Lost Illusions

by Honoré de Balzac

  These two young people passed sovereign judgement on society the more readily because of the inferiority of their own status, for unappreciated men make up for their lowly position by the disdainful eye they cast upon the world. Moreover their despair was the more bitter because it made them press on more impetuously to what they regarded as their true destiny. Lucien had done much reading and much comparing; David did much thinking and much pondering. Although the printer seemed to enjoy the robust health of a peasant, he was a man of melancholic, even sickly genius and was lacking in self-confidence; whereas Lucien, possessing more initiative but less stability of mind, displayed an audacity which tallied ill with his languid, almost frail though femininely graceful physique. His was superlatively a Gascon temperament, bold, courageous, adventurous, overrating the bright and minimizing the gloomy side of things, never recoiling from a profitable misdeed and making light of vice if it served as a stepping-stone. These ambitious tendencies were so far kept in check by the beautiful illusions of youth which inclined him towards the nobler means which men enamoured of glory adopt in preference to any others. As yet he was at grips only with his own desires and not the difficulties of life, with his own potentialities and not that moral laxity which sets a terrible temptation to volatile spirits. Deeply fascinated by Lucien’s brilliance of mind, David continued to admire him even while correcting the errors into which the furia francese flung him. The upright David’s timidity of character was in conflict with his robustness of constitution, though he did not lack the doggedness of northern Frenchmen. Quick at discerning all difficulties, he was nevertheless ready to face them without losing heart; and he tempered the firmness of a truly apostolic rectitude with gracious and inexhaustible forbearance. In this long-established friendship, one of them loved the other to the point of idolatory: it was David. And so Lucien assumed control like a woman conscious of being loved, while David gave willing obedience. His friend’s physical beauty implied an ascendancy which David acknowledged, believing himself to be uncouth and commonplace.

  ‘The patient ox should draw the plough, the bird should be carefree,’ the printer told himself. ‘I will be the ox, Lucien shall be the eagle.’

  For nearly three years therefore, the two friends had had one common destiny, one bright future ahead of them. They read the masterpieces which, once peace was proclaimed, loomed up on the literary and scientific horizon: the works of Schiller, Goethe, Lord Byron, Walter Scott, Jean-Paul Richter, Berzelius, Sir Humphry Davy, Cuvier, Lamartine etc. They drew warmth from these flaming hearths, made their own abortive writing efforts, took them up, laid them down, took them up again with ardour, toiling on continually without exhausting their unflagging youthful energy. Both were poor but fired with the love of art and science, and they forgot their present poverty in their efforts to lay the foundation of their future renown.

  ‘Lucien, do you know what I have just received from Paris?’ asked the printer, drawing a little 18mo volume from his pocket. ‘Listen.’

  And David read, as only a poet could read, André Chénier’s bucolic poem entitled Néère and the one entitled The Love-Sick Youth, followed by the elegy on suicide which is couched in the style of antiquity, and finally Chénier’s last two iambic poems.

  ‘So that is what André Chénier is like!’ Lucien exclaimed again and again. ‘It drives one to despair,’ he repeated for the third time when David, too moved to go on reading, handed the volume over to him, – ‘A poet discovered by another poet!’ he cried, when he saw by whom the preface was signed.

  ‘After writing all these poems,’ David continued, ‘Chénier still thought he had produced nothing worthy of publication.’

  In his turn Lucien read out the epic passage from The Blind Poet and several elegies. When he came to the fragment:

  Have they not bliss? Then there is none on earth,

  he kissed the book, and the two friends wept, for they were both of them madly in love. The vine-shoots were coming into colour, the aged walls of the house, full of fissures and bulges, with ugly cracks running across them in irregular fashion, had been adorned with the fluting, the embossments, the bas-reliefs and the innumerable embellishments of some strange, faery architecture. Fantasy had scattered its blossoms and rubies over the dingy little courtyard. For David, André Chénier’s Camilla had changed into his beloved Eve, and for Lucien into a great lady to whom he was paying court. Poetry had draped the majestic folds of its starry gown over the printing-office in which ‘monkeys’ and ‘bears’ were performing their antics. It was just on five o’clock, but the two friends were neither hungry nor thirsty; life was one golden dream, and all the riches of the world lay at their feet. They could descry that patch of blue on the horizon to which Hope points a finger for those whose life is overclouded, while saying with siren voice: ‘Go, spread your wings: you will find escape from misery in that stretch of gold, silver or azure.’ At this instant an apprentice named Cérizet, a Paris street-urchin whom David had brought to Angoulême, opened the little glass door from the workshop to the court, and indicated where the two friends sat to a stranger who came towards them and gave a bow.

  ‘Monsieur,’ he said to David, pulling an enormous copybook from his pocket. ‘Here is a memoir I should like to have printed. Would you give me an estimate of the cost?’

  ‘Monsieur, we do not print such sizable manuscripts,’ David replied without even glancing at the copybook. ‘Go and see Messrs Cointet.’

  ‘But we have a case of very pretty type which would be suitable,’ Lucien added, taking the manuscript. ‘Perhaps you would be good enough to come again tomorrow and leave us your work so that we may reckon up the cost of printing.’

