Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics) (3 page)

It is an amusing thought that, in the late twenties and early thirties, Balzac had himself been a contributor to these disreputable rags and sometimes had a hand in the running of them; for instance he had helped Philipon to found
La Caricature.
Throughout his career he contributed many novels in serial form to the more important newspapers, notably those founded by Girardin and Dutacq –
La Presse
and
Le Siècle.
But by the time he was writing
Λ Great Man in Embryo
he had left the
petits journaux
far behind him. He himself tried his luck as a newspaper-proprietor and editor: he bought
La Chronique de Paris
in 1836 and founded
La Revue Parisienne
in 1840. Both of these ventures failed. We can well imagine therefore what a large amount of bile was accumulating inside him. On the whole, reviews of his works appearing in periodicals had been hostile if not harsh. He suffered much from the disparagement of editors and critics such as Sainte-Beuve and Jules Janin respectively. He was always quarrelling with Émile de Girardin. And so he took his revenge. He had already made a preliminary attack on the periodical press in
The Skin.
And he followed up his attack of 1839 with his
Monograph of the Paris Press
(1842).

This information relative to Balzac’s attack on the Press constitutes a bare minimum if we compare it to the discoveries made by researchers on the models used – both newspapers and personalities – but it should suffice to explain the importance he himself assigned to this third aspect of his novel. All this is centred round the person of Lucien Chardon, whose
failure to prove his mettle as ‘a great man’ is due to his inexperience, feebleness of character and naivety, just as his failure to achieve legal status as ‘Monsieur de Rubempré’ is due to his self-conceit and readiness to be gulled by his ex-patroness Madame de Bargeton and her formidable cousin the Marquise d’Espard. The third part of
Lost Illusions
takes him back to Angoulême. David’s failure as a printer (Balzac draws generously on his experience of 1826 for his knowledge of typography, its processes and difficulties) is now aggravated by his failure as the inventor of a cheap method of paper-manufacture. He has insuperable obstacles to cope with: the well-laid schemes of his competitors the brothers Cointet, supported by the Machiavellian wiles of the rascally solicitor Petit-Claud, the short-sighted meanness of his drunken father, the insolvency into which Lucien’s forgery of bills of exchange plunges him and the renewed fatuousness of Lucien in supposing that he can reconquer Madame de Bargeton (now Madame la Comtesse du Châtelet) and obtain governmental subsidies which will enable David to complete his researches.

So
Lost Illusions
ends as it had begun, as a ‘Scene of Provincial Life’.
An Inventor’s Tribulations
shows in the main the same disparaging attitude to life in the provinces as
The Two Poets
had done. Angoulême, like Paris, is full of rogues and sharks; but the domestic harmony, unselfishness and integrity of the Séchard couple, naive and gullible as they are, does give a more pleasant colouring to the total picture and makes for some serenity of outlook at the end. After landing David in prison for debt, Lucien is reduced to such despondency that suicide seems to be the only way out. But at the last moment Balzac brings a
deus ex machina
into operation: the mysterious Spanish ecclesiastic and diplomat ‘Carlos Herrera’ who, after long harangues, takes Lucien under his wing and leads him back to Paris where he intends to make his fortune in a really effectual way. The scheme he adopts is to use another woman of easy virtue, Esther Van Gobseck, another Coralie (Balzac always kept a soft spot in his heart for such women), as a decoy for extorting money from an elderly, infatuated banker, the
Baron de Nucingen – readers of Balzac will know that, according to his ingenious system of ‘reappearing characters’, they are liable to meet the same persons time and time again in different novels – so that the Rubempré estates can be repurchased and the foundations laid for Lucien’s ennoblement and success in political life. This project also fails. Lucien finds himself in prison under the accusation of murder and hangs himself in his cell.

All this takes place in the long sequel to
Lost Illusions
entitled
Splendour and Misery of Courtesans (A Harlot High and Low
in the Penguin Classics translation) which brings Lucien to his appointed end. This conclusion to his sorry career had obviously been in Balzac’s mind since the beginning. There is a hint of it in Part I (page 60): ‘Lucien, who did not know that his course lay between the infamy of a convict-prison and the palms awarded to genius, was soaring over the Mount Sinai of the Prophets without seeing that below him were the Dead Sea and the horrible winding-sheet of Gomorrha.’ In 1838 he had published a fragment of
Splendour.
Once more Lucien was to prove feeble and ineffectual – mere putty in the hands of ‘Carlos Herrera’. Who is this mysterious person? No Spaniard, but a character who had made his first appearance in
Old Goriot
in 1834; the master-criminal Vautrin, Jacques Collin, ‘Trompe-la-Mort’ – ‘Cheat-Death’: a man who has declared war on society and who, thanks to his homosexual tendencies, likes to take young men in hand and make a career for them (hence no doubt the allusion to Gomorrha in the above quotation). In
Old Goriot
he had failed to capture Eugène de Rastignac – Eugène found other ways of getting on – but Lucien becomes an easy prey. Vautrin is a fascinating figure, partly modelled on the notorious police-spy Vidocq of Napoleonic and Restoration times. He is also the prime mover in a drama –
Vautrin –
which Balzac produced in 1840. After Lucien’s suicide, broken-hearted, he gives up his war on society and becomes its protector in the role of superintendent of police!

