Lost Illusions

by Honoré de Balzac

  Over the balconies to view the scene,

  Its alabaster petals give delight:

  Snow-garlands, setting off the raven hair

  Of love-inspiring ladies gathered there.

  – No Phidias marble is more chastely white.

  ‘What do you think of my poor sonnets?’ Lucien asked in formal tones.

  ‘Are you asking for the truth?’ said Lousteau.

  ‘I am young enough to love truth, and I am too anxious for success not to hear it without getting annoyed – but not without feeling despair.’

  ‘Very well, my friend. The circumlocutions in the first one indicate a poem written in Angoulême, one which no doubt caused you too much effort for you to scrap it. The second and the third have more of a Paris atmosphere about them. But read me yet one more,’ he added, with a gesture which the provincial prodigy found charming.

  Encouraged by this request, Lucien was more self-confident in reading the sonnet which d’Arthez and Bridau liked best, perhaps because of the colour in it.

  SONNET NO. FIFTY

  THE TULIP

  The Tulip I. From Dutch line I descend:

  So exquisite and of so pure a strain

  In brilliant hues on graceful stem I reign.

  Flemings, to own me, half their substance spend.

  To feudal ladyship I do pretend

  And hold me stately like a châtelaine.

  Gay colours doth my coat of arms contain:

  Gules fessed with argent and with purple bend.

  The heavenly Gardener tressed with loving hands

  His sunbeam threads and royal purple strands

  To weave for me a tunic soft and neat.

  No flower in His own garden shows more fair,

  Though in my cup of daintiest china-ware

  Nature has stored no wealth of odours sweet.

  ‘Well?’ asked Lucien after a moment of silence which seemed to him inordinately long.

  9. Good advice

  ‘MY friend,’ said Etienne Lousteau gravely, looking at the tips of the boots which Lucien had brought from Angoulême and which he was finishing wearing out. ‘I advise you to black your boots with your ink in order to save boot-polish, to make toothpicks of your quill pens in order to give the appearance of having dined when, after leaving Flicoteaux’s, you stroll along the beautiful walks in this garden, and look for some sort of job. Become a bailiff’s man if you have pluck enough, a book-keeper if you prefer a sedentary life, or a soldier if you’ve a liking for military bands. You have the stuff of three poets in you; but, if you reckon to live on what your poetry brings in, you have time to die half a dozen deaths before you make your name. Now, judging by your rather youthful remarks, your intention is to coin money with your pen. I’m not passing judgement on your poetry: it’s far better than all the volumes of verse which clutter up the bookshops. Almost all those “nightingales”, marked at a slightly higher price than the others because they are printed on vellum, come fluttering down to the banks of the Seine, where you may go and study the songs they sing if one day you feel like making an instructive pilgrimage along the Paris quays from old Jérôme’s secondhand bookstall on the Pont Notre-Dame as far as the Pont-Royal. There you will find all the Essays in Poesy, Inspirations, Elevations, Hymns, Chants, Ballads, Odes, in short all the clutches that have hatched out during the last seven years: muses covered with dust, spattered with mud by passing cabs, thumb-marked by all the idlers who want to look at the vignettes on the title-pages.

  ‘You know nobody and have no access to any periodical: your Marguerites will still keep their petals chastely folded; they will never open their buds to the sunshine of publicity in the meadow of wide margins spangled with the floral designs which the illustrious publisher Dauriat, the monarch of the ‘Galeries de Bois’, lavishes on the works of his celebrities.

