Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics) (15 page)

‘Do you find that very entertaining, Fifine?’ said the desiccated Lili to her neighbour – she had probably been expecting some spectacular display.

‘Don’t ask me my opinion, dear. I doze off as soon as I hear anyone reading.’

‘I hope Naïs wont often give us poetry recitals in the evening,’ said Francis. ‘When I listen to reading after dinner, the attention I have to pay to it upsets my digestion.’

‘Poor darling,’ whispered Zéphirine. ‘Have a glass of lemonade.’

‘A very good recital,’ said Alexandre. ‘But I prefer whist.’

On hearing this remark which was regarded as witty because of the Irish meaning of the word,
¹
a few ladies anxious for a game of cards made out that the reciter needed a rest. On this pretext, one or two couples slipped off into the boudoir. Then Lucien, at the request of Louise, the charming Laure de Rastignac and the Bishop, aroused attention once more by declaiming the spirited counter-revolutionary
Iambics,
which a few people, carried away by the verve with which Lucien recited them, applauded although they did not understand them. Such people can be influenced by vociferation just as coarse palates are excited by crude spirits. While ices were being passed round, Zéphirine sent Francis to have a look at the volume, and informed Amélie, who was sitting next to her, that the verses read by Lucien were in print.

‘Well,’ answered Amélie, with obvious pleasure. ‘It’s quite simple. Monsieur de Rubempré works at a printing-office. It’s just like a pretty woman making her own gowns’ – this she said with a side-glance at Lolotte.

‘He has printed his poems himself,’ the women said to one another.

‘Why then does he call himself Monsieur de Rubempré?’ asked Jacques. ‘A gentleman should drop his name when he takes to manual labour.’

‘He has in fact dropped his,’ said Zizine. ‘It was a commoner’s name, and he has taken that of his mother, who is of gentle birth.’

‘Since his lines are in print, we can read them for ourselves,’ said Astolphe.

This stupidity confused the issue until Sixte du Châtelet deigned to explain to this ignorant gathering that Lucien’s announcement had not been an oratorical precaution and that these fine poems had been written by the royalist brother of the revolutionary Marie-Joseph Chénier. This Angoulême assembly, with the exception of the Bishop, Madame de Rastignac and her two daughters, who had been impressed by the poetry, believed that it had been hoaxed and took offence at such deceit. There were low murmurs, but Lucien did not hear them. Isolated from this odious crowd by the enthralling melodies which were echoing through his mind, he was trying to convey them to his audience and so had only a misty view of people’s faces. He read the sombre elegy on suicide, the one in which profound melancholy is expressed in the style of antiquity; then the one which contains the following line:

Steeped in delightful reveries, one hand passing through her curls which she had inadvertently ruffled, the other hanging inactive, with absent look, alone in the midst of her guests, Madame de Bargeton felt transported into her own rightful sphere for the first time in her life. Imagine then how disagreeable it was for her to be brought down to earth by Amélie, who took it upon herself to voice the general opinion.

‘Naïs, we came here to listen to Monsieur Chardon’s poems, and you are only giving us published poetry. Although
these pieces are very pretty, the ladies here have enough local patriotism to prefer the local vintage.’

‘Don’t you think the French language is not very suitable for poetry?’ Astolphe asked of the Director of Taxes. ‘I find Cicero’s prose a thousand times more poetic.’

‘True French poetry is light poetry, the
chanson,’
replied du Châtelet.

‘The
chanson
proves that our language is very musical,’ said Adrien.

‘I should very much like to hear the verses which have brought about Naïs’s downfall,’ said Zéphirine. ‘But judging by the way she’s treating Amélie’s request, she doesn’t feel inclined to give us a sample of them.’

‘She owes it to herself to make him recite them,’ answered Francis, ‘After all, this young fellow’s talent is his only justification for being here.’

‘You have been in the diplomatic career, Monsieur du Châtelet,’ said Amélie. ‘Get him to do it.’

‘Nothing could be easier,’ replied the baron.

The former Secretary to her Imperial Highness was used to little manoeuvres of this kind: he went over to the Bishop and was able to bring him forward. At his Lordship’s request, Naïs was forced to ask Lucien to recite some piece which he knew by heart. For his prompt success in this negotiation, the baron was rewarded by a languid smile from Amélie.

