Lost Illusions

by Honoré de Balzac

  For the first year of his retirement to the country, old Séchard showed a troubled countenance as he leaned over his vine-poles, for he spent all his time in his vineyard, just as formerly he had remained inside his workship. The unhoped-for thirty thousand francs went to his head even more than his cloudy September vintage: in his mind’s eye he could already see himself fingering them lovingly. The less he deserved this money, the more he desired to lay hands on it. And so anxiety often brought him back from Marsac to Angoulême. He toiled up the slopes of the rock on whose pinnacle the town is perched and entered the workshop to see how his son was getting on. The presses were in their usual place. The one and only apprentice, with a paper cap on his head, would be cleaning the ink-balls. The old ‘bear’ could hear the press creaking over an invitation card, recognize his old type and see his son and the foreman, each in his cage, reading what he supposed to be the proofs of a book. After dining with David, he returned to his Marsac property, brooding over his fears. Avarice, like love, is endowed with second sight as regards future contingencies; it sniffs them out and worries them. At a distance from the workshop where the sight of his apparatus fascinated him and carried him back to the days when he was prospering, the vine-grower could detect disquieting symptoms of inactivity in his son’s demeanour. He took fright at the very name of Cointet Brothers, and could see it eclipsing that of Séchard and Son. In short the old man could scent misfortune in the wind, for misfortune was indeed hovering over the Séchard firm. But there is a divinity that looks after misers and, through a combination of unforeseen circumstances, this divinity was about to pour the proceeds of his usurious sale into the drunkard’s lap.

  The reason for the Séchard printing-office being on the decline in spite of factors making for prosperity was David’s indifference to the religious reaction which set in under the Restoration government, equalled by his unconcern about the Liberal movement. He maintained in political and religious matters a neutrality which was most injurious to his interests. He was living in a period when provincial tradespeople had to line up with a party in order to get customers: in fact they had to choose between the patronage either of the Liberals or the Royalists. David had fallen in love; this, together with his scientific preoccupations and his inherent good nature, prevented his having that avidity for gain which goes to the making of a genuine business man and which might have induced him to study the differences existing between provincial and Parisian industry. Shades of opinion, which stand out so clearly in the départements, are obliterated in the great swirl of Parisian activity. The brothers Cointet adopted the views of the monarchist party, made an open show of keeping fast-days, haunted the Cathedral, cultivated the society of priests and brought out reprints of books of devotion as soon as they came into demand. Thus they took the lead in a lucrative side-line, and slandered David by accusing him of liberalism and atheism. How, they asked, could one give work to a man whose father had sided with the Terrorists, who was a drunkard, a Bonapartist, an old miser who sooner or later would surely leave piles of gold to his heir? They themselves were poor men with large families, whereas David was a bachelor and would be rolling in wealth; that was why he was taking things easy. And so forth. Influenced by the accusations thus launched against David, the prefectoral and episcopal officials at length transferred their custom to the Cointets. Soon these greedy opponents, emboldened by their rival’s indifference, founded a second advertising journal. All that the older press had left was jobbing-work from the townspeople; the profits from its advertising journal were reduced by half. Soon the Cointet firm, considerably enriched by the sale of prayer-books and works of piety, offered to buy the Séchard journal in order to monopolize the printing of departmental notices and judicial announcements. The moment David passed on the news to his father, the old vine-grower, appalled by the progress the Cointet firm was making, swooped down from Marsac to the Place du Mûrier with the swiftness of a crow scenting corpses on the battle-field.

  ‘Leave me to deal with the Cointets,’ he said to his son. ‘You keep out of this.’

  The old man was quick to see through the Cointet’s intentions, and they were alarmed by his shrewd appraisal of the situation. His son, he said, was making a blunder, and he was going to prevent it. Where would their custom come from if the journal were handed over? Every solicitor, notary and tradesman in L’Houmeau was a Liberal. Well, the Cointets had tried to ruin the Séchards by making out they were Liberals. But this was as good as throwing out a life-line, for it meant that Séchard and Son would keep all the Liberal advertisements. Sell the journal? Just as well sell out completely, stock and printer’s licence!

