Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics) (30 page)
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Authors: Honore de Balzac
A
T
the beginning of December Lucien, having used the remainder of his money to buy a few logs, found himself penniless while eagerly engaged in the task of re-writing his novel. Daniel for his part burned peat and heroically endured his poverty; he made no complaints, lived as steadily as an old maid and with so much method that he seemed like a miser. His courage stimulated that of Lucien who, as a newcomer to the Cénacle, was overwhelmingly reluctant to talk about the straits he was in. One morning he went to the rue du Coq in order to sell
The Archer of Charles the Ninth
to Doguereau, but failed to see him. Lucien did not know how indulgent great minds can be. Each of his friends was aware of the weaknesses peculiar to writers of poetry and the dejection
resulting from the efforts of a mind overstrained by the contemplation of nature, the interpretation of which is the poet’s function. These men, so sturdy in coping with their own troubles, showed a tender sympathy for Lucien in his sufferings. And so the members of the Cénacle added a crowning touch to one of those pleasant evenings given over to conversation, profound thinking, poetry, personal confidences, impetuous dashes through the fields of the intellect, international policy and the domains of history: they made a characteristic gesture which proved how slight was Lucien’s understanding of his new friends.
‘Lucien, my friend,’ said Daniel. ‘You didn’t dine at Flicoteaux’s yesterday, and we know why.’
Lucien could not prevent tears from streaming down his cheeks.
‘You showed little trust in us,’ said Michel Chrestien. ‘We shall chalk a cross on the mantelpiece, and when we have reached the tenth…’
‘We have each of us,’ said Bianchon, ‘done an extra piece of work. I looked after one of Desplein’s wealthy patients for him. D’Arthez wrote an article for the
Revue Encyclopédique.
One evening Chrestien thought of going out singing in the Champs-Elysées with a scarf and four candles, but he was commissioned to write a pamphlet for a man with political ambitions and provided him with six hundred francs’ worth of Machiavelli. Léon Giraud has borrowed fifty francs from his publisher. Joseph has sold some sketches and on Sunday Fulgence had his play performed before a full house.’
‘Here are two hundred francs,’ said Daniel. ‘Take them and don’t let us catch you out again!’
‘Hanged if he isn’t going to hug every one of us, as if we had done something extraordinary!’ said Chrestien.
To show how delighted Lucien was to be in the midst of this living encyclopaedia of angelic spirits, this group of young men each bearing the impress of a special originality derived from his own line of research, it will suffice to record the replies which Lucien received the next day to a letter written to his family, a masterpiece of sensibility and good
intentions, a heart-rending cry which his distress had wrung from him.
DAVID SÉCHARD TO LUCIEN
My dear Lucien,
You will find enclosed a draft in your name for two hundred francs, payable in ninety days. You can cash it with Monsieur Métivier, paper-merchant, our Paris correspondent, rue Serpente. My good Lucien, we are absolutely denuded. My wife has taken over the printing-office and is running it with a devotedness, patience and energy which make me thank Heaven for having given me such an angel for a wife. She herself has realized how impossible it is for us to send you any worthwhile help. But, my friend, I believe you are on so fine a path in the company of such great and noble hearts that a glorious destiny awaits you, aided as you are by people of almost divine intelligence like Messieurs Daniel d’Arthez, Michel Chrestien and Léon Giraud, with the counsels of Messieurs Meyraux, Bianchon and Ridal, whom your precious letter has made known to us. And so, without telling Eve, I drew this bill of exchange and will find some way of meeting it when it falls due. Do not turn aside from the road you are following: it will be hard going, but it will bring you fame. I would rather suffer a thousand ills than know you had fallen into any of the mud-pits of Paris – I saw so many of them when I was there. Have the courage to avoid, as you are doing, evil resorts, evil people, irresponsible persons and certain men of letters whom I learnt to appraise at their true value during my stay in Paris. In short, be a worthy emulator of those lofty minds who have become dear to me through you. You will soon reap the reward of such conduct. Good-bye, beloved brother: you have filled my heart with delight. I had not expected so much courage from you.
DAVID.
EVE SÉCHARD TO LUCIEN
My dear,
We all cried as we read your letter. Let those noble hearts to which your guardian angel led you know this: a mother and a poor young woman will pray to God for them night and morning; and if the most fervent prayers rise to His throne, they will obtain some favours for all of you. Yes, dear brother, their names are engraved
in my heart. Oh, I shall meet them some day! If I have to walk the whole way I will come and thank them for showing you such friendship, for it has poured balm on my open wounds. Here, my darling, we are toiling like poor workmen. My husband, that unknown great man whom I love more every day as I discover, moment by moment, new treasures in his heart, is neglecting his printing-office, and I can guess why: your destitution, as well as ours and Mother’s, worry him to death. Our beloved David is like Prometheus with grief, a yellow-beaked vulture pecking at his entrails. Noble as he is, he scarcely thinks of himself, for he is hoping to make a fortune. He spends all his time making experiments in the manufacture of paper; he has asked me to look after the business in his stead, but he gives me as much help with it as his preoccupation will allow. Alas, I am expecting a child. Such an event, which would have overwhelmed me with joy, makes me sad in our present situation. Our dear mother has become young again and found new strength for her tiring profession as sick nurse. Without our money troubles we should be happy. Old Séchard won’t give his son a farthing. David went to see him to borrow a few coppers in order to help you, for your letter brought him to despair. ‘I know Lucien’, David said, ‘he will lose his head and do something silly.’ I gave him a good scolding. ‘Would my brother fall short in any way?’ I replied. ‘Lucien knows I should die of grief.’ Mother and I, without David suspecting it, have pawned a few articles which Mother will redeem as soon as any money comes in. In this way we raised a hundred francs which I am sending by post. Don’t be cross with me, my dear, for not answering your first letter. We were in such a predicament that we worried night and day. Oh, I didn’t know I was so strong. Madame de Bargeton is a soulless and heartless woman; even if she no longer loved you, she owed it to herself to help and protect you after snatching you away from us and flinging you into the terrible ocean of Paris, where God’s blessing is needed for one to find true friends amid the rough seas of human self-interest. Have no regrets for her. I wanted you to have a devoted woman about you, a second myself; but now that I know you have friends who feel just as we do, my mind is easy. Spread the wings of your fine genius, darling. Our glory will be in you, as our love is already.
