Read Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics) Online
Authors: Honore de Balzac
Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics) (26 page)
What would you say, Madame, about a woman who took a fancy to some poor timid child, full of those noble beliefs which later are called illusions, and used all her coquettish graces, all her subtlety of mind and the most beautiful semblance of maternal love to divert him from his course? Neither the most affectionate promises, nor the castles in Spain which filled him with wonder, cost anything to her.
She takes him off with her, monopolizes him, scolds him for his lack of trust in her and flatters him turn by turn. When this child deserts his family and follows her blindly, she leads him to the shore of a boundless sea, smilingly entices him into a frail cockleshell and sends him forth helpless through the tempest. Then, from
the rock on which she has remained, she bursts out laughing and wishes him good luck.
You are that woman; I am that child. But he holds in his hands a token which might be used to expose the crime you committed by your beneficence and the favour you showed him in casting him aside. You might have cause for blushing with shame when you saw that child struggling against the waves, once the thought came to you that you had held him to your bosom. When you read this letter you will be free to do as you like with such memories. You may forget them entirely if you will. After the bright hopes your finger pointed out to me in the heavens, I am facing the realities of poverty in the mire of Paris. While you, brilliant and adored, stride through the grand halls of society, to the threshold of which you led me, I shall be shivering in the miserable attic into which you have flung me. But perhaps remorse will come to you in the midst of your galas and pleasures; perhaps you will give a thought to the child you plunged into an abyss. Oh no, Madame! Spare yourself such remorse. From the depths of his misery this child offers you the only thing he has left as he looks his last on you: his forgiveness.
Yes, Madame, thanks to you, I have nothing left. But the world was made out of nothing. Genius must imitate God, and I begin by showing clemency, as He does, without knowing whether I shall have the strength He has. You need tremble only if I turn to evil ways, for then you will have been my accomplice in wrongdoing. Alas! I pity you because you can no longer have any part in the fame to which I aspire, with my work to lead me on.
After writing this letter, bombastic but full of that sombre dignity which an artist of twenty-one tends to overdo, Lucien’s thoughts went back to the bosom of his family: in his mind’s eye he saw the neat apartment which David had decorated for him by sacrificing a part of his resources. He had a vision of the peaceful, modest, commonplace joys he had tasted there. His mother, his sister and David gathered round him in shadowy outline. He heard anew the sound of their weeping at the moment of his departure. He too wept, for he was alone in Paris, friendless and unprotected.
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A few days later, Lucien wrote as follows to his sister:
My dear Eve,
Sisters have the sad privilege of taking to themselves more sorrow than joy when they share the existence of brothers dedicated to Art, and I begin to fear that I shall become a grave liability to you. Have I not already imposed upon your generosity, you who have made such sacrifices for me? My memories of the past, so full of family joys, have fortified me in the solitude of my present position. With what swift flight, like an eagle returning to its eyrie, have I not winged my way back to you, to the haven of true affection, after suffering the first humiliations and disappointments of social life in Paris I Have the candles at home spluttered? Have the burning logs rolled over in the hearth? Have your ears tingled? Has my mother asked: ‘Is Lucien thinking of us?’ Has David answered: ‘He is battling with men and things’? Dear Eve, I write this letter for your eyes alone. To you alone shall I dare tell of the good and the evil which will come my way, blushing for both of them, for here the good is as rare as the evil should be.