  Thereupon he demanded sixty thousand francs of the Cointets for the printing-works, to save his son from ruin. He loved his son; he was protecting his son. The vine-grower made use of his son as peasants make use of their wives: his son wanted this, or he didn’t want that, according to the propositions he extorted one by one from the Cointets. By this means he persuaded them, not without great effort, to pay twenty-two thousand francs for the Charente Advertiser. But David was to undertake never to print any periodical whatsoever, under a penalty of thirty thousand francs’ damages. This sale spelled suicide for the Séchard press, but the vine-grower cared little for that. Theft always leads to murder. The old reprobate counted on applying this sum to the recovery of his capital, and to lay his fingers on that he would have handed David over into the bargain, the more readily because this nuisance of a son had a right to one half of the unexpected windfall. By way of compensation, the generous father made over the printing-works to him – but he still kept the rent for the house at the prodigious figure of twelve hundred francs a year.

  After this sale of the Charente Advertiser to the Cointets, the old man rarely came to town, alleging his great age; but the real reason was his lack of interest in a printing-office which no longer belonged to him. Nevertheless he was unable entirely to repudiate the long-standing affection he felt for his apparatus. When his concerns brought him to Angoulême, it would have been very difficult to decide what most attracted him to the house – his wooden presses or his son, whom he visited in order to make pro forma requests for his rent. His erstwhile foreman, who had now gone over to the Cointets, well knew what to make of this paternal generosity: the wily old fox, he said, was thus reserving to himself the right of intervening in his son’s affairs, since the accumulation of unpaid rents made him a preferential creditor.

  David Séchard’s negligence was due to causes which will throw light on the young man’s character. A few days after settling in at his father’s printing-office, he had met one of his school friends, Lucien Chardon, a young man of about twenty-one, who at that time was living in the utmost poverty. He was the son of a former medical officer in the Republican armies who had been invalided out as a result of a wound. Nature had made a chemist of Monsieur Chardon senior, and chance had set him up as a pharmacist in Angoulême. Death overtook him just as he was working his way to a lucrative discovery after spending several years at scientific research. He was trying to find a cure for all kinds of gout. Gout is a rich man’s disease, and rich men will pay any price to recover their health once lost. And so, among all the problems which had given him subject for meditation, he had singled out this one for resolution. Divided between science and his practice as a pharmacist, the late Chardon had realized that science alone could bring him prosperity: he had accordingly studied the causes of the disease and based his remedy on a certain diet suited to every constitution. He died during a stay in Paris while soliciting the approval of the Academy of Science, and thus lost the fruit of his labours. Anticipating prosperous times, the pharmacist had spared no expense for the education of his son and daughter, so that budgeting for the family constantly ate away the income from his chemist’s shop. Consequently, he not only left his children in poverty but also, unfortunately for them, he had brought them up in the expectation of a brilliant future, which his death extinguished. Th
e illustrious doctor Desplein tended him in his last moments and watched him die in convulsions of rage. The prime motive for his ambition had been the ardent love he bore his wife, the last representative of the Rubempré family, whom he had miraculously saved from the scaffold in 1793. Without getting the girl’s consent for the fiction, he had gained time by alleging she was pregnant. After having to some extent established the right to marry her, he did in fact marry her in spite of their mutual poverty. His children, like all love-children, inherited their mother’s beauty and nothing more: a present which so often proves fatal when it goes with poverty. Madame Chardon’s keen participation in her husband’s hopes, labours and disappointments had made deep inroads into her beauty, just as her standard of living had suffered from the gradual deterioration which indigence inflicts; but her courage, and that of her children, proved equal to this adversity. The poverty-stricken widow sold the chemist’s shop situated in the High Street of L’Houmeau, Angoulême’s principal suburb. The proceeds allowed her to purchase an income of three hundred francs a year, a sum insufficient to provide even for her own needs; but she and her daughter accepted their situation without shame and went out to work to earn a living. The mother became a nurse for women in labour, and her gentle manners gained her the preference over all others in the rich households, in which she lived without costing her children anything and in fact earned twenty sous a day. To spare her son the humiliation of seeing his mother reduced to such humble employment, she had assumed the name of ‘Madame Charlotte’. People in need of her services applied to Monsieur Postel, Chardon’s successor. Lucien’s sister worked in a laundry which handled fine linen and belonged to a neighbour, a very decent woman much esteemed in L’Houmeau, a Madame Prieur, and there she was earning about fifteen sous a day. She was in charge of the laundry-women and so enjoyed a sort of superiority which raised her somewhat above the class of working-girls. The meagre proceeds of their toil, added to Madame Chardon’s income of three hundred francs, amounted to about eight hundred francs a year, which had to provide these three people with food, clothes and lodging. Even strict economy made this seem scarcely adequate, for it was almost entirely absorbed by Lucien’s requirements. Madame Chardon and her daughter Eve believed in Lucien as fervently as Mahomet’s wife believed in her husband: there were no bounds to the sacrifices they made for his future. This hard-up family lived in L’Houmeau in a dwelling rented for a very modest sum from Monsieur Chardon’s successor; it lay at the further end of an inner court, over the dispensary. Lucien occupied a shabby room in the attic. Spurred on by his father who, with his passion for the natural sciences, had at first urged his son in the same direction, Lucien was one of the most brilliant pupils in the College of Angoulême; he had reached a senior class at the time Séchard was finishing his studies there.

