How have you been working on Matifat in order to get your three thousand francs?’

  ‘I had Florine attacked in six newspapers and Florine complained to Matifat. Matifat asked Braulard to find out the reason for these attacks. Braulard was taken in by Finot, for whose profit I was doing the blackmailing, and he told the druggist that you were demolishing Florine in Coralie’s interests. Giroudeau went and intimated to Matifat that everything could be settled if he would sell his sixth share of Finot’s Review for ten thousand francs. Finot was to give me three thousand francs if the trick worked. Matifat was about to clinch the deal, happy to get back ten of his thirty thousand francs which seemed to him a bad risk because Florine had been telling him for several days that the Review wasn’t doing well and that instead of pocketing a dividend he might have to face a new call for capital. But the director of the Panorama-Dramatique, before filing his petition, needed to negotiate a number of bills, and in order to get Matifat to place them, he informed him of the trick Finot was playing on him. Matifat, who’s a smart business man, gave up Florine, kept his sixth share and now he knows what we’re up to. Finot and I are howling with despair. We’ve had the misfortune to attack a man who won’t stand by his mistress, a soulless and heartless wretch I Unfortunately Matifat’s business gives no handle to the Press; his interests are unattackable. You can’t criticize a druggist as you criticize hats, millinery, plays and art products. Cocoa, pepper, paint, dye-woods and opium can’t go down in price. Florine’s at the end of her tether, the Panorama closes down tomorrow, and she’s at her wit’s end to know what to do.’