  ‘Is it not Monsieur Lucien Chardon whom I have the honour…?’

  ‘Himself, sir,’ answered the proof-reader.

  ‘I am happy, sir,’ the author said, ‘to make the acquaintance of a young poet of such brilliant promise. I come from Madame de Bargeton.’

  Lucien reddened on hearing this name and stammered a few words to express his gratitude for the interest Madame de Bargeton was taking in him. David noticed the blush and his friend’s embarrassment, and left him in conversation with this country gentleman, who had written a memorandum on the culture of silkworms, and was impelled by vanity to get into print so that his colleagues of the Agricultural Society could read his monograph.

  ‘Well, well, Lucien!’ said David when the gentleman had gone away. ‘Can it be that you’re in love with Madame de Bargeton?’

  ‘Desperately!’

  ‘But there’s a wider gulf of prejudice between you and her than if she were in Pekin and you in Greenland!’

  ‘Where there’s a will there’s a way between people in love,’ said Lucien, with his gaze turned down.

  ‘You’ll forget all about us,’ replied the beautiful Eve’s timorous admirer.

  ‘On the contrary, it may be that I have given up my lady for your sake,’ cried Lucien.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Although I love her, and in spite of the diverse interests which prompt me to obtain a footing in her house, I have told her I would never return there if a man whose talents are superior to mine, who is worthy of a glorious future, if David Séchard, my brother and friend, were not accepted there. Her reply should be waiting for me at home. But although all the local aristocracy is invited there for this evening to a reading of my verses, if the reply is negative, I will never set foot again in Madame de Bargeton’s house.’

  David gave Lucien a vigorous handshake after wiping the tears from his eyes. The clock struck six.

  ‘Eve will be getting anxious. Good-bye,’ said Lucien abruptly. He made off, leaving David a prey to emotions which at his age alone are felt with such intensity, and above all in the case of two cygnets whose wings had not yet been clipped by life in the provinces.

  ‘A heart of gold!’ cried David, following Lucien with his eye as he walked through the workshop.

  Lucien str
ode down to L’Houmeau through the handsome Promenade de Beaulieu, the rue du Minage and the Porte Saint-Pierre. You may know by the fact of his taking the longest way that Madame de Bargeton’s house was situated on this route. It gave him so much pleasure to pass under her windows – even though she was unaware of it – that for two months he had not returned home by the Porte-Palet.

  As he passed beneath the trees of Beaulieu, he surveyed the distance separating Angoulême from L’Houmeau. Local manners and customs had raised spiritual barriers between them which were much more difficult to cross than the slopes which Lucien was now descending. This ambitious young man, who had just gained admission to the Bargeton mansion by making his poetic reputation a bridge between town and suburb, was as anxious about his patroness’s decision as can be a court favourite apprehensive of disgrace when he has tried to extend his power. These words must seem obscure to those who have not yet observed the manners peculiar to cities divided into an upper and a lower town; but it is all the more necessary at this point to make some remarks on Angoulême because they will help us to understand Madame de Bargeton, one of the most important characters in this story.