  When chance brought these two school friends together again Lucien, tired of drinking from the rudely-fashioned cup of poverty, was on the verge of making one of those drastic decisions which young men of twenty are apt to make. David offered to teach Lucien the art of proof-reading, although he had absolutely no need of a foreman, and paid him a wage of forty francs a month, which saved him from despair. The ties of a friendship dating from schooldays, thus renewed, were strengthened both by the similarity of their predicament and the differences in their characters. Both of them, full of varied ideas for making their fortune, were possessed of that soaring intelligence which makes a man capable of the highest achievements. Yet there they were, at the very bottom of the social ladder. The injustice of their lot forged a powerful bond between them. Moreover, each of them was a poet, although they had climbed different slopes on their way to Parnassus. Although he had been destined for the highest speculations of natural science, Lucien had an ardent thirst for literary glory, while David, whose meditative genius predisposed him to poetry, felt drawn towards the exact sciences. This interchange of roles engendered a kind of spiritual affinity between them. Lucien was not slow in communicating to David the lofty views transmitted to him by his father on the application of science to industry; and David opened Lucien’s eyes to new paths in literature along which he might venture in order to make his name and fortune. In a few days the friendship between these two young people developed into the kind of passion that occurs only as one emerges from adolescence. David soon caught a glimpse of the beautiful Eve and fell in love with all the fervour natural to a melancholic and meditative spirit. The liturgical Et nunc et semper et in secula seculorum is the guiding maxim for those sublime, unknown poets whose only works are the magnificent epics which two hearts conceive but never consign to paper. When Eve’s admirer fathomed the secret hopes which Lucien’s mother and sister were setting on his handsome, poetic brow, when he became aware of their blind devotion, he found it sweet to draw closer to his beloved by sharing her hopes and self-denial. And so Lucien became a chosen brother to David. Like the ‘Ultras’ who were then trying to be more royalist than the King himself, David carried to excess the faith which mother and sister placed in Lucien’s genius, and indulged him as a mother does her child. During one of the frequent conversations in which, under the stress of frustrating penury, they were ruminating as all young people do over means of prompt enrichment – shaking the branches of all the trees which earlier marauders had already denuded of their fruit – Lucien remembered two ideas put forward by his father. Monsieur Chardon had talked of halving the price of sugar by the use of a new chemical reagent, and of a similar reduction in the cost of paper to be achieved by importing from America certain inexpensive vegetable substances analogous to those used by the Chinese. David recognized the importance of this problem over which the Didots had already cogitated, and he seized on the idea, seeing a promise of enrichment in it; and so he looked on Lucien as a benefactor whom he would never be able to repay.

  Anyone will divine the incompetence of these two friends to manage a printing-press, obsessed as they were by their schemes and their cult of the inner life. Far from bringing in between fifteen and twenty thousand a year, as did the printing-office of the Cointet brothers, printers and publishers to the diocese, proprietors of the Charente Advertiser, which was now the only periodical in the département, the press belonging to young Séchard scarcely produced three hundred francs a month; and from this had to be deducted the proof-reader’s salary, Marion’s wages, taxes and rent; and that only left David with about one hundred francs a month. In enterprising and industrious hands the type would have been renewed, steel presses bought and a contract made with Paris publishers for cheap reprints of their books. But master-printer and foreman were so absorbed in their intellectual pursuits that they were content to carry out the orders placed by their sole remaining customers. The Cointet brothers were now so fully aware of David’s character and manner of life that they slandered him no more; on the contrary, a wiser policy was to let his press rub along in honest mediocrity so that it should not fall into the hands of some rival to be feared; they themselves passed the so-called town custom on to it. Thus, without knowing it, David owed his commercial survival to the cunning calculation of his competitors. Pleased with what they called his mania, the Cointets made a show of rectitude and loyalty in their dealings with him; but in reality they were behaving like the Public Transport Service when it stages bogus competition in order to ward off a genuine one.