I have much to tell you in a few words. Madame de Bargeton has become ashamed of me, disavowed me, dismissed me, repudiated me nine days after our arrival. She has turned away at the sight of me; and I, in order to follow her into the society in which she had proposed to launch me, had spent seventeen hundred and sixty of the two thousand francs, so difficult to lay, hands on, which I brought away from Angoulême. Spent them on what? you will ask. Dear sister, Paris is a strange, gaping maw. One can dine there for less than a franc, but the simplest dinner in a smart restaurant costs fifty francs. One can buy waistcoats and trousers for forty francs and forty sous, but a fashionable tailor charges you no less than a hundred francs for making them. You pay a sou to get over the street gutters when it’s raining. And the shortest journey in a cab comes to thirty-two sous. After living in an elegant quarter, I am now at the Hôtel de Cluny in the rue de Cluny, one of the poorest and dingiest back-streets in Paris, squeezed between three churches and the ancient buildings of the Sorbonne. I have taken a furnished room on the fourth floor, a very bare and dirty one – but I still have to pay fifteen francs a month for it. I breakfast on a roll which costs two sous and a sou’s worth of milk, but I dine quite well for twenty-two sous at the restaurant of a man called Flicoteaux, right in the square in front of the Sorbonne. Until
winter comes my expenses will not exceed sixty francs a month all told – at least I hope not. Thus my two hundred and forty francs will last me the first four months. By then I shall no doubt have sold
The Archer of Charles the Ninth
and my
Marguerites
. And so don’t be anxious about me. If the present is cold, bare and mean, the future is unclouded, rich and splendid. Most great men have gone through ups and downs: they affect me but do not overwhelm me. Plautus the great writer of comedies was a mill-hand. Machiavelli wrote
The Prince
in the evenings after spending the day in the company of workmen. Even the great Cervantes, who had lost an arm at the battle of Lepanto while making his contribution to that famous victory, and was called a ‘disreputable old crock’ by the scribblers of the time, unable to find a publisher, had to wait ten years before he could get the second part of that sublime work
Don Quixote
into print. We are not in so bad a position today. Unknown talent alone is subject to the vexations of poverty; once writers have made their name they grow rich. I shall be rich. Moreover I am living the life of a scholar. I spend half the day in the Sainte-Geneviève library where I am acquiring the education I lack, and without which I should not go far. And so today I feel almost happy. It took me only a few days to adjust myself cheerfully to my situation. From early morning I settle down to the work I love; my material life is assured; I do a lot of thinking, I study, and I don’t see what can hurt me now that I have given up society, in which my vanity could have suffered pinpricks every moment of the day. Illustrious men of any age must live in isolation. They are like the birds of the forest. They sing, they add a charm to nature, and they must remain unseen. So shall I, if I am at all capable of realizing the ambitious plans my mind has conceived. I do not regret Madame de Bargeton. That woman did well to fling me into Paris and leave me to my own resources. Here is the habitat of writers, thinkers, poets. Here only can the seeds of fame be sown, and I know what fine harvests are being reaped today. Here only can writers find, in the museums and art collections, the immortal works of past genius to warm and stimulate the imagination. Here only vast libraries, always open, offer knowledge and sustenance for the mind. In short, in Paris, in the very air one breathes and the smallest details of existence, there is a spirit which permeates and makes its impress on the creations of literature. One learns more in half an hour, chatting in cafés and theatres, than one learns in the provinces in ten years. Here indeed all is spectacle, matter for comparison and instruction. Excessive cheapness, excessive
costliness: such is Paris, where every bee can find a cell in which to store its honey, where every soul can assimilate the substance it needs. If then at this moment I am suffering, I am not repenting. On the contrary, I see a fine future ahead and my heart rejoices although it was bruised for a moment.
Good-bye, my dear sister. Don’t expect letters from me regularly: a peculiar thing about Paris is that one really doesn’t know where the time goes. Life rushes on with frightening rapidity. I embrace you all: Mother, David, and you more tenderly than ever.
