Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics) (12 page)

Louise was so successful in releasing her poet’s heart and mind from the swaddling-bands in which provincial life had wrapped them that Lucien was eager to find out if he could conquer this lofty prey without suffering the humiliation of a refusal. The social evening which had been announced provided an opportunity to make this test. His love for her was mingled with ambition. He was in love and he wanted to rise; this two-fold urge is very natural in young people who have a heart to satisfy and indigence to fight against. Society’s present-day habit of inviting all its children to one and the same banquet arouses their ambitions in the very morning of life. It robs youth of its graces and vitiates most of its generous sentiments by adulterating them with calculation. Poetic idealism would have it otherwise, but the fiction one would wish to accept is too often belied in reality for a more favourable picture to be given of young men as they are in the nineteenth
century. Lucien felt that his calculation was motivated by a noble sentiment, his friendship for David.

He wrote a long letter to Louise, for he found boldness easier on paper than in speech. It took him twelve pages, which he recopied three times, to tell her of his father’s genius, his baffled hopes and the terrible poverty in which he was forced to live. He depicted his beloved sister as an angel, David as a budding Cuvier who, although on his own way to greatness, was at once father, brother and friend to him. He would consider himself unworthy of being loved by Louise, who represented the peak of glory for him, if he did not ask her to do for David what she was doing for him. He would give up everything rather than betray David Séchard and wanted David to share in his success. It was one of those frantic letters in which young people threaten to shoot themselves if their request is refused, full of immature casuistry and the insensate logic of exalted minds; a delightful sample of word-spinning embroidered with the naïve declarations which come straight from the writer’s heart without his knowing it, and which please women so much. After handing this letter to the lady’s-maid, Lucien had spent the day at the printing-office, correcting proofs, superintending a number of jobs and dealing with certain minor printing-office matters. He had said nothing to David about the letter: at the time of life when one still has the heart of a child such noble reticence is natural. Moreover, he was perhaps beginning to be afraid of the Phocian’s axe which David could wield expertly; perhaps he feared the keenness of a scrutiny which pierced through to his soul. After the Chénier reading, David’s reproach, which felt to Lucien like a doctor’s finger probing a wound, had touched him to the quick and made him divulge the secret which hitherto he had kept to himself.

One may readily imagine the thoughts which must have been running through Lucien’s head as he walked down from Angoulême to L’Houmeau. Was the great lady annoyed? Would she welcome David to her house? Would not her ambitious admirer be hurled back into his sordid den in L’Houmeau? Although, before he kissed Louise’s forehead, he
had himself been able to gauge the distance separating a queen from her favourite, he had not stopped to consider that it was impossible for David, in the twinkling of an eye, to leap over the gulf which it had taken him five months to cross. Not knowing how absolute was the sentence of outlawry delivered against lowly people, he was unaware that a second venture of this kind would bring disaster to Madame de Bargeton. Branded and convicted for having so flagrantly demeaned herself, she would be forced to leave the town where her own caste would shun her as a leper was shunned in the Middle Ages. The clan of blue-blooded aristocracy and the clergy itself might well defend Naïs against all – comers in the event of her allowing herself a lapse from virtue, but the crime of consorting with those beneath her would never be forgiven. The sins of royalty may be condoned, but once it abdicates they are condemned. And would she not indeed be abdicating if she received David at her house? Even though Lucien did not think out this aspect of the question, his aristocratic instinct gave him forebodings of many other difficulties, and he found them appalling. Noble feelings do not necessarily confer nobility of deportment. Racine looked like the noblest of courtiers, Corneille was very like a cattle-dealer, while Descartes could have passed for a worthy Dutch trader. Often, when visitors to La Brède met Montesquieu with a rake over his shoulder and wearing his night-cap, they took him for a common gardener. Knowledge of the ways of society, when it does not proceed from high birth, when it is not a
savoir-vivre
imbibed with one’s mother’s milk or transmitted through blood, is a matter of education, but education must be aided by the fortuitous possession of a certain elegance of manner, distinction of features and tone of voice. In David all these tremendous trifles were lacking, whereas his friend was endowed with them by nature. Lucien was of gentle extraction through his mother, and even his foot had the high arch of the Franks; whereas David Séchard had the flat feet of the Celt and the stocky build of his father the pressman. Lucien could anticipate the shower of raillery which would fall on David, and he could already see Madame de Bargeton repressing a smile. In short, without exactly feeling ashamed of his
‘brother’, he promised himself that he would never again give heed to a first impulse without turning it over in his mind.

