Lost Illusions

by Honoré de Balzac

  Du Châtelet was able to have his say without interruption from Madame de Bargeton: she was struck by the apropos of his observations. The first lady in Angoulême had indeed reckoned on keeping her incognito.

  ‘You are right, dear friend,’ she said. ‘But what should I do?’

  ‘Let me find you suitable apartments, completely furnished. That way you will live more cheaply than in any hotel, and you will be in your own home. If you take my advice you will sleep there tonight.’

  ‘But how did you find out my address?’

  ‘Your carriage was easy to recognize, and besides, I was following you. At Sèvres the postilion who was bringing you told mine your address. Will you allow me to be your quarter-master? I will soon write and tell you where I have found lodging for you.’

  ‘Very well, do so,’ she said.

  This seemed a little thing to say, but it meant everything. The Baron du Chêtelet had spoken like a man of the world to a woman of the world. He had come dressed with all the elegance of Parisian fashion in a smart and well-appointed cabriolet. It so happened that Madame de Bargeton was standing at her window to consider her situation, and from there she watched the old dandy’s departure. A minute or two later Lucien, abruptly awoken and hastily dressed, appeared before her in his last-year’s nankeen trousers and his shabby little frock-coat. He was handsome, but his clothes were ridiculous. If you put the Belvedere Apollo or Antinous in a water-carrier’s costume, will you recognize him as the superb creation of a Greek or Roman chisel? The eye makes comparisons before the heart can rectify its rapid and automatic judgement. The contrast between Lucien and Chêtelet was too blatant for Louise not to be struck by it. When, at about six o’clock, dinner was over, Madame de Bargeton motioned Lucien to come and sit beside her on the shabby sofa covered in yellow-flowered red calico.

  ‘My Lucien,’ she said. ‘Don’t you think that if we have committed an indiscretion equally disastrous to us both, there is reason for repairing it? We must not live together in Paris, dear child, nor let it be suspected that we came here together. Your future depends on my position, and I must do nothing to prejudice it. And so, from tonight onwards, I am going to lodge a short distance away; but you will stay in this hotel, and we can meet every day without criticism from anyone.’

  Louise then expounded the laws of society to Lucien, who listened with wide-open eyes. Though he did not know that women who are going back on their indiscretions are going back on their love, he realized that for her he was no longer the Lucien of Angoulême. She only talked to him about herself, her own interests, her reputation, her place in society, and to palliate her selfishness she tried to persuade him that his own interests were also at stake. He had no rights over Louise, who had so promptly become Madame de Bargeton once more, and worse still he had no power either! And so he could not keep back the big tears which filled his eyes.

  ‘If I am your hope and pride, you mean even more to me. You are my only hope and my whole future. I understood that if you were to share my success you would share my misfortunes too. And here we are, separating already.’

  ‘You are judging my conduct,’ she said. ‘You do not love me.’ Lucien looked at her with such a pained expression that she could not refrain from adding: ‘Dear boy, I will stay here if you wish: it will spell ruin for both of us and we shall be without support. But when we are equal in misery and both of us are spurned, when failure – for we must foresee all possibilities – has relegated us to L’Escarbas, remember, my love, that I predicted this result, and that I proposed at the beginning that you should make your way in conformity with and obedience to the laws of society.’

  ‘Louise,’ he replied, putting his arms round her. ‘It frightens me to see you so prudent. Remember that I’m very young and that I abandoned myself entirely to your dear will. I myself had wished to triumph over men and things by sheer force; but if I can succeed more quickly with your aid than by myself I shall be very happy to owe all my good fortune to you. Forgive me! I have staked too much on you not to be full of fear. For me, separation from you is a prelude to abandonment, and abandonment would kill me.’

  ‘But my dear child,’ she replied, ‘Society does not ask a lot of you. It is merely a question of your sleeping here; you can spend the day in my flat without anyone taking exception.’