  The outside of the Séchard premises was in keeping with the squalor reigning inside: the old ‘bear’ had never carried out any repairs. Rain, sun and every variety of inclement weather had made the door opening on to the alley look like an old tree-trunk, so deeply was it scored with cracks of unequal sizes. The house-front, an unsymmetrical medley of stone and brick, seemed to be drooping under the weight of a decrepit roof overladen with concave tiles such as are used for all roof-structures in the southern parts of France. The worm-eaten window-frames were furnished with the enormous shutters supported by thick cross-beams which the hot climate necessitates. It would have been difficult
in the whole of Angoulême to find a building so full of cracks and so held together by the strength of its cement. Imagine the workshop itself, having light at both ends but dark in the centre, its walls plastered with posters, the lower half of them worn brown by the workmen who had been rubbing against them for thirty years, its ceiling encumbered with rope-tackle, its piles of paper, aged presses, stacks of stone slabs for flattening out the wetted sheets, rows of case and, at one end, the two cages in which master and foreman took their respective stances. This will show you what sort of existence the two friends led.

  In 1821, in the early days of May, David and Lucien were standing by the window overlooking the court at about two in the afternoon, just as their four or five workmen were going off to dinner. When the master-printer saw his apprentice shutting the street door, which had a bell, he took Lucien out into the courtyard, as if he could no longer endure the smell of paper, ink-troughs, presses and old wooden utensils. The two of them sat down under the arbour from which they could descry anyone entering the workshop. The sunbeams frolicking among the vine-branches caressed the two poets and threw a halo of light around them. The contrast between the physiognomy and characters of the two men was so strongly accentuated that it might have tempted a painter to take up his brush. David had the physical conformation which nature bestows on beings predestined to arduous effort, whether spectacular or unobserved. His broad chest was set between robust shoulders which had the same fullness as all his members. His face, tanned brown, but florid and plump, rising from a sturdy neck, and framed in an abundant forest of black hair, reminded one at first of Boileau’s cathedral canons, ruddy and glowing with health. But further inspection revealed, in the curve of his full lips, his cleft chin, the square cut of his nose with its sensitively chiselled nostrils – and above all in his eyes! – the steady flame of a first and only love, the sagacity of a thinker, the ardent melancholy of a mind capable of scanning the horizon from end to end and taking cognizance of all its undulations, one which readily found disillusion in imagined joys after subjecting them to the hard, clear light of analysis. If one could divine in this countenance the darting flashes of genius in eruption, one could also see the cinders lining the crater: the hope burning within it was damped down by a profound consciousness of the social obscurity in which humble birth and lack of means confine so many lofty spirits. In contrast with this needy printer nauseated with his occupation though it brought him so much in contact with intellectual activity, in contrast with this squat, ungainly Silene who drank as from a goblet deep draughts of science and poetry, seeking intoxication from them in order to forget the miseries of provincial life, Lucien had the grace of bearing with which sculptors have endowed the Indian Bacchus. His face had the distinction of line found in antique beauty: he had a Grecian brow and nose, the smooth whiteness of a woman’s skin, and eyes of so deep a blue that they seemed to be black – eyes brimming with tenderness, their whites so limpid as to vie with those of a child. Above these fine orbs, edged with long, light brown lashes, were eye-brows such as a Chinese brush might have traced. A silky down gave a touch of colour to the cheeks and harmonized with that of his fair, naturally curly hair. An Olympian suavity shone forth on his golden-white temples. His short but gently curving chin bore the impress of incomparable nobility. The smile of a mourning angel hovered over lips whose coral was off-set by impeccably white teeth. He had the hands of a well-born man, elegant hands whose every gesture men felt constrained to obey and which a woman would have wanted to kiss. He was slender but of average height. Any man looking at his feet would have been tempted to take him for a girl in disguise, the more so because, like most men of subtle, not to say astute mind, he had a woman’s shapely hips. This is usually reliable as a clue to character, and was so in Lucien’s case, for his restless turn of mind often brought him, when he came to analyse the present state cf society, to adopt the depravity of outlook characteristic of diplomats, who believe that any means however shameful they may be, are justified by success. One of the great misfortunes to which great intelligence is subjected is the necessity of comprehending all things, vice and virtue alike.