‘Decidedly the baron has his wits about him,’ she said to Lolotte.

Lolotte was remembering Amélie’s feline remark about women who made their own dresses.

‘How long is it since you began recognizing barons of the Imperial vintage?’ she asked with a smile.

Lucien had attempted to deify his lady in an ode addressed to her under the kind of title young men invent on leaving school. This ode, over whose composition he had lingered so fondly and which was embellished with all the love he had in his heart, seemed to him to be the only work capable of rivalling that of Chénier. He gazed at Madame de Bargeton with a somewhat fatuous air and announced the title: TO HER!
Then he struck a lofty pose before declaiming this ambitious poem, for, with Madame de Bargeton to stand by him, he felt secure in his self-esteem as an author.

At this instant, Naïs’s secret attachment became patent to the women present. Usually her high intelligence allowed her to dominate the people of her salon, but now she could not help feeling tremulous on Lucien’s behalf. She was visibly embarrassed, and she looked round as if she were in some way asking for their indulgence. After which she had perforce to sit there with her eyes cast down and conceal her satisfaction as Lucien began to deliver the following stanzas:

‘Do you understand this rigmarole?’, Amélie asked of Monsieur du Châtelet with a coquettish ogle.

‘The sort of verse most of us scribbled when we left school,’ the baron answered, putting on an air of boredom in order to sustain his role of sophisticated critic. ‘Time was when we went in for the mists of Ossian. We babbled of Malvinas, Fin-gals, wraiths wrapped in clouds, warriors rising from their graves with stars shining over their heads. Nowadays that kind of poetic frippery has given place to Jehovah, sistrums, angels, seraphs’ wings and all the stock-in-trade of Paradise to which words like ‘immense’, ‘infinity’, ‘solitude’ and ‘intelligence’ have given a new lease of life. We deal in lakes, God speaking through the clouds, a sort of near-Christian pantheism enriched with rare and far-fetched rhymes, like amethyst and rainbow-kist, colocynth and labyrinth, and so forth. In short, we have moved into new latitudes, from North to East: but thick darkness still reigns.’

‘The ode itself may be obscure,’ said Zéphirine, ‘but the declaration seems clear enough to me.’

‘And the archangelic armour is a fairly diaphanous muslin garment,’ said Francis.

Although politeness demanded that they should profess to find the ode ravishing in order to please Madame de Bargeton,
the ladies, enraged at having no poet at their service to call them angels, rose from their seats with boredom written on their faces and murmured in icy tones:
Very good; lovely; perfect.

‘If you care at all for me, you will not congratulate the author or his angel,’ said Lolotte to her dear Adrien with a despotic air which commanded obedience.

‘After all, it’s just verbiage,’ said Zéphirine to Francis. ‘Whereas love is poetry in action.’

‘That’s precisely what I was thinking, Zizine, but I couldn’t have put it so neatly,’ rejoined Stanislas, complacently surveying himself from head to foot.

‘I would give quite a lot,’ Amélie told du Châtelet, ‘to bring Naïs down a peg or two. Letting a man call her an archangel!. As if she were any better than us! And making us mix with such riff-raff: the son of a chemist and a sick-nurse, his sister a laundry-maid and himself a printer’s assistant!’

‘His father sold pills to cure flatulence,’ said Jacques. ‘He ought to have given some to his son!’

‘He’s carrying on his father’s trade, for what he has just dispensed to us is very like a nostrum,’ said Stanislas, assuming one of his most provocative poses. ‘If I needed a nostrum, I could choose a better one.’

Immediately, of one accord, they set out to humiliate Lucien with their ironic and snobbish witticisms. Being a pious woman, Lili regarded this as an act of charity, proclaiming that it was time to enlighten Naïs and bring her to her senses. Francis the diplomat undertook to make a success of this stupid conspiracy, and all these petty-minded people threw themselves into it as if they were watching the last act of a play, and thought of it as a bit of sport they could tell their friends about the next morning.