  In the end a few caresses pacified Lucien. An hour later Gentil brought a note from Châtelet to tell Madame de Bargeton that he had found rooms in the rue Neuve-du-Luxem-bourg. She enquired where this street was situated – it was not very far from the rue de l’Echelle – and told Lucien: ‘We shall be near one another.’ Two hours later Louise took a carriage sent by du Châtelet in order to go to her flat. It was the kind of place that tapestry-makers furnish and let to rich deputies or important persons making a short visit to Paris: sumptuous but inconvenient. At about eleven o’clock Lucien returned to the little Hôtel du Gaillard-Bois, having so far seen nothing more of Paris than that part of the rue Saint-Honoré which runs between the rue Neuve-du-Luxembourg and the rue de l’Echelle. He went to bed in his sordid little room, which he could not help comparing with Louise’s magnificent quarters. Just after he had left her, Baron Châtelet arrived there on his way back from the house of the Minister for Foreign Affairs, in all the splendour of his ballroom array. He had come to tell her of the arrangements he had made for her. Louise was worried: such luxury appalled her. Provincial ways of life had had their effect on her in the long run and she had become strict in her accounts, which she kept in such good order that in Paris she would have been taken for a miser. She had come away with a draft for twenty thousand francs from the Receiver-General, reckoning that this sum would more than cover her expenses for four years. She feared already that it was not enough and that she would fall into debt. Châtelet informed her that her flat would not cost her more than six hundred francs a month.

  ‘A mere nothing,’ he said as he saw Naïs give a shrug. ‘You have at your disposal a carriage which will cost you five hundred francs a month: that makes little more than a thousand francs. After that you need only think of what you will spend on clothes. A woman who moves in society cannot settle things otherwise. If you want to get Monsieur de Bargeton made a Receiver-General or obtain a post for him in the King’s household, you must not look like a pauper. Here gifts are made only to the rich. You are lucky to have Gentil to escort you and Albertine to dress you, for servants in Paris cost the earth. Launched in society as you will be, you won’t often eat at home.’

  Madame de Bargeton and the Baron chatted about Paris. Du Châtelet told her the latest news and the thousand and one niceties to be observed if one wishes to be accepted as a Parisian. He was not slow in giving Naïs advice about the shops she should patronize: he recommended Herbault for toques, Juliette for hats and bonnets; he told her where she could find a dressmaker to replace Victorine; in short he impressed on her the necessity of casting off everything to do with her Angoulême ways. As he was leaving, a happy inspiration came to him on the spur of the moment:

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he said in casual tones, ‘I shall no doubt have a box at some theatre. I will pick you up, you and Monsieur de Rubempré, and take you to it. You will allow me, will you not, to show both of you a little of life in Paris.’

  ‘He has more generosity of character than I thought,’ Madame de Bargeton told herself on seeing Lucien invited.

  In the month of September cabinet ministers have hardly any use for their boxes at the theatre: ministerial deputies and their constituents are busy with their grape-gatherings or their harvests, while their most exacting acquaintances are away in the country or travelling. And so, at this season, the finest boxes in the Paris theatres are filled with an assortment of guests whom the regular theatre-goers never see again and who make the audience look like a piece of patched tapestry. The idea had already come to du Châtelet that, thanks to this circumstance, and without much expense, he could procure for Naïs the kind of amusement most enticing
to provincial visitors. The next day, when Lucien made his first call on Louise, he did not find her at home. She was out doing some indispensable shopping. Having written to tell the Marquise d’Espard of her arrival, she had gone to hold counsel with the grave and illustrious authorities on ladies’ fashions whom du Châtelet had cited to her. Although Madame de Bargeton possessed the self-confidence which long-standing domination confers, she was terribly afraid of looking provincial. She had tact enough to know how much relations between women depend on first impressions, and though she knew she was capable of promptly rising to the level of superior women like Madame d’Espard, she felt the need to inspire good will at the first encounter, and was particularly anxious not to neglect anything which might contribute to success. She was therefore infinitely grateful to Châtelet for having indicated by what means she might get into step with the Parisian beau monde. By a strange chance the Marquise found herself in a situation which made her delighted to render service to someone of her husband’s family. The Marquis d’Espard had withdrawn from society for no apparent cause. He was taking no interest in his own affairs, or politics, or family concerns, or those of his wife.1 Left thus to her own devices, the Marquise felt that she needed the approval of society; therefore she was happy to be able to replace the Marquis in this circumstance by befriending his relations. Her intention was to put some ostentation into this patronage so that her husband might appear more obviously to be in the wrong. That very day she sent to ‘Madame de Bargeton, née Nègrepelisse,’ a note so nicely worded as to conceal from the cursory reader the shallowness of its contents.

  She wrote that she was happy for a turn of events which was bringing a person whom she had heard mentioned and was desirous to know into closer connection with the family, for friendships in Paris were not so stable that she did not wish to have someone else on earth to love, and if this were not to come about she would have merely one more illusion to be interred with the rest. She put herself entirely at her cousin’s disposal. She would have come to see her had an indisposition not kept her indoors; but she already regarded herself as being under an obligation to Madame de Bargeton because she had thought of her.

