Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics) (18 page)

‘Father, I have only come to ask for your consent.’

‘Oh, that’s different. Who are you reckoning to marry, by the way?’

‘Mademoiselle Eve Chardon.’

‘Who’s she? What’s she made of?’

‘She’s the daughter of the late Monsieur Chardon, the chemist of L’Houmeau.’

‘You’re marrying a girl from L’Houmeau, you, a well set-up business man? You, a printer by royal appointment? That’s what comes of education! Some good sending your sons to college! – Come now, my boy, she’s very well off then?’ said the old vine-grower approaching his son with an ingratiating leer. ‘For sure, if you’re taking a girl from L’Houmeau, she must be worth thousands and thousands! Good, you’ll be able to pay me your arrears of rent: two years and three months, my boy, and that makes two thousand seven hundred francs, and they’ll come in the nick of time for me to pay my cooper. For anyone but my own son I could charge you interest: after all, business is business; but I’ll let you off that. Well now, how much has she got?’

‘She has just what my mother had.’

The old vine-grower nearly blurted out: ‘What! she has only ten thousand francs!’ But he remembered his refusal to render any account to his son, and he exclaimed: ‘She’s got nothing then!’

‘My mother’s fortune was her brains and her beauty.’

‘You go and sell that on the market, and you’ll see what you’ll get for it! God help us! What bad luck fathers have with their children! When I married, David, all I had was a paper cap and my two hands. I was a poor “bear”; but with the fine printing-works I’ve given you, with all your hard work and your know-how, you ought to marry a respectable
girl from the town, a woman with thirty or forty thousand francs. Stop being love-sick, and I’ll find you a wife myself. A few miles away there’s a miller’s widow of thirty-two, worth a hundred thousand francs in property: that’s the match for you! You can join her lands to the Marsac lands, they run side by side. Oh, what a fine estate we should have, and how well I’d look after it! They say she’s going to marry Courtois, her chief hand, but you’re a still better bargain for her! I’d run the mill, while she lived like a lady in Angoulême.’

‘Father, I am committed.’

‘David, you don’t understand a thing about business. You’ll come to ruin. Sure enough, if you marry this girl from L’Houmeau, I’ll square accounts with you. I’ll sue you for my rent, for I can see no good coming of this. Ah! my poor presses! You needed money to grease the works, to keep you going and get things moving. After this, only a good vintage can give me peace of mind.’

‘Father, it seems to me that up to now I haven’t caused you much worry…’

‘And not paid much rent either,’ the vine-grower retorted.

‘I came to ask you not only to consent to my marriage, but also to build a second storey to your house and put up living premises above your penthouse.’

‘Nothing doing. I haven’t a sou, as you well know. Besides, it would be pouring money down the sink – what would it bring me in? So then, you got up at daybreak to come and ask me to do a building job that would bankrupt a king. I may have christened you David, but I’m not Solomon in all his glory. Are you crazy? You’re not my child, you’re a changeling.’

He broke in on his own discourse to show David a vine-stock. ‘There’s one,’ he said, ‘which will be loaded with grapes. That’s the sort of child that doesn’t disappoint its parents: give it manure and it pays you back. I sent you to school. I paid through the nose to make a learned man of you, I sent you to study with the Didots. And what comes of all this humbug? You give me a daughter-in-law from L’Houmeau without a penny in her stocking. If you hadn’t studied,
if I’d kept you here under my nose, you’d have done what I saw fit, and today you’d be marrying a miller’s widow with a hundred thousand francs and a mill into the bargain. Oh yes! You’re so brainy you think I’m going to foot the bill for these fine notions and build palaces for you!… To hear you talk, the house you’re living in has been a pig-sty for two hundred years and isn’t good enough for your girl from L’Houmeau to sleep in. Who is she? the Queen of France?’

‘Very well, father, I shall build the second storey at my own expense and the son will enrich the father. It’s the wrong way round, but it does happen sometimes.’

‘What, my lad, you’ve money enough to build, but not enough to pay your rent? You young fox, you’re trying to trick your father!’

Stated this way, the problem became difficult to solve, for the old man was delighted to manoeuvre his son into a position which enabled him to give him nothing at all while still talking like a father. And so David could get nothing else from him but plain and simple consent to the marriage and permission to build, at his own expense and in his father’s own house, any accommodation he needed. The old ‘bear’, this paragon among thrifty sires, did his son the favour of not demanding the back rent and so not robbing him of the savings he had been so imprudent as to divulge. David returned home in a sad mood: he realized that if misfortune came he could not count on help from his father.