F
LICOTEAUX
is a name inscribed in many memories. Few are the students who, having lived in the Latin quarter during the first twelve years of the Restoration, did not frequent this shrine of hunger and poverty. A three-course dinner then cost eighteen sous with a quarter-carafe of wine or a bottle of beer, and twenty sous with a bottle of wine. What has no doubt prevented Flicoteaux the friend of youth from making a colossal fortune is a certain feature in his programme (it figures also in capitals in his competitors’ bills of fare) thus stated: BREAD AT YOUR DISCRETION – an indiscretion as far as restaurant-proprietors are concerned. Flicoteaux has been foster-father to a good many famous men. Certainly there are many amongst them who must feel innumerable chords of memory stirring their hearts when they contemplate the front windows looking out on to the Place de la Sorbonne and the rue Neuve-de-Richelieu. Until the Revolution of July 1830, Flicoteaux the First and Flicoteaux the Second had respectfully preserved the small brown-tinted panes and the ancient, venerable appearance which denoted disdain for the pretentious exteriors devised by today’s restaurant-keepers for appeal to the eye rather than the stomach. In lieu of heaps of stuffed game (not for consumption) or monstrous fishes justifying the comedian’s joke ‘I’ve discovered a fine carp: I’m saving
up for it’; in lieu of the ‘early’ (better called ‘yearly’) fruit displayed in deceptive show-cases for the delectation of soldiers and their village girl-friends, the honest Flicoteaux set out variously-garnished bowls of stewed prunes to regale the customer’s eye and assure him that the word ‘dessert’, too lavishly used on other menus, was not a take-in. Six-pound loaves, divided into four portions, substantiated the promise of BREAD AT YOUR DISCRETION. Such was the fine fare of an establishment which in his time Molière would have made famous, there being so many comic implications in the name itself. Flicoteaux’s is still extant: it will live on as long as university students need to be kept alive. It’s an eating-house, nothing less and nothing more. But its customers eat, as they also work, with a sombre or joyous zest according to character or circumstance. At that period this celebrated establishment consisted of two T-shaped dining-rooms, long, narrow and low, one of which drew its light from the Place de la Sorbonne, the other from the rue Neuve-de-Richelieu. Both are furnished with tables from some abbey refectory, for indeed their length gives them a monastic appearance; and the places are laid with the regular customers’ napkins slipped into numbered shiny tinplate rings. Flicoteaux the First only changed the table-cloths every Sunday. But Flicoteaux the Second, so they say, started changing them twice a week as soon as his dynasty was threatened by competition. This restaurant is a workshop suitably equipped, and not an elegant banqueting-hall with pleasant amenities: customers are quickly served. Behind the scenes there is rapid activity. Waiters come and go without wasting time: they are all busy and much in demand. The food is not very varied, and always includes potatoes. There might not be a single potato in Ireland or anywhere else, but Flicoteaux would have a supply. For the last thirty years his potatoes have rejoiced in a Titian blond colouring. They are sprinkled with chopped green-stuff and enjoy a privilege which women envy: you saw them in 1814, and in 1840 they will look just the same. Mutton cutlets and fillet of beef are to the menu of this establishment what grouse and fillet of sturgeon are in Véry’s
restaurant, namely special dishes which have to be ordered in the morning. The female of the bovine species predominates and her calves proliferate, served up in the most ingenious disguises. When whiting and mackerel abound on the oceanic shores they are plentiful in Flicoteaux’s restaurant. Everything there conforms to agricultural vicissitudes and the seasonal whims of the French climate, so that there one learns facts never suspected by the idle rich and those who take no interest in the phases of nature. Students herded together in the Latin quarter acquire a most accurate knowledge of what each season produces. They know when the crop of peas and beans is good, when the vegetable market is overstocked with cabbages, when lettuce is plentiful and the supply of beetroot scarce. A long-standing calumny, reiterated at the time Lucien was patronizing this restaurant, attributed the appearance of beefsteak to a rise in the death-rate of horses.