  2. Madame de Bargeton

  ANGOULÊME is an ancient town built on the summit of a cone-shaped rock towering over the meadows through which the river Charente runs. From the Périgord direction this rock forms a long ridge which terminates abruptly on the Paris-Bordeaux road, thus forming a sort of promontory marked out by three picturesque valleys. The importance of this town at the time of the religious wars is attested by its ramparts, its city gates and the ruins of a fortress perched on the peak of the rock. Its situation formerly made it a strategic point which was equally valuable to Catholics and Calvinists; but its erstwhile strength constitutes its weakness today; the ramparts and the excessive slope of the rock have prevented it from sprawling out over the Charente valley and condemned it to the direst stagnation. About the time when our story begins, the Government was trying to push the town forward into Périgord by building the prefectoral palace, a marine school and military establishments along the hill, and laying plans for roads. But commerce had moved in the opposite direction. Long since, the suburb of L’Houmeau had spread out like a bed of mushrooms at the foot of the rock and along the river banks, parallel to which runs the main road from Paris to Bordeaux. The paper-mills of Angoulême are well-famed: during the last three centuries they had of necessity established themselves along the Charente and its tributaries, where waterfalls were available. At Ruelle the State had set up its most important foundry for naval cannons. Haulage, post-houses, inns, wheelwrights’ workshops, public transport services, all the industries which depend on roads and waterways clustered round the base of Angoulême in order to avoid the difficulties presented by access to the town itself. Naturally tanneries, laundries and all water-side trades remained within reach of the Charente, which was also lined with brandy warehouses, depots for all raw materials conveyed by water and in fact for all kinds of goods in transit. And so the suburb of L’Houmeau became a busy and prosperous town, a second Angoulême, arousing resentment in the upper town where the administration, the Bishop’s palace, the courts of justice and the aristocracy remained. For this reason L’Houmeau, despite its increasing activity and importance, was a mere appendage of Angoulême. The nobility and the political authority held sway on high, commerce and finance down below: two social zones, everywhere and constantly hostile to each other; as a consequence, it is difficult to guess which of the two towns more cordially hates its rival. This state of things had remained fairly quiescent during the Empire; nine years of Restoration government had aggravated it. Most of the houses in Upper Angoulême are inhabited either by noble families or by long-established middle-class families living on their investments and constituting a sort of autochtonous nation to which strangers are never admitted. It is a rare occurrence if, even after living in the place for a couple of hundred years and contracting a marriage alliance with one of the original families, a family which has migrated from some neighbouring province is received into the fold: the native population still considers it a newcomer. Prefects, Receivers-General and civil service officials who have succeeded one another for forty years have tried to civilize these ancient families perched on their rock like so many watchful ravens: these families have attended their receptions and eaten their dinners, but they have persistently refused to welcome them to their own houses. Disdainful, disparaging, jealous and miserly, these houses intermarry and close their ranks to prevent anyone entering or leaving; they know nothing of the creations of modern luxury; in their view, to send a child to Paris is to seal its doom. Such prudence illustrates the antiquated manners and customs of these families, far gone in unintelligent royalism, fanatically devout though not genuinely pious, all of them as rigid in their way of life as the town itself and the rock on which it is built. And yet Angoulême enjoys a great reputation in the adjacent provinces for the education young people receive there. Neighbouring towns send their daughters to its boarding-schools and convents. It is easy to imagine the influence exerted by class-consciousness in Angoulême and L’Houmeau. Business people are rich, the aristocracy is generally impoverished. Each vents its spite on the other by an equal show of contempt. Even the middle classes in Angoulême join in this antagonism. A shopkeeper in the upper town cannot put enough scorn into his voice when he refers to a merchant of the suburb as a man from L’Houmeau. The Restoration, when it defined the status of the French nobility and awakened its hopes of something which only a general social upheaval could bring about, widened the moral gulf which, far more than the difference of locality, divided Angoulême from L’Houmeau. The aristocratic society of Angoulême, at that time at one with the Government, became more exclusive than anywhere else in France. Anyone living in L’Houmeau was virtually a pariah. Hence the deep, underground hatreds which were to inspire a terrible unanimity in those who engineered the insurrection of 1830 and destroyed the elements of a durable social community in France. The arrogance of the court nobility was a cause of alienation between the throne and the provincial nobility, and the latter alienated the middle-classes by wounding all their susceptibilities. It follows that to introduce a man from L’Houmeau, the son of a chemist, into Madame de Bargeton’s circle constituted in itself a minor revolution. And who had started such ideas? Lamartine and Victor Hugo, Casimir Delavigne and Canalis, Villemain and Monsieur Aignan, Soumet and Tissot, Etienne and D’Avrigny, Benjamin Constant and Lamennais, Victor Cousin and Michaud: in short, all the older and younger literary celebrities, Liberals as well as Royalists. Madame de Bargeton was enamoured of art and letters, an extravagance of taste, a mania which Angoulême openly deplored; but some justification for it must be offered by sketching the life of this woman who was born for celebrity but whom an inevitable train of circumstances maintained in obscurity: her influence was to determine Lucien’s destinies.

  Monsieur de Bargeton was the great-grandson of an alderman of Bordeaux, Mirault by name, who in the reign of Louis XIII had risen to noble status by virtue of his long-exercised function. Under Louis XIV his son, now Mirault de Bargeton, became an officer in the Household Guards and made such a lucrative marriage that, in the time of Louis XV, his son became purely and simply Monsieur de Bargeton. This Monsieur de Bargeton, grandson of the worshipful alderman, was so intent on behaving like a model nobleman that he squandered all the family property and checked its advance towards prosperity. Two of his brothers, great-uncles of the present-day Monsieur de Bargeton, reverted to commerce, so that there are still Miraults in business in Bordeaux. Since the Bargeton estate, situated in the province of Angoulême in dependency on the fief of La Rochefoucauld, was entailed, as well as a mansion in Angoulême which was called Bargeton House, the grandson of Monsieur de Bargeton the Squanderer inherited these two properties. In 1789 he lost all his effective feudal rights and had nothing more than the income from his land, which amounted to about ten thousand francs a year. If
his grandfather had followed the glorious example set by Bargeton the First and Bargeton the Second, Bargeton the Fifth, who may be styled Bargeton the Silent, could have become the Marquis de Bargeton. He might have married into some great family and risen to be a duke and peer like so many others; whereas in 1805 he was very flattered to marry Mademoiselle Marie-Louise-Anaïs de Nègrepelisse, the daughter of a country gentleman who had long since been lost sight of in his manor-house although he belonged to the younger branch of one of the most ancient families in southern France. There was a Nègrepelisse among the hostages who stood surety for Saint Louis; but the chief of the elder branch bears the illustrious name of d’Espard, acquired under Henri IV through marriage with the heiress of that family. This gentleman, the younger son of a younger son, drew his subsistence from the property of his wife, a small estate near Barbezieux, which he exploited very successfully indeed by taking his own corn to market, distilling his own brandy and taking no heed of ridicule so long as he could fill his moneybags and enlarge his domain from time to time.