‘There’s a lucky chap,’ said a solicitor’s clerk, an ugly young man named Petit-Claud, who had been at school with Lucien and with whom Lucien took on little airs of condescension.

‘True enough. He’s good-looking. He has talent and Madame de Bargeton is gone on him!’ replied a youth of good social standing who had been present at the reading.

Lucien had waited impatiently for the time when he knew he could catch Louise by herself: this woman, who had become the arbiter of his destiny, had to be persuaded to accept his sister’s marriage. After the events of the previous evening, she might perhaps feel more tenderly disposed, and from this tenderness might spring a brief spell of happiness. He was not mistaken: Madame de Bargeton welcomed him with an effusiveness which for a novice in love was a touching sign of mounting passion. She yielded her beautiful golden locks, her hand and her head to the burning kisses of the poet who had suffered so much the evening before.

‘If you could have seen yourself as you were reading’ – she used the affectionate ‘thou’, for they had reached that stage the evening before, when Louise, sitting on her sofa, had wiped away the drops of moisture gleaming like pearls on the brow on which she would have liked to set a wreath of laurels. ‘Your lovely eyes were flashing, while from your lips I saw the golden chains unwind, the chains of words that poets use to bind men’s hearts to them. You shall read me the whole of Chénier; he is the poet for lovers. You shall suffer no more, I will not allow you to! Yes, dear angel, I will put an oasis around you and in it you will live your poet’s life – active, languid, indolent, industrious, pensive turn by turn. But never forget that you will owe your laurels to me, and that will be the splendid reward I shall reap for the pains I shall have to endure. Dear, dear boy, society will not spare me any more than it spares you – it takes its revenge for any happiness it does not share. Yes, I shall always be envied
– did you not see that yesterday? How quickly those gadflies swarmed round to slake their thirst with blood from the pricks they had made! But how happy I was! I really lived! How long it is since every chord of my heart felt such vibrations!’

Tears were streaming down Louise’s cheeks. Lucien took her hand, and the long kiss he gave it was his only reply. And so the poet’s vanity was flattered by this woman as it had been by his mother, his sister and David. All those about him persisted in lifting him higher than ever on his imaginary pedestal. Everything, the adulation of his friends and the fury of his enemies, fanned the flame of his delusions and ambition; the atmosphere he moved in was bright with mirages. The imagination of young people is so inclined to eulogize, to foster such notions, and circumstances seem so eager to serve a handsome young man with a future before him, that more than one bitter and chilling lesson is needed to dissipate such illusions.

‘So then, my beautiful Louise, you are willing to be my Beatrice – but a Beatrice who will let herself be loved?’

She raised her beautiful eyes – until then they had been drooping – and replied, with an angelic smile which gave the lie to her words:

‘If you deserve it… later! Are you not happy? To have someone whose heart is yours! To be able to confide completely in someone you are sure will understand you! Surely that is happiness?’

‘Yes,’ he replied, but with the wry expression of a frustrated lover.

‘Child that you are!’, she said, teasingly. ‘Come now, haven’t you something to tell me? You looked quite worried as you came in, my Lucien.’

Lucien shyly told his darling of David’s love for his sister, his sister’s love for David, and the proposed marriage.

‘Poor Lucien,’ said Louise. ‘He’s afraid of being beaten and scolded, as if it were he who was getting married!’

‘But what harm is there in that,’ she continued, running her hands through his hair. ‘What does your family matter
to me, since you are so much above it? If my father married his servant, would it worry you? Dear child, lovers are a whole family to themselves. Have I any interest in the world other than my Lucien? Become a great man, find the way to glory: that’s all that concerns us!’

This egoistic response made Lucien the happiest man in the world. But just as he was listening to the extravagant arguments by which Louise was proving to him that they were alone in the world, Monsieur de Bargeton came in. Lucien knitted his eyebrows and seemed taken aback. Louise made him a sign, begged him to stay to dinner, and asked him to read some Chénier until the card-players and other regular visitors arrived.

‘You will not only be giving her pleasure,’ said Monsieur de Bargeton, ‘but me as well. Nothing suits me better than to listen to reading after dinner.’