And so, after the hour given to poetry and warm feeling, after a reading which had shown the two friends that a new sun was shining over the fields of literature, Lucien found that the time had come for policy and calculation. As he made his way back to L’Houmeau he regretted having sent the letter and would have liked to recall it; through a flash of intuition, he perceived how pitiless are the laws of society. Sensing how favourable to his ambition was the advantage he had already acquired, he was reluctant to withdraw his foot from the bottom rung of the ladder he had to scale in his assault on greatness. Then a picture of times past rose up before his eyes: the calm and simple life he had led as in a garden bright with the flowers of family love; David, so full of genius, who had nobly helped him and was ready to die for him if need arose; his mother, a great lady despite her lowly occupation; his sister, so graceful in the acceptance of her lot, the purity of her childhood and the immaculacy of her conscience; the hopes he cherished, which no biting wind had stripped of their petals. At such moments he told himself that it would be a finer thing to force his way through the serried ranks of the aristocratic or middle-class crowd by his own achievements than to reach success through a woman’s favour. Sooner or later the genius in him would shine forth like that of so many men, his predecessors, who had brought society to heel. How women would love him then! The example of Napoleon, so baleful for the nineteenth century through the pretensions it inspires in mediocre people, came to Lucien’s mind: he repented of his calculations and jettisoned them. Of such stuff was Lucien made: he veered as easily from bad to good as from good to bad. For the last month, the love a scholar feels for his retreat had given place in Lucien’s mind to a kind of shame when he caught sight of the shop over which his family lived, with its sign written in yellow letters on the background of green:

POSTEL (LATE CHARDON) PHARMACIST

His father’s name, thus displayed at a spot by which every carriage passed, was an eye-sore to him. On the evening when he had first emerged from the front door, adorned with a small iron grill in bad taste, in order to go and make his appearance at Beaulieu, where, with Madame de Bargeton on his arm, he was to find himself among the most elegant young people of the Upper Town, he had intensely deplored the obvious incompatibility between this habitation and the favour she was showing him.

‘To love Madame de Bargeton, before long perhaps to possess her, and to be living in such a hole!’ This was his thought as he passed through the alley into the little courtyard in which several bundles of drying herbs were hung out along the walls, in which the apprentice was scouring the laboratory cauldrons, in which Monsieur Postel, wearing his dispenser’s apron, holding a retort, was inspecting a pharmaceutical product while keeping an eye on the shop: for even if he gave the closest attention to the drug, he kept his ear open for the sound of the door-bell. The odour of camomile, mint and various kinds of distilled plants filled the yard and the modest suite of rooms which were reached by climbing one of those narrow flights of stairs known as ‘millers’ ladders’, with a pair of ropes doing duty for a handrail. Above it was the one and only attic bedroom, which Lucien occupied.

‘Good-day to you, my boy,’ said Monsieur Postel, who was the very epitome of a provincial shopkeeper. ‘How goes it with you? I have just been carrying out an experiment with molasses, but it would have taken your father to discover what I am looking for. A fine man, he was! If I had known the secret of his cure for gout, we should both be rolling along in our carriages today!’

No week went by without the pharmacist, a man as stupid as he was good-natured, giving Lucien a little stab by reminding him of the disastrous prudence his father had shown in keeping quiet about his discovery.

‘It’s a great misfortune,’ was Lucien’s reply. He was beginning to find his father’s pupil prodigiously vulgar, although he had often heaped blessings on his head: for more than once
the honest Postel had given a helping hand to his master’s widow and children.