In few Paris restaurants will you witness so fine a spectacle. There you only find young people, faith in the future and poverty cheerfully endured, although in fact there is also no shortage of solemn, yearning, sombre and anxious faces. Usually there is a certain negligence of dress, and therefore regular customers who arrive in their best clothes invite attention. Everyone knows what this unusual attire signifies: a rendezvous with a mistress, a visit to the theatre or higher social circles. There, it is said, friendships have been formed between divers students who later have become famous men, as this story will confirm. Nevertheless, apart from young people from the same province gathered together at the end of a table, in general the diners have a gravity of bearing which does not readily unbend, thanks perhaps to the commonplace quality of the wine, which does not encourage expansiveness. Those who have frequented Flicoteaux’s eating-house are able to recall various sombre and mysterious personages, wrapped in the mists of coldest indigence, who may have dined there for a couple of years and then disappeared without even the most inquisitive of customers gaining a glimmer of enlightenment about these Parisian will-o’-the wisps. Friendships
initiated there were sealed in neighbouring cafés around a flaming punch-bowl or in the companionable warmth of small cups of coffee laced with some sort of brandy.
During the first days of his stay at the Hôtel de Cluny Lucien, like any newcomer, was shy and conventional in his behaviour. After the chastening experience of elegant life which had soaked up his capital, he plunged into his work with that initial ardour soon dissipated by the difficulties and diversions which Paris offers to every kind of existence, the most luxurious and the most denuded. To get the better of them, the savage energy of real talent or the grim willpower of ambition is needed. Lucien dropped into Flicoteaux’s at about four-thirty, having observed that it paid to be among the first arrivals, for then the food was more varied and the customer could still obtain his favourite dishes. Like all those with poetic minds, he had taken to a particular place, and his choice of food betokened a fair amount of discernment. At his very first visit he had noticed a table near the cash-desk; he perceived from the physiognomy of its occupants and also their conversation, whose trend he readily grasped, that they belonged to the literary confraternity. Moreover, a kind of instinct told him that, being near to the cash-desk, he would be able to hold parley with the people who ran the restaurant. In the long run they would get to know him and at times of financial distress he would no doubt obtain the credit he needed. And so he had sat at a little square table beside the cash-desk, laid for only two people with two napkins without rings and probably intended for casual diners. Opposite Lucien sat a thin, pale young man, seemingly as poor as he was, whose handsome but already ravaged face announced that shattered hopes had seared his brow and left furrows in his soul in which sown seed had not germinated. Lucien felt drawn to this stranger by these lingering signs of idealism, also by an irresistible urge of sympathy.
The name of this young man, the first whom the poet from Angoulême was able to engage in conversation after a week of little acts of politeness and the exchange of words and observations, was Etienne Lousteau. Like Lucien, Etienne had
come from the provinces: he had left his native town in Berry two years before. The vivacity of his gestures, the brilliance of his glance, the brevity of his occasional remarks, betrayed his bitter experience of literary life. Etienne had come from Sancerre with a tragedy in his pocket, spurred on by the same desire as Lucien – for fame, power and money. This young man, who at first dined regularly for several days, soon began to turn up only at long intervals. When, after five or six days’ absence, he reappeared, Lucien hoped to see him again the next day, but the next day he would find Etienne’s place taken by a stranger. When two young people have met the day before, the flame of yesterday’s conversation casts its glow on that of today; but these intervals obliged Lucien to break the ice anew every time, and thereby delayed the progress of any intimacy between them during the first weeks. Lucien questioned the lady at the cash-desk and learnt that his future friend was on the staff of a ‘little newspaper’