And so, coaxed by Monsieur de Bargeton as well as Louise, with the servants showing him the respect that servants feel for their employers’ favoured guests, Lucien stayed on, accepting as his due all the enjoyments attached to a fortune which was to be his for the using. By the time the drawing-room had filled up, he felt so fortified by Monsieur de Bargeton’s stupidity and so confident of Louise’s love that he assumed a dominating attitude which his beautiful mistress encouraged and savoured the pleasures of the despotic power which Naïs had acquired and which she willingly shared with him. In short, he did his best during this soirée, to play the role of a country town ‘lion’. Taking note of Lucien’s new attitude, a few persons decided that he was, to use an old-fashioned expression, ‘on the best possible terms’ with Madame de Bargeton. Amélie, who had arrived with Monsieur du Châtelet and had joined the group of jealous and envious people gathered in a corner, affirmed that the worst had happened.

‘Don’t make Naïs responsible,’ said Châtelet, ‘for the vanity of a silly youth puffed up with pride at finding himself in company to which he never expected to be admitted. Can’t you see that this Chardon is taking the gracious utterances of a
society lady as advances? He hasn’t yet learnt to distinguish between the silence of real passion and the patronizing language merited by his good looks, youth and talent I Women would be greatly to be pitied if they were blamed for all the desires they inspire in us. He is certainly in love, but as for Naïs…’

‘Oh! as for Naïs,’ the perfidious Amélie repeated, ‘Naïs is very happy to have inspired this passion. At her age, a young man’s love has so many attractions to offer! His youthfulness is contagious; a woman becomes a girl again and takes on the scruples and affectations of a girl without realizing how ridiculous it is… Just fancy! An apothecary’s son strutting about as if he were master in Madame de Bargeton’s house!’

The next day there was no house in Angoulême in which the degree of intimacy between Monsieur Chardon,
alias
de Rubempré, and Madame de Bargeton was not a matter for discussion. At most they had exchanged a kiss or two, and society was already accusing them of the most guilty relations. Madame de Bargeton was paying the penalty for her pre-eminence. Which of us has not observed the eccentricities peculiar to polite society, the capriciousness of its judgements and the extravagance of its demands? To some persons everything is permissible; their conduct may go far beyond the bounds of reason; all their actions are seemly; they are justified by all and sundry. But there are others to whom society is incredibly severe: they must make no mistakes, never falter or even utter a foolish remark. They are like venerated statues which are removed from their pedestals once the winter frost has nipped off a finger or chipped a nose; they are allowed no human feelings and must for ever remain god-like and perfect. A single glance at Lucien from Madame de Bargeton was equivalent to the twelve years’ happiness enjoyed by Zizine and Francis. One hand-clasp was certain to bring down all the thunders of the Charente valley on the amorous couple.

David had brought back from Paris a secret nest-egg which he was earmarking for his wedding expenses and the construction of a second floor in his father’s house. It was after all in his own interests to enlarge this house. It would come to him sooner or later, since his father was seventy-eight. And so the printer had Lucien’s rooms half-timbered so as not to overload the cracked walls of this old building. He took pleasure in decorating and elegantly furnishing the first-floor flat in which his lovely Eve was to spend her days. It was a period of unmixed joy and happiness for the two friends. Weary as he was of the mean dimensions of provincial existence, tired as he was of the sordid economy which made a five-franc piece an enormous sum, Lucien uncomplainingly endured the cheese-paring and privation which poverty entails. The gloomy melancholy of his expression had given place to the radiancy of hope. A star was shining above his head; he had dreams of a bright future and was staking his happiness on the demise of Monsieur de Bargeton, who from time to time had stomach troubles and the happy mania of regarding his after-dinner indigestion as an ailment which after-supper indigestion could cure.

By the beginning of September, Lucien was no longer a proof-reader: he was Monsieur de Rubempré, sumptuously lodged in comparison with the wretched dormer-windowed attic the insignificant Chardon had occupied in L’Houmeau. He was no longer a man from L’Houmeau: he lived in Upper Angoulême and dined about four times a week with Madame de Bargeton. My Lord Bishop was friendly with him and received him at his palace. His occupations put him on a level with persons of the loftiest degree. In fact he was expected one day to rank among the most illustrious figures in France. Assuredly, as he paced through his elegant sitting-room, his charming bedroom and his tastefully decorated study, he could forgive himself for levying thirty francs a month on the painfully earned wages of his sister and mother, for he could look forward to the day when the historical novel at which he had been working for two years –
The Archer of Charles the Ninth,
and a volume of verse entitled
The Mar
guerites
– would spread his renown through the world of literature and bring him enough money to pay his debt to his mother, sister and David. And so, feeling greater in stature, already hearing his name echoing down the corridors of the future, he was now accepting these sacrifices with a noble self-assurance: he could smile at the straits he suffered and enjoy his last days of poverty.