  ‘My poor boy, like you I came here with my heart full of illusions, spurred on by the love of art, swept forwards by an invincible yearning for fame. I soon discovered the hard facts of the writer’s trade, the difficulty of getting into print and the brutal reality of poverty. My enthusiasm, now deflated, and the effervescence of those early days made me blind to the mechanism which keeps the world moving: I had to see it in action, get caught up in the works, run foul of the shafts, get coated with grease and listen to the rattle of chains and flywheels. You will find out as I did that underneath your beautiful dream-world is the turmoil of men, passions and needs. You’ll find yourself inevitably involved in the fearful struggles between one work and another, one man and another, one faction and another, and you’ll have to wage systematic warfare to avoid being abandoned even by your own allies. These ignoble conflicts bring disenchantment to the soul, corruption to the heart and the weariness born of vain effort: for such effort often results in conferring glory on a man you hate, a man of second-rate talent put forward as a genius in spite of you. In literature, as in the theatre, much happens behind the scenes. Success, whether filched or merited, is what the pit applauds; the revolting tricks and dodges, the supernumeraries in their grease-paint, the hired clappers, the call-boys and scene-shifters, that’s what it’s not allowed to see. You are still watching from the pit. There’s still time to abdicate before you set foot on the bottom step towards the throne for which so many people are fighting. Don’t throw honour away, as I do, in order to live.’

  Etienne Lousteau’s eyes were moist with tears. ‘Do you know how I live?’ he continued with rage in his voice. ‘The little money my family was able to give me was soon used up. I found myself penniless after getting a play accepted at the Théâtre-Français. At that theatre, even the patronage of a Prince or a First Gentleman of the Royal Bedchamber doesn’t help one to jump the queue: the actors only give way to those who threaten their self-esteem. If you were able to spread a rumour that the jeune premier is asthmatic, that the jeune première has a fistula on some part of her body, that the soubrette’s breath is bad enough to kill flies on the wing, your play would be put on the very next day. I don’t know whether in two years’ time I myself shall be able to wield such power: one needs too many friends. Where, how and by what shifts was I to earn my daily bread? That was the problem which the pangs of hunger forced me to face. After many attempts, after writing an anonymous novel for which Doguereau – he didn’t make much out of it – paid me two hundred francs, I plainly saw that I could only live by journalism. But how was I to get into the racket? I won’t tell you of the steps I took and the applications I made in vain, nor of the six months I spent working as a supernumerary and being told I was scaring away the subscribers whereas in fact I was breaking them in. Let’s pass over insults of that sort. Today I’m reviewing boulevard theatre plays, almost gratis, for the paper owned by Finot, that fat little man who still lunches two or three times a month at the Café Voltaire – a place you don’t go to. Finot is the editor. I make my living by selling the tickets which the theatre managers give me to buy my benevolence as a subaltern member of his staff, also the books which publishers send me for review. Lastly, once Finot has had his cut, I make a bit out of the contributions in kind sent along by industrial concerns for or against which he allows me to launch articles. The makers of Carminative Face-Lotion, Sultana Hand-Cream, Cephalic Oil and Brazilian Mixture pay me twenty or thirty francs for a facetiously-worded commendation. I am forced to bark at the publisher who sends too few copies of his books to the paper: the paper takes two and Finot sells them; I also require two for sale. Even if he brings out a masterpiece, a publisher stingy with copies gets a drubbing. It’s a dirty business, but I live by it, and so do hundreds of others. And don’t imagine that the political world is much cleaner than the literary world: in both of them bribery is the rule; every man bribes or is bribed. When a publisher is bringing out a more or less important work, he pays me not to attack it. And so my income is in direct ratio to the prospectuses of forthcoming books. When prospectuses break out like measle spots money pours into my pocket and I
stand my friends a meal. When there’s nothing doing in the publishing line I dine at Flicoteaux’s. Also actresses pay for the write-up we give them, though the wiliest ones pay merely to be criticized, for silence is what they fear most of all. And so a disparaging article, so worded that it can be turned inside out in another newspaper, is worth more and pays better than a dry commendation which is forgotten the next day. Polemics, my dear fellow, build a pedestal for celebrities. At this trade – as a hired assassin of ideas, industrial, literary and dramatic reputations – I make fifty francs a week; I can get a novel sold for five hundred francs and I’m becoming known as a man to be reckoned with. When, instead of living with Florine at the expense of a wholesale druggist who gives himself the airs of a lord, I settle down in a flat of my own, when I am promoted to a big newspaper and have my own daily article in it, on that day, my dear man, I shall make a great actress of Florine. As for me, I don’t know what may be in store for me then: I may be a cabinet minister or even an honest man – anything may happen.’