It goes without saying that
Splendour and Misery of Courtesans,
with such a plot as its basis, contains a strong element of
melodrama, and this is foreshadowed in the last few chapters of
An Inventor’s Tribulations.
But
Lost Illusions
is a genuine ‘study of manners’, even though it has a pronouncedly satirical bias. And, conversely, a sentimental one. It is a strange blend of cynical pessimism and Romantic emotionalism. Also a notable feature in Balzac’s novels in general is his duality of attitude. There is the Balzac who participates and sympathizes, not only with his virtuous characters, rare enough in this novel (Eve, David, Madame Séchard, Marion, Kolb, Bérénice, Martainville), but also with his reprehensible ones – his treatment of Madame de Bargeton, Lucien and even Lousteau show this. Nor can he withold some admiration from rogues like Finot, the Cointets and Petit-Claud. There is also the Balzac who satirizes, admonishes and condemns. This ambiguity of attitude passes over into his style. At one moment he is crisp, pungent and objectively sardonic; at another moment inflated and pretentiously ‘poetic’. Many of his more ambitiously stylistic passages, with his addiction to swollen metaphor and hyperbolic statement, invite criticism and are difficult to translate. As regards the present translation, it may be noted that in the first edition of the
Human Comedy
(1842 onwards) he had suppressed his original chapter divisions. Here they are restored. His paragraphs are sometimes inordinately long and transition is lacking from one order of ideas to another. I have therefore taken certain liberties in redividing them. Nor have I found it advisable to adhere slavishly to his system of punctuation.

Lost Illusions:
this is of course the
leitmotiv
of the whole book. In Part I, Lucien quickly discovers that poetic ability gives no passport to social success with the Angoulême élite. On their arrival in Paris, he and his protectress soon find that there is no foundation for their mutual admiration. Etienne Lousteau, in Chapter Nine of Part II, disabuses Lucien about the likelihood of real talent making good in the literary world. Lucien’s experience with publishers and editors emphasizes this truth. He has to face the brutal fact that, wherever he goes, only money and intrigue count. In Part III we are shown how Eve, David and Madame Chardon shed their illusions about
their
grand homme de province.
Yet Lucien, after all the disasters which have overtaken him, is slow in shedding his illusions about himself. He still has a good opinion of himself as he returns, ragged and dejected, to the family homestead: ‘I am heroic!’ And, after further disasters, ‘Carlos Herrera’ comes along to restore his diminished morale. Gustave Flaubert, in 1869, was to renew the subject of ‘lost illusions’ in his
Sentimental Education.
The two novels are well worth comparing.

H. J. H.

1799
20 May:
Born at Tours, and put out to nurse until the age of four. His father is a civil servant, of peasant stock; his mother from a family of wealthy Parisian drapers.

Napoleon Bonaparte overthrows the Directory and becomes First Consul of France.

Hölderlin, Hyperion.

1804
First Empire: Napoleon becomes Emperor of France, and starts conquering Europe.

Schiller,
William Tell.

1805
Nelson defeats the French and Spanish fleet in the naval battle of Trafalgar. Napoleon defeats Austro-Russian troops at Austerlitz and then the Prussians at Jena.

Chateaubriand,
René.

1807
Sent to the Oratorian college in Vendôme, where he boards for the next five years. Birth of his half-brother Henry. (Already has two younger sisters: Laure, Laurence.)

1812
Napoleon is defeated in his catastrophic Moscow campaign against Tsar Alexander I.

Byron,
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

1814
Family move to Paris, where Balzac continues his education.

Allied troops enter Paris. Napoleon abdicates, and becomes King of Elba. First restoration: Accession of Louis XVIII to the French throne.

Austen,
Mansfield Park.
Goya,
The Second
and
Third of May 1808.

1815
Napoleon returns in triumph to Paris and rules for 100 days before defeat at Waterloo. Second restoration: Louis XVIII is reinstated on the French throne.

1816–19
Begins his legal training, attending lectures at the Sorbonne; articled to a solicitor, Maître Guillonet-Merville, then a notary, Maître Passez.

1819
Determined to make a career from writing, moves into a garret in Rue Lesdiguières.

Scott,
Ivanhoe.
Géricault,
The Raft of the Medusa.

1820 Finishes a verse drama,
Cromwell,
which is judged to be a failure by family and friends.

Shelley,
Prometheus Unbound.
Keats,
Ode on a Grecian Urn.

1821
Publishes novels of Gothic inspiration, many produced collaboratively, under the pseudonyms Lord R’hoone, and Horace de St Aubin. Writes poems and plays.

Constable,
Landscape: Noon (The Hay Wain).

1822
Becomes the lover of Laure de Berny, mother of nine and twenty-two years his senior.

1824
‘Horace de St Aubin’ is slated in the
Feuilleton littéraire.
Balzac contemplates suicide.

Lous XVIII dies and is succeeded by Charles X.

Beethoven,
Ninth Symphony.

1825
Launches a publishing and printing venture, producing editions of Molière and La Fontaine. Meets Victor Hugo.

Grillparzer,
King Ottokar’s Rise and Fall.

1828
Printing business collapses, leaving him in debt. His literary purpose strengthens.

Schubert,
Schwanengesang (Swansong).

1829
Frequents the
salons,
introduced by the Duchesse d’Abrantès. His father dies.
The Chouans,
the first novel he signs with his own name.

1830
Publishes numerous short stories including ‘Gobseck’, ‘The Vendetta’ and ‘Sarrasine’.