Eve and David had put their own happiness second to his. Their wedding had been postponed until the workmen could finish the furnishing, painting and paper-hanging on the first floor, for Lucien’s concerns had been given priority. No one who knew Lucien would have been surprised at the devotion shown to him: he had such charming, such endearing manners! He so gracefully expressed his impatience and his desires! His cause was always won before he had opened his mouth. So fatal a privilege is disastrous rather than salutary to most young people. Accustomed to the attentions which their youth and good looks guarantee, and happy to receive the protection which humanity egoistically accords to any of its darlings in the same way that it gives alms to the mendicant who stirs its feelings and affords it emotional satisfaction, many of these overgrown children enjoy such favour but do not use it to advantage. Deceived as to the meaning and motives governing social relations, they always expect to be greeted with flattering smiles. But the moment comes when society discards them – perhaps on the threshold of a salon or at a street-corner – denuded, bald-headed, threadbare, worthless and destitute, like aging coquettes or worn-out garments.

Moreover Eve herself had desired this postponement because she wanted to cater as economically as possible for her future household needs. What could a loving couple refuse to a brother who, when he saw his sister at work, exclaimed with heart-felt sincerity: ‘How I wish I could sew!’ And David, grave and observant as he was, had joined in this conspiracy of self-sacrifice. None the less, since Lucien’s triumph in Madame de Bargeton’s salon, he was alarmed by the transformation he could discern in Lucien: he was afraid
that he would come to despise their modest standard of living. Desiring to put his ‘brother’ to the test, he sometimes got him to choose between the patriarchal joys of family life and the pleasures of high society, and when he had seen Lucien giving up his vainglorious enjoyments for their sake, he had exclaimed: ‘They won’t succeed in spoiling him!’ On various occasions the three friends and Madame Chardon went off on pleasure parties, as provincial people do. They took walks in the woods near Angoulême which run along the river Charente; they picnicked on the grass with provisions which David’s apprentice brought to a certain spot at an agreed time; then they returned home in the evening, rather tired, but without having spent as much as three francs. On great occasions, when they dined at what is called a ‘restaurât’, a sort of rustic eating-house which is half-way between a provincial tavern and a Paris pleasure-garden, they went to the expense of five francs which David and the Chardons shared. David was infinitely grateful to Lucien for forgetting, during these rustic excursions, the satisfaction he drew from consorting with Madame de Bargeton and eating sumptuous society dinners. Each of them then wanted to fête the ‘great man’ of Angoulême.

At this conjuncture, just when all plans for the future household were practically complete, while David was making a journey to Marsac to prevail on his father to come to the wedding, in the hope that the old man would yield to his daughter-in-law’s charm and contribute to the enormous expenditure necessitated by the alterations to the house, one of those events occurred which entirely change the look of things in a small town.

In the person of du Châtelet, Lucien and Louise had a close spy who, with the persistency of hatred mingled with passion and avarice, was watching for an opportunity to provoke a scandal. Sixte wanted Madame de Bargeton to declare herself so openly for Lucien as to become what one calls a ‘lost woman’. He had posed as a humble confidant of Madame de Bargeton; but if, in her house in the Rue du Minage, he admired Lucien, he ran him down everywhere
else. By imperceptible degrees he had gained the right to pay informal calls on Naïs, who was no longer suspicious of her elderly admirer; but he had staked too much on the love of Lucien and Louise which, to their very great regret, remained platonic. In fact there are passions which – put it as you will – are well or badly launched. Two persons make sentiment a matter of tactics, talk instead of acting, and fight in the open field instead of laying siege. As a result they often cool off towards each other because their desires spend themselves in a vacuum. Both lovers thus give themselves time to reflect and judge one another. Often passions which have taken the field with flying colours and fine array, with ardour enough to sweep all before them, end up by retreating to their quarters, with no victory gained, humiliated, disarmed, a laughing-stock for the vain stir they have made. These mischances are sometimes attributable to the timidity of youth and the temporisations with which women love to begin – for this kind of reciprocal deception happens neither to practised seducers nor to coquettes well versed in the strategy of passion.

Besides this, life in the provinces is singularly adverse to the satisfactions of love and favours passion only as a kind of intellectual debate. Also the obstacles it opposes to that sweet intercourse which so much binds lovers together drive ardent souls to extreme decisions. Provincial life is based on such meticulous espionage, it requires that private conduct shall be so open to inspection, it so reluctantly approves of any intimacy which consoles while not offending virtue, it so unjustly incriminates the most chaste relationship, that many women are stigmatized however innocent they may be. Thereupon some of them become angry with themselves for not having tasted all the felicity as well as the overwhelming unhappiness which a lapse from virtue brings. So that society, which without any serious examination blames or criticizes the overt act which brings long inward conflicts to an end, is primarily responsible for the ensuing scandal; but most of those people who rail against the supposedly shocking conduct of a few undeservedly calumniated women have never
thought of the causes which have brought them into the open. Madame de Bargeton was to find herself in the same peculiar situation as many women who have fallen only after being unjustly accused.