The former consul, preferring to avoid a duel with the young poet who would be sent into a fury by a gibe uttered in the hearing of his patroness, realized that a non-secular weapon, one which excluded all possibility of retaliation, must be used in order to lay him low. He followed the example set him by the adroit du Châtelet when the question had arisen of
asking Lucien to recite his verses. He went over to the Bishop, chatted with him, and pretended to share the enthusiasm which his Lordship had felt on hearing Lucien’s ode. Then he maliciously intimated that Lucien’s mother was a woman of superior talent and excessive modesty, and that it was she who had provided her son with the themes of all his poems. Lucien adored his mother, he said, and his greatest pleasure was to see other people paying just tribute to her. Once the Bishop had got this notion into his head, Francis calculated that the vagaries of conversation would lead up to a cruel witticism which he was hoping to elicit from the prelate.

When Francis and the Bishop rejoined the guests clustered round Lucien, those who had already been administrating small doses of hemlock to the wretched poet became doubly attentive. Having absolutely no experience of salon tricks and stratagems, Lucien could do nothing but gaze at Madame de Bargeton and give gauche answers to the gauche questions they asked him. He was ignorant of the names and titles of most of the persons present, and did not know how to hold his own in conversation with women whose inane remarks put him to shame. Moreover he felt worlds apart from these Angoulême divinities who at one moment called him Monsieur Chardon and at another Monsieur de Rubempré, while they addressed one another as Lolotte, Adrien, Astolphe, Lili and Fifine. His confusion was extreme when, taking Lili for a man’s name, he called the brutal Monsieur de Senonches ‘Monsieur Lili’. That Nimrod interrupted Lucien by calling him ‘Monsieur Lulu’, and Madame de Bargeton flushed up to the ears.

‘One must be far gone in blindness to let in this little bounder and introduce him to us here,’ he said under his breath.

‘Madame la Marquise,’ said Zéphirine to Madame de Pimentel in a low tone, but loud enough to be heard. ‘Do you not notice a strong resemblance between Monsieur Chardon and Monsieur de Cante-Croix?’

‘An ideal resemblance,’ replied Madame de Pimentel with a smile.

‘Glory can exert an attraction,’ Madame de Bargeton said to the Marquise, ‘which there is no shame in acknowledging. Some women are as susceptible to greatness as others are to pettiness,’ she added with a side-glance at Francis.

Zéphirine missed the point of this, for she considered her consul a very great man; but the Marquise took sides with Naïs by breaking into laughter.

‘You are a very fortunate man, sir,’ Monsieur de Pimentel said to Lucien, correcting himself by calling him Monsieur de Rubempré after having called him Chardon. ‘You can never be bored!’

‘Do you work quickly?’ asked Lolotte in the tone one would have used in asking a carpenter: ‘Does it take you long to make a box?’

Lucien remained quite stunned after receiving this bludgeon blow; but he raised his head again when he heard Madame de Bargeton smilingly reply: ‘My dear, poetry doesn’t spring up in Monsieur de Rubempré’s head like grass in our courtyards.’

‘Madame,’ said the Bishop to Lolotte. ‘We cannot show too much respect to those noble minds whom God has endowed with a beam of His own light. Indeed, poetry is a sacred thing. Poetry involves suffering. How many nights of silence have paid for the stanzas you admire! Pay a tribute of love to the poet who almost always leads an unhappy life and for whom God no doubt reserves a place in Heaven among his prophets. This young man
is
a poet,’ he added, setting his hand on Lucien’s head. ‘Do you not see the mark of predestination on this handsome forehead?’

Happy at being so nobly defended, Lucien thanked the Bishop with a gentle glance, little knowing that the worthy prelate was about to become his executioner. The exultant glances which Madame de Bargeton darted at this hostile circle struck home like so many javelins into the hearts of her rivals and redoubled their fury.

‘Ah! my Lord,’ the poet replied, hoping to bring his golden sceptre down on the heads of these imbeciles. ‘Common minds have neither your wit nor your charity. No one knows
the grief we suffer or the toil we endure. A miner has less labour winning the gold from his mine than we have in wresting our imagery from the entrails of this most obdurate language of ours. If the aim of poetry is to bring ideas to the exact point at which the rest of the world can perceive and feel them, the poet must be for ever mounting and descending the ladder of men’s intelligence in order to satisfy them all; he must conceal those mutually hostile forces, logic and sentiment, under the most vivid colours; he must concentrate a whole world of ideas in a single word and sum up whole philosophies in a single image; in short his verses are so many seeds which he sows in the furrows of personal feeling so that flowers may spring up in human hearts. Must he not have felt all there is to feel in order to give expression to it? And if one feels keenly, is not that suffering? Therefore poetry is only born after arduous journeys through the vast regions of thought and society. Are they not immortal, the works to which we owe those creations whose life becomes more authentic than that of people who have really lived – Richardson’s Clarissa, Chénier’s Camille, Tibullus’s Delia, Ariosto’s Angelica, Dante’s Francesca, Molière’s Alceste, Beaumarchais’s Figaro, Walter Scott’s Rebecca and the Don Quixote of Cervantes?’