  He raised his downcast head and gazed up at the foliage of the trees with a look of despair which was both accusatory and frightening.

  ‘And I have a fine tragedy which has been accepted! And I have among my papers a poem which will die on my hands! And once I was so kind and pure in heart! Now I have an actress at the Panorama-Dramatique for a mistress: I, who dreamt of splendid love affairs with the most distinguished women in high society! And lastly, because a publisher is one copy short in a book he sends to my paper, I run it down even though I admire it!’

  Lucien, moved to tears, wrung Etienne’s hand.

  ‘Outside the literary world,’ said the journalist, as they rose to their feet and made for the Grande Avenue de l’Observatoire which the two poets walked along as if to take more air into their lungs, ‘there’s not a single person who knows what a fearful Odyssey one has to pass through in order to acquire what one must call, according to the diversity of talents, popularity, vogue, reputation, renown, celebrity, public favour, the successive rungs on the ladder leading to fame – for which however they are never a substitute. The attainment of this brilliant zenith depends on so many and so rapidly varying chances that no example has occurred of any two men reaching it by the same route. Canalis and Nathan are two quite dissimilar cases, and they will not recur. D’Arthez, who is wearing himself out with work, will achieve fame by a different chain of events. Dame Reputation, whom so many men lust after, is almost always a crowned prostitute. Yes indeed, in relation to the lower kinds of literature she figures as the needy whore who stands shivering at street corners; in relation to second-rate literature, she’s the kept woman who has come straight from the brothels of journalism – and I am one of her pimps; in relation to successful literature, she’s the flashy, insolent courtesan with furnished apartments; she pays her taxes, is at home to eminent people and is kind or cruel to them by turns, has liveried servants and a carriage and is in a position to keep her anxious creditors waiting. Ah! those men who see in her – as I did yesterday, as you do today – an angelic creature with shining wings, clad in white tunic, with an evergreen palm in one hand and a flaming sword in the other, having some affinity both with the mythological abstraction that lives at the bottom of a well and the poor but honest maiden who lives in exile in a slum, whom only the beacon light of virtue and nobly courageous efforts lead to wealth, who flies back to Heaven with soul unsullied – unless of course she goes to her rest in a pauper’s hearse, soiled, despoiled, raped and forgotten: those men, whose brains are circled with bronze, whose hearts still keep their warmth as they face the blizzards of experience, are rare in that place you see at your feet’ – and he pointed to the great city with its smoke rising in the evening sky.

  A vision of the Cénacle passed swiftly before Lucien’s eyes and he felt moved, but he was swept along by Lousteau as the latter continued his appalling jeremiad.

  ‘Such men are rare and sparse in this fermenting wine-vat, as rare as true lovers in the world of dalliance, as rare as honestly-acquired fortunes in the financial world, as rare as a man of integrity in journalism. The experience of the first person who told me what I am now telling you was wasted on me, just as mine no doubt will be useless to you. It’s always the same story, every year the same enthusiastic inrush of beardless ambition from the provinces to Paris: an equal, indeed an increasing number of young men who leap forward, with high head and lofty heart, to their wooing of Fashion, the Princess Turandot of the Thousand and One Days to whom everyone would play Prince Calaf! But not one guesses the riddle and wins her. They all fall into the pit of misery, the mire of journalism, the morass of the book-trade. These mendicants go round like gleaners, picking up biographical articles, ‘tartines’, news-in-brief columns on the newspapers or else write books bespoken by the shrewd-minded pedlars of scrawl who prefer a piece of nonsense they can sell in a fortnight to a masterpiece which stays long on their hands. These caterpillars, squashed before they can turn into butterflies, live on shame and infamy: they’re ready to bite or boost budding talent at the bidding of some pasha from the Constitutionnel, the Quotidienne or the Journal des Débats, on a hint from the publishers, at the request of a jealous colleague or often in return for a dinner. Those who get over the obstacles forget the squalor of their beginnings. I myself spent six months putting the best of my wit into some articles for a scoundrel who passed them off as his own and, on the strength of these samples, was put in charge of a feuilleton: he didn’t take me on as a collaborator; he didn’t even pay me five francs; and yet, when I meet him I’m obliged to shake hands with him.’