In the early days of a passion, the inexperienced are intimidated by obstacles, and those which confronted the two lovers were very like the cords with which the Lilliputians tied up Gulliver. They were a multitude of trivialities which made all movement impossible and thwarted the most violent desires. So, Madame de Bargeton had always to remain in public view. If she had been ‘not at home’ at the time of Lucien’s visits, there would have been nothing more to say: she might just as well have eloped with him. True, she received him in her boudoir, and he was so used to being there that he looked upon it as his domain – but Louise was scrupulous in keeping open house. Nothing went beyond the bounds of strict propriety. Monsieur de Bargeton bumbled about the house like a cockchafer and it never occurred to him that his wife might wish to be alone with Lucien. Had he been the only obstacle, Naïs could very easily have sent him off or kept him busy; but she was inundated with visitors, and the keener curiosity became, the more their number increased. Provincial people are by nature malicious and love to balk nascent passion. The servants passed to and fro through the house without being summoned and gave no warning of their presence, in conformity with the long-standing habits which a woman who had nothing to conceal had allowed them to acquire. To have made any changes in the domestic routine would have been tantamount to confessing a love intrigue which Angoulême continued to suspect. Madame de Bargeton could not set foot outside her house without the town knowing where she was going. To have gone for solitary walks with Lucien outside the town would have been a decisive step: there would have been less danger in shutting herself up with him in her house. If Lucien had stayed with her after midnight, with no other company present, tongues would have wagged the next morning. And so, indoors and out of doors, Madame de Bargeton’s life was open to the public. These details give a complete
picture of provincial life: a transgression is either openly avowed or made impossible.

Like all women involved in a love affair but lacking experience, Louise came to realize the difficulties of her situation one by one; they frightened her, and then the alarm she felt had its effect on those amorous discussions with which lovers, alone to themselves, most pleasantly while away the time. Madame de Bargeton had no estate to which she could take her beloved poet, like some women who cleverly manufacture some excuse for burying themselves in the country. Tired of living under the public gaze, exasperated by the tyranny whose yoke brought more vexation than her love afforded satisfaction, her mind turned towards L’Escarbas and she thought of paying her aged father a visit, so irritated she was with these miserable obstacles.

Châtelet did not believe in such great innocence. He kept an eye on the times at which Lucien visited Madame de Bargeton and called on her a few minutes later; and he was always accompanied by Monsieur de Chandour, the most indiscreet member of their circle, whom he was careful to let go in first, hoping that some lucky chance, obstinately awaited, would enable him to take the lovers by surprise. His role and his prospects of success were the more dubious because he had to remain neutral in order to manoeuvre the actors in the drama he wanted to stage. And so, in order to lull any suspicion in Lucien, whom he flattered, and Madame de Bargeton, who was not lacking in perspicacity, he had attached himself to the jealous Amélie for appearances’ sake. So that a closer watch could be kept on Louise and Lucien, he had succeeded a few days since in starting a controversy about the two lovers between himself and Chandour. Du Châtelet claimed that Madame de Bargeton was playing with Lucien, that she was too proud and of too high rank to condescend to a chemist’s son. This pretence of incredulity suited his plans, for he wanted to figure as Madame de Bargeton’s champion. Stanislas de Chandour maintained that Lucien was by no means spurned as a lover. Amélie’s eagerness to know the truth added heat to the discussion. Each party had a
reasoned case. As is typical in a small town, intimate friends of the Chandours would often turn up during a conversation in which both du Châtelet and Stanislas were very competently upholding their point of view. It was not very difficult for either disputant to recruit partisans by asking his neighbour: ‘What do
you
think about it?’ This controversy kept Madame de Bargeton and Lucien under constant surveillance. Finally, du Châtelet one day remarked that whenever Monsieur and himself called on Louise and Lucien was there, no sign was revealed of a suspect relationship: the boudoir door remained open, people came and went, no mysterious exchanges gave any hint of guilty love-play between the two people, etc. Stanislas, who had more than his share of stupidity, undertook to steal in next day on tiptoe, and the perfidious Amélie expressed strong approval.