‘And what will you be creating for us?’ asked du Châtelet.

‘To put forth such conceptions,’ Lucien replied, ‘is it not tantamount to taking out one’s patent as a man of genius? In any case, to give birth to such sublime conceptions demands a long experience of life, a study of human passions and interests that I could not yet have made. – But I am making a start,’ he added bitterly as he threw a vengeful glance at the people around him. ‘Ideas gestate a long time in the womb of thought.’

‘You will have a painful delivery,’ interrupted Monsieur du Hautoy.

‘Your excellent mother will be able to help you,’ said the Bishop.

This apparent witticism, so skilfully engineered, was the avenging shaft they had all been awaiting, and their eyes lit
up with a gleam of delight. A smile of aristocratic satisfaction passed over everybody’s face, and its effect was increased by Monsieur de Bargeton who, in his idiocy, gave vent to a belated laugh.

‘My Lord, your wit is too subtle for us at this moment. These ladies do not understand you,’ said Madame de Bargeton. This single word froze all laughter and made them turn their eyes on her with astonishment. ‘A poet who draws all his inspiration from the Bible finds his true mother in the Church. Monsieur de Rubempré, read to us
Saint John at Pathmos,
or
Belshazzar’s Feast,
in order to prove to my Lord Bishop that Rome is still the
magna parens
of Virgil.’

The women exchanged a smile on hearing Naïs pronounce these two Latin words.

On the threshold of life, men of the stoutest courage may well lose heart. At the first moment this affront cast Lucien down into watery depths; but he struck out and rose to the surface, vowing that he would dominate this gathering of people. Like a bull stung by a thousand darts, he pulled himself up in a rage and was about to do as Louise had said and recite
Saint John at Pathmos;
but most of the card-players, falling back into their routine habits, which afforded them a pleasure that poetry had not provided, returned to the whist-tables. Moreover, the irritated self-esteem of so many people would not have been fully avenged without the negative disdain for indigenous poetry which they displayed by deserting Lucien and Madame de Bargeton. They each had their special preoccupation: one of the men went and discussed the construction of a by-road with the Prefect; one of the women suggested that the evening’s pleasure might be varied with a little music. The high society of Angoulême, fully incompetent to judge poetry, was anxious to know what the Rastignacs and the Pimentels thought of Lucien, and several persons gathered round them. On important occasions the prestige enjoyed by these two families in the
département
was always recognized: everyone envied them and paid court to them, for they all foresaw the possibility of needing their protection.

‘What do you think of our poet and his poetry?’ Jacques asked the Marquise, over whose lands he was allowed to shoot.

‘Well,’ she replied with a smile, ‘it’s not bad as far as provincial verse goes. Anyhow so good-looking a poet can’t write anything bad.’

Everyone found this verdict adorable and went off to repeat it, but with greater malice than the Marquise had intended to put into it.

Then du Châtelet was asked to accompany Monsieur de Bartas as he massacred Figaro’s great song. Now that the door was opened to music, they simply had to listen to du Châtelet’s rendering of the chivalric ballad which Chateaubriand had written in Imperial days. Then came piano duets such as are played by little girls and called for by Madame du Brossard who wanted to show off her darling Camille’s talent to Monsieur de Séverac.

Madame de Bargeton, wounded by the general display of contempt for her poet, returned disdain for disdain by retiring into her boudoir while the music was on. She was followed by the Bishop whose Vicar-General had explained to him the deep irony contained in his unintended epigram and who wanted to make up for it. Mademoiselle de Rastignac, captivated by the poem, slipped into the boudoir without her mother noticing. As Louise sat down on the quilted sofa to which she had brought Lucien, she was able, without being seen or heard, to whisper in his ear: ‘Dear angel, they didn’t understand you, but