‘What’s the trouble?’ asked Monsieur Postel, laying his test-tube down on the laboratory bench.

‘Has any letter come for me?’

‘Yes, one which smells like balm! It’s on the counter, beside my desk.’

The letter from Madame de Bargeton lying among a chemist’s bowls I Lucien dashed into the shop.

‘Hurry up, Lucien! Your dinner’s been waiting an hour. It will get cold,’ a soft musical voice called out through a half-open window. Lucien did not hear.

‘He’s a bit crazy, your brother, Mademoiselle,’ said Postel, raising his head.

Unmarried himself and very like a little brandy-cask on which a painter’s whimsy has sketched a big, round, ruddy, pock-marked face, he assumed an air of ceremony and affability as he looked up at Eve, disclosing his thoughts of matrimony with his predecessor’s daughter, although he had not yet resolved the conflict which was going on in his heart between love and thriftiness. That is why, with a smile, he so often repeated the same remark when Lucien passed to and fro: ‘She’s a real beauty, your sister! And you’re not bad-looking either! Your father made a good job of everything.’

Eve was tall and olive-skinned, with black hair and blue eyes. Although she showed some signs of firmness of character, she was sweet-natured, tender and devoted. Her guilelessness, her simplicity, her tranquil submission to a life of toil, her unimpeachable modesty, had inevitably bewitched David Séchard. And so, since their first meeting, a mute, simple, Teutonic kind of passion, unostentatious and undemonstrative, had sprung up between them. The thoughts of each had gone out secretly to the other, as if they had been kept apart by some jealous husband to whom their fellow-feeling had given offence. Both of them hid it from Lucien, thinking that perhaps it might injure his prospects. David was afraid that Eve did not care for him, while Eve, for her part, gave way to the shyness which comes of poverty. A real
working-class girl would have been bolder, but, like a girl of good family fallen upon evil days, she suited her behaviour to her unhappy circumstances. Though of modest demeanour, she had her pride, which would not allow her to show too much interest in the son of a man reputed to be rich. At that time, people aware of the increasing value of landed property reckoned that the Marsac domain was worth more than eighty thousand francs, quite apart from the plots of land which old Séchard, having saved up much money and being skilful in selling his produce, was no doubt adding to his possessions when favourable opportunities occurred. David was probably the only person who had no idea of his father’s wealth. In his eyes, the house at Marsac was a shanty acquired in 1810 for some fifteen or sixteen thousand francs; he only went there once a year in the grape-picking season, when his father took him through the vineyards and bragged about his grape-harvests: but the young printer never saw these and thought little about them. The love of a studious young man, accustomed to solitude, whose feelings grew all the stronger because he overrated the obstacles in his path, stood in need of encouragement; for David regarded Eve with greater veneration than a simple clerk would regard a great lady. He was awkward and ill at ease in the company of the woman he worshipped, and as much in a hurry to leave as he had been to arrive; so he restrained his feelings instead of expressing them. Often, in the evenings, after inventing some excuse for going to consult Lucien, he walked down from the Place du Mûrier by the Porte-Palet to L’Houmeau; but when he got to the green door with the iron grill he made off again, in fear of having come too late or of seeming a nuisance to Eve, who he thought would have gone to bed. And yet, although the great love he bore her only expressed itself in trifling ways, Eve was well aware of it; she felt flattered, though without vainglory, at being the object of the deep respect so plainly visible in the looks he gave her, the words he spoke to her and his manners. But what Eve found most attractive in David was his fanatical attachment to Lucien: he had unwittingly discovered the best means of pleasing her. The mute joys of
this love differed from tumultuous passion as the flowers of the field from the splendour of a garden bed. There were glances as soft and delicate as the blue lotus floating on the waters, expressions as fleeting as the faint perfume of wild roses, moments of melancholy as tender as velvety mosses: flowers put forth by two fine souls, and springing from a forever rich and fertile soil. On several occasions already Eve had divined the strength which lay behind this gentleness; she took the avowals which David dared not make so much into account that the slightest incident was likely to bring them to a more intimate spiritual understanding.