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, to which he contributed articles on new books and reviews of the plays performed at the Ambigu-Comique, the Gaiety Theatre and the Panorama-Dramatique. The young man suddenly became a somebody in Lucien’s eyes and he counted on getting into rather more intimate conversation with him and making a few sacrifices in order to strike up a friendship, so necessary to a beginner. But the journalist remained absent for a fortnight. Lucien was unaware as yet that Etienne only dined at Flicoteaux’s when he had no money, and that was what gave him his gloomy and disillusioned air and the iciness which Lucien tried to melt with flattering smiles and gentle words. Nevertheless such a relationship called for mature reflection, for this little-known journalist seemed to be leading an expensive existence in which glasses of cognac, cups of coffee, bowls of punch, visits to the theatre and suppers played their part. Now during the early days of Lucien’s establishment in the Latin quarter, his conduct was that of a needy youth stunned by his first experience of life in Paris. And so, after studying the bill of fare and calculating the contents of his purse, Lucien dared not emulate Etienne’s scale of living, for he was afraid of repeating the blunders which were still causing him
repentance. The yoke of his provincial loyalties still weighed upon him, and the figures of his two guardian angels, Eve and David, loomed up whenever a reprehensible thought came to him and reminded him of the hopes they placed in him, his responsibility for the happiness of his aging mother and all the promise of his budding genius. He was spending his mornings studying history in the Sainte-Geneviève library. His initial researches had made him conscious of appalling errors in his novel
The Archer of Charles the Ninth
. When the library closed, he returned to his damp, cold room to correct the work, stitching in new chapters and deleting others. After dining at Flicoteaux’s he would go down to the Passage du Commerce and there, in Blosse’s reading-room, he read works of contemporary literature, newspapers, collections of periodicals and books of poetry in order to keep up with the intellectual movement; he re-entered his miserable lodgings about midnight without having consumed any wood or tallow. This reading so enormously changed his ideas that he revised his collection of flower sonnets, his cherished
Marguerites,
and re-wrote them so completely that less than a hundred lines remained untouched. Thus, in the beginning, Lucien led the pure, innocent life of such poor, provincial immigrants as consider Flicoteaux’s fare luxurious in comparison with that of their father’s house, whose recreation consists of long walks along the Luxembourg avenues, looking yearningly at pretty girls from the corner of their eye, who never leave the quarter they live in and piously devote themselves to their work while dreaming of the future. But Lucien, a born poet, soon found himself a prey to vast longings and had no strength to resist the seduction of theatre-bills. The
Théâtre-Français,
the Vaudeville Theatre,
Les Variétés,
the
Opéra-Comique,
at all of which he stood in the pit, robbed him of about sixty francs. What student could resist the joy of seeing Talma in his famous roles? The theatre, first love of all poetic spirits, fascinated Lucien. The actors and actresses seemed to him to be imposing figures; he never thought it possible to go beyond the footlights and meet them on familiar terms. These people, the purveyors of his pleasure, were treated by the newspapers as figures of national importance,
and he regarded them as marvellous beings! To be a dramatist, to have one’s plays produced – what a dream to cherish! And for some bold spirits, Casimir Delavigne for example, this dream had come true!
These fecund thoughts, these moments of faith in himself, followed by moods of despair, stirred Lucien and kept him on the straight and narrow path of hard work and thrift, in spite of the underground rumblings of more than one insensate impulse. Through excess of prudence, he denied himself permission to enter the Palais-Royal, that place of perdition where in one single day he had spent fifty francs at Véry’s and nearly five hundred francs on clothes. And so, whenever he yielded to the temptation to see Fleury, Talma, the two Baptistes or Michot, he restricted himself to the dim gallery for which he had to stand in a queue from half past five onwards, while late-comers had to go to the box-office to buy their seat for ten sous. Often, after they had queued for two hours, the cry ‘Full house!’ resounded in the ears of many a disappointed student. After the show Lucien used to return home with downcast eyes, paying no attention to the streets which at that hour were peopled with flesh and blood temptations. Perhaps there did come his way a few adventures of the kind which, extremely simple though they may be, occupy an enormous place in a young and timorous imagination. Startled at the dwindling of his capital one day when he was counting his money, Lucien broke out in a cold sweat and bethought him of the need to enquire about a publisher and look for some paid work. The young journalist of whom he had made a friend through his own initiative no longer came to Flicoteaux’s. Lucien was waiting for some stroke of luck which did not come off. In Paris, such luck only comes to people who move around a great deal: the number of relationships increases the chances of success in every sphere, and moreover luck is on the side of the big battalions. Being a man in whom provincial caution still persisted, Lucien did not want the moment to come when he would have only a few francs left. He decided to accost the publishers.