  ‘But why?’ Lucien asked with proud resentment.

  ‘Because I may need to get a dozen lines into his feuilleton,’ Lousteau coldly replied. ‘In short, my friend, the key to success in literature is not to work oneself, but to exploit others’ work. Newspaper-proprietors are contractors; we’re their masons. And so, the more mediocre a man is, the sooner he arrives at success; he can swallow insults, put up with anything, flatter the mean and petty passions of the literary sultans like that newcomer from Limoges, Hector Merlin, who is already writing political articles in a Right Centre paper as well as working for our little rag: I have seen him stoop to pick up an editor’s hat for him. By keeping on the right side of everybody, that fellow will edge in between rival ambitions while they are scuffling. I feel sorry for you. I see in you what I used to be, and I’m sure that in a year or two you’ll be as I am now. You’ll put this bitter advice down to some secret jealousy or self-interest, but it’s prompted by the despair of a damned soul who can’t get out of hell. No one else will dare to tell you what I’m shouting out to you with the grief of a disheartened man, like a second Job from his dung-heap: “Look upon my sores!”’

  ‘I must fight; on this battle-field or another I must fight,’ said Lucien.

  ‘Then realize this!’ continued Lousteau. ‘It will be a fight to the death if you have any talent, for you’d have a better chance without it. The austerity of your conscience, which today is pure, will give way before those in whose hands you’ll see that your future lies, those who with one word can give you life but will not speak that word: for, believe me, the author in fashion is harder and more insolent towards newcomers than the most brutal publisher: the one shows you out, the other tramples on you. In order to write fine works, my dear boy, you’ll pump out in large penfuls all the tenderness, sap and energy in your heart, which you’ll expose to view in the shape of passion, feeling and oratory. Yes, you’ll write instead of acting, you’ll sing instead of fighting, you’ll do your loving, hating and living in the books you write; but when you’ve saved up your riches for your style, your gold and purple for your characters, when you walk in rags through the streets of Paris, happy to have launched on the world, in rivalry with the Registry Office, a creature named Adolphe, Corinna, Clarissa or Manon, when you’ve ruined your life and digestion giving birth to this creation, you’ll see it slandered, betra
yed, sold into slavery, deported to the salt marshes of oblivion by the journalists and committed to the grave by your best friends. Will you be able to wait for the day when your creation will spring to life once more – resurrected by whom, when and how? There exists a magnificent book, the cri du coeur of incredulity, Obermann: it is languishing in solitude in the desert of the stock-rooms, and this is what the book-sellers ironically call a “nightingale”. When will its Easter Day dawn? Who can tell? To start with, try and find a publisher daring enough to print Les Marguerites. It’s not a question of getting paid for your poems, but of getting them into print. Do that, and you’ll witness some curious scenes.’

  This harsh tirade, delivered in tones varying with the passion it expressed, fell on Lucien like an avalanche of snow and chilled him to the heart. He stood there silent for a moment. At last, as though stimulated by the terrible poetry of difficulties ahead, he gave vent to a passionate outburst. Pressing Lousteau’s hand, he exclaimed: ‘I shall win through!’

  ‘Well, well!’ said the journalist. ‘One more Christian going down into the arena to face the lions! My dear fellow, there’s a first performance this evening at the Panorama-Dramatique. It doesn’t begin till eight. It’s six o’clock now. Go and put on your best clothes; in short, dress suitably. Come and call for me. I live in the rue de La Harpe, above the Café Servel, on the fourth floor. We’ll visit Dauriat first of all. You really mean to go on with it? Right! I’ll introduce you this evening to one of the kings of the book trade and a few journalists. After the show, we’ll have supper in my mistress’s flat with some friends, for the dinner we’ve had could scarcely be called a meal. There you’ll meet Finot, the editor and owner of my paper. You know how Minette of the Vaudeville Theatre improved on the old proverb? Time and bride wait for no man. Well, luck might well be our bride: let’s woo her!’