Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics)

BOOK: Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics)
13.12Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

PENGUIN
CLASSICS
LOST ILLUSIONS

 

HONORÉ DE BALZAC
was born at Tours in 1799, the son of a civil servant. He spent nearly six years as a boarder in a Vendôme school, then went to live in Paris, working as a lawyer’s clerk then as a hack-writer. Between 1820 and 1824 he wrote a number of novels under various pseudonyms, many of them in collaboration, after which he unsuccessfully tried his luck at publishing, printing and type-founding. At the age of thirty, heavily in debt, he returned to literature with a dedicated fury and wrote the first novel to appear under his own name,
The Chouans.
During the next twenty years he wrote about ninety novels and shorter stories, among them many masterpieces, to which he gave the comprehensive title
The Human Comedy.
As Balzac himself put it: ‘What he [Napoleon] was unable to finish with the sword, I shall accomplish with the pen.’ He died in 1850, a few months after his marriage to Evelina Hanska, the Polish countess with whom he had maintained amorous relations for eighteen years.

HERBERT J. HUNT
was educated at Lichfield Cathedral Choir School, the Lichfield Grammar School and Magdalen College, Oxford. He was a Tutor and Fellow at St Edmund Hall from 1927 to 1944, then until 1966 he was Professor of French Literature and Language at London University and from 1966 to 1970 was Senior Fellow of Warwick University. He published books on literature and thought in nineteenth-century France; he was also the author of a biography of Balzac, and a comprehensive study of Balzac’s writings:
Balzac’s ‘Comédie Humaine’
(1959, paperback 1964). His translation of Balzac’s
Cousin Pons
appeared in the Penguin Classics in 1968. He died in 1973.

OLIVIA M
c
CANNON
studied languages at the Queen’s College, Oxford. She has been based in Paris since 1998, working as a writer and translator. She has translated French plays for the Royal Court Theatre, and is currently working on a new edition of Balzac’s
Old Goriot
for Penguin Classics.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

 
Lost Illusions
 

Translated and introduced by
HERBERT J. HUNT

 

PENGUIN BOOKS

 

PENGUIN BOOKS

 

Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London
WC2R 0RL
, England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M4V 3B2
Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa

 

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London
WC2R 0RL,
England

 

www.penguin.com

 

Lost Illusions
originally published in three parts 1837–43
This translation published 1971
Reprinted with a new Chronology and Further Reading 2004
22

 

Translation and Introduction copyright © Herbert J. Hunt, 1971
Chronology and Further Reading copyright © Olivia McCannon, 2004
All rights reserved

 

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

 

ISBN: 978-0-14-193602-4

 
Contents
 

Introduction

Chronology

Further Reading

P
ART
I: THE TWO POETS

1 A provincial printing-office

2 Madame de Bargeton

3 A social evening and a riverside stroll

4 Catastrophic sequels to provincial love

P
ART
II: A GREAT MAN IN EMBRYO

1 First-fruits

2 Flicoteaux

3 Two varieties of publishers

4 First friendship

5 The ‘Cénacle’

6 The flowers of poverty

7 A newspaper seen from outside

8 The sonnets

9 Good advice

10 A third variety of publisher

11 The Wooden Galleries

12 A publisher’s bookshop in the Wooden Galleries

13 A fourth variety of publisher

14 Behind the scenes

15 A use for druggists

16 Coralie

17 How a news-sheet is edited

18 The supper

19 An actress’s apartments

20 Last visit to the Cénacle

21 A variety of journalist

22 Boots can change one’s way of life

23 The arcana of journalism

24 Re-enter Dauriat

25 The battle begins

26 Dauriat pays a call

27 A study in the art of recantation

28 Journalistic grandeurs and servitudes

29 The playwrights’ banker

30 A journalist’s christening-party

31 Polite society

32 The ‘viveurs’

33 A fifth variety of publisher

34 Blackmail

35 The money-brokers

36 A change of front

37 Finot’s finesses

38 The fateful week

39 Skulduggery

40 Farewells

P
ART
III: AN INVENTOR’S TRIBULATIONS

Introduction

1 The doleful confession of a ‘child of the age’

2 Back-kick from a donkey

THE HISTORY OF A LAW-SUIT

3 The problem at issue

4 A plucky wife

5 A Judas in the making

6 The two Cointets

7 The first thunderbolt

8 A glance at paper-making

9 Provincial solicitors

10 A free lecture on dishonoured bills for those unable to meet them

11 Lucien under distraint

12 ‘Your house is on fire’

13 A contrast in loyalties

14 Keeping the fire going

15 Climax

16 Imprisonment for debt in the provinces

17 An obdurate father

18 The pack pauses before the kill

19 A bride for Petit-Claud

20 The Curé has his say

THE FATAL MEMBER OF THE FAMILY

21 The prodigal’s return

22 An unexpected triumph

23 How the triumph had been staged

24 A rare kind of devotion

25 The pride of his province?

26 The snake in the grass

27 Lucien takes his revenge

28 The peak of disaster

29 A last farewell

30 A chance encounter

31 The story of a favourite

32 A history lecture for the ambitious – by a disciple of Machiavelli

33 A lecture on ethics – by a disciple of Mendoza

34 A Spanish profile

35 Why criminality and corruption go hand in hand

36 On the brink of surrender

37 The effect of a night in gaol

38 A day too late

39 The history of a business venture

40 Conclusion

Introduction
 

H
ONORÉ DE
B
ALZAC
(born at Tours, 1799, died in Paris, 1850) was just past the middle of his writing career when he gave
Lost Illusions
to the world
(The Two Poets,
1837,
A Great Man in Embryo,
1839,
An Inventor’s Tribulations,
1843). After ten uneasy years (1819–1829) of initial efforts, interrupted between 1826 and 1828 by an abortive attempt to make his fortune as publisher, printer and type-founder, he had achieved his first relative success by producing the novel since known as
The Chouans
(1829), the first one he signed with his own name. By about 1830 he had already conceived the idea of presenting the social and moral history of his own times in a complex series of novels and short stories: he also intended it to be an interpretation of life and society as he saw it, and it was therefore backed by a certain number of ‘philosophical novels’, the most conspicuous of these being
The Skin
(1831),
Louis Lambert
(1832–1835) and
Seraphita
(1834–1835). He made a first collection of his works between 1834 and 1837, dividing them into three categories:
Studies of Manners, Philosophical Studies
and
Analytical Studies.
The
Studies of Manners
were sub-divided into various kinds of ‘Scenes’ – of Private, Provincial, Parisian, Political, Military and Country Life. But of course, as he went on writing, new novels had to be inserted into these compartments. After finding a general title for them in 1840
(The Human Comedy)
he collected them again between 1842 and 1846. He continued to write with feverish energy until as late as 1847, and by 1850, when he died, the time was ripe for yet another collection; hence the appearance, between 1869 and 1876, of the so-called ‘Definitive Edition’.

BOOK: Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics)
13.12Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson
Wandering Soul by Cassandra Chandler
Falling Awake by T.A Richards Neville
A Wedding Story by Susan Kay Law
Freedom's Child by Jax Miller
Spinsters in Jeopardy by Ngaio Marsh
New Heavens by Boris Senior
Stripped by Morgan Black