  In the course of his first random stroll through the boulevards and the rue de la Paix, Lucien, like all new-comers to Paris, took more stock of things than of persons. In Paris, it is first of all the general pattern that commands attention. The luxury of the shops, the height of the buildings, the busy to-and-fro of carriages, the ever-present contrast between extreme luxury and extreme indigence, all these things are particularly striking. Abashed at the sight of this alien crowd, the imaginative young man felt as if he himself was enormously diminished. People who in the provinces enjoy a certain amount of consideration and at every step they take meet with some proof of their own importance can in no wise accustom themselves to this sudden and total devaluation. Some transition is needed between the two states of being a somebody at home and of being a nobody in Paris; and those who pass too abruptly from the one to the other experience a feeling of annihilation. For a young poet used to having a sounding-board for all his feelings, an ear into which he could pour all his thoughts and a kindred soul to share his slightest impressions, Paris was to prove a fearsome desert. Lucien had not gone to fetch his fine blue coat, so that he felt embarrassed by the sorry, not to say ruinous, condition of his clothes as he was returning to Madame de Bargeton’s flat at a time when he deemed she would be back. The Baron du Châtelet was already there, and he took them both out to dine at the Rocher-de-Cancale. Lucien, stunned by the rapid whirl of life in Paris, could say nothing to Louise, as all three of them were together inside the carriage. But he squeezed her hand, and she gave a friendly response to all the thoughts he was thus expressing. After dinner Châtelet took his two guests to the Vaudeville Theatre. Lucien felt secretly displeased to see du Châtelet and was cursing the ill-luck which had brought him to Paris. The Director of Taxes alleged his own ambition as an excuse for his arrival there: he was hoping to be appointed Secretary-General in a civil service department and to enter the Council of State as a master of requests; he had come to ask that the promises made to him should be honoured, for a man like himself could not remain a mere Director of Taxes; he would prefer to be nothing at all, become a deputy or return to a diplomatic career. He was puffing himself out, and Lucien vaguely recognized in the elderly fop the advantage which a man of the world enjoys in Parisian society; but above all he was ashamed to owe any enjoyment to him. Whereas the poet was anxious and ill at ease, the former Secretary to an Imperial Highness was altogether in his element. Just as old sea-dogs mock at greenhorn sailors who have not yet found their sea-legs, so du Châtelet smiled at his rival’s hesitancy, his wonderment, the questions he asked and the little blunders he made through inexperience. But the pleasure which Lucien felt at his first visit to a theatre in Paris compensated for the annoyance which his blunders caused him. It was a memorable evening for him, thanks to his unvoiced repudiation of a great number of his ideas about life in the provinces. His little world was broadening out and society was assuming vaster proportions. The proximity of several beautiful Parisian women, so elegantly and so daintily attired, made him aware that Madame de Bargeton’s toilette, though passably ambitious, was behind the times: neither the material, nor the way it was cut, nor the colours were in fashion. The hair-style he had found so seductive at Angoulême struck him as being in deplorable taste compared with the delicate inventiveness which lent distinction to the other women present. ‘Will she remain like that?’ he wondered, not knowing that she had spent the day preparing a transformation. In the provinces no occasion arises for choice or comparison: one sees the same physiognomies day by day and confers a conventional beauty on them. Once she has moved to Paris a woman accepted as pretty in the provinces commands not the slightest attention, for she is beautiful only by virtue of the proverb: ‘In a community of the blind, one-eyed people reign supreme.’ Lucien was observing Madame de Bargeton and making the same comparison as she had made the previous evening between Châtelet and himself. Madame de Bargeton too was indulging in strange reflections about her admirer. The poor poet was singularly handsome, but he cut a sorry figure. His frock-coat, too short in the sleeves, his cheap provincial gloves and his skimpy waistcoat gave him a prodigiously ridiculous appearance in comparison with the young men in the dress-circle: Madame de Bargeton found him pitiable to look at. The elegant Châtelet, who was giving her his undisguised attention and watching over her with such care as betokened deep passion, was as much at ease as an actor on the stage of his favourite theatre; he had taken only two days to recover all the ground he had lost in six months. Although it is not commonly admitted that feelings are subject to sudden changes, it is certain that two people in love often move apart more quickly than they have come together. In the case both of Madame de Bargeton and Lucien, mutual disenchantment was setting in, and Paris was the cause of it. The poet was seeing life on a larger scale and society was taking on a new aspect in Louise’s eyes. With both of them, only a chance event was needed to sever the bonds between them. The axe was soon to fall and deal Lucien a terrible blow.