EVE.
My beloved child, after what your sister has written to you, I can only send you my blessing and assure you that my prayers and
thoughts are all, alas, for you alone, to the detriment of those around me. There are some hearts for whom absent people are always in the right: so it is with the heart of
YOUR MOTHER.
Thus, two days later, Lucien was able to pay back to his friends the loan they had so gracefully made him. Never perhaps had life seemed more beautiful to him, but this prompting of self-respect did not elude the searching glances of his friends.
‘One would say that you were afraid of owing us something,’ Fulgence exclaimed.
‘Indeed,’ said Michel Chrestien, ‘the pleasure he manifests seems a grave thing to me. It confirms what I have already noticed: there is vanity in Lucien.’
‘He’s a poet,’ said d’Arthez.
‘Do you resent my having so natural a feeling?’
‘We must give him credit,’ said Léon Giraud, ‘for not hiding it from us; but I fear that later on he may be afraid of us.’
‘But why?’ asked Lucien.
‘Because we can read your heart,’ Joseph Bridau replied.
‘In you,’ said Michel Chrestien, ‘there is a diabolic spirit which will help you to justify in your own eyes things most contrary to our principles: instead of being a sophist in ideas you will be a sophist in action.’
‘Indeed, I fear so,’ said d’Arthez. ‘Lucien, you will hold admirable discussions with yourself which will make you feel big, but they will lead to blameworthy deeds… You will never be in tune with yourself.’
‘What are your grounds for making such an accusation?’ asked Lucien.
‘Is your vanity so great, my dear poet,’ exclaimed Fulgence, ‘that it enters even into your friendships? All vanity of that kind betokens fearful egoism, and egoism poisons friendship.’
‘Oh, good Heavens!’ cried Lucien. ‘So you don’t know what great love I have for you?’
‘If you loved us as we love you, would you have made such haste and fuss about returning to us what we had had so much pleasure in giving you?’
‘Here we don’t lend money to one another, we give it,’ Joseph Bridau bluntly interposed.
‘Don’t think we are being harsh, my dear boy,’ said Michel Chrestien. ‘We are looking ahead. We are afraid that one day we may see you preferring the joys of petty requital to the joys of our pure friendship for you. Read Goethe’s
Tasso,
the greatest work of that fine genius, and you will see there that the poet loves gaudy clothes, banquets, triumphs, outward show: well, be a Tasso without his follies. Are the world and its pleasures calling you? Stay here. Transfer to the realm of ideas all that you expect to gain from vanity. Exchange one folly for another: put virtue into your actions and vice into your fictions; instead, as d’Arthez said, of thinking well and behaving badly.’
Lucien let his head droop: his friends were right.
‘I confess I have not strength such as yours,’ he said, looking at them very appealingly. ‘My back and shoulders are not sturdy enough to hold up Paris, to struggle courageously. Nature has given us different temperaments and faculties, and you know better than I do the reverse side of vices and virtues. I admit that I am already tired.’
‘We will support you,’ said d’Arthez. ‘That is just what loyal friendship is for.’
‘The help I have just received is precarious and everyone in my family is as poor as the rest; need will soon be on my heels again. Chrestien, depending as he does on casual earnings, has no influence with the publishers. Bianchon is outside this sphere of affairs. D’Arthez is only in touch with firms producing scientific and specialized treatises, which cut no ice with publishers looking for novelty. Horace, Fulgence Ridal and Bridau work in a region of ideas which keeps them a hundred leagues away from publishers. I must come to some decision.’
‘Hold on to ours: endurance!’ said Bianchon. ‘Endure with courage and put your trust in hard work!’
‘But what is only endurance for you means death for me,’ Lucien quickly retorted.
‘Before the cock has crowed three times,’ said Léon Giraud with a smile, ‘this man will have betrayed the cause of hard work for that of sloth and the vices of Paris.’
‘How far has hard work taken you?’ asked Lucien with a laugh.
‘When you leave Paris for Italy, you don’t find Rome midway,’ said Joseph Bridau. ‘You seem to expect your green peas to grow already cooked and served up with butter.’
‘They only grow like that for the eldest sons of peers,’ said Michel Chrestien. ‘The rest of us sow them and water them and find them all the tastier.’
The conversation turned to jests and the subject was dropped. These shrewd minds and delicate hearts tried to make Lucien forget this little quarrel, but henceforth he realized how difficult it was to deceive them. There soon came to him an inner despair which he carefully concealed from his friends, for he believed them to be implacable mentors. His southern temperament, so apt to run up and down the gamut of emotions, caused him to vacillate between the most contrary resolutions.
On several occasions he talked of plunging into journalism, but his friends always said: ‘For Heaven’s sake don’t.’
‘That would be the end of the fine, gentle Lucien we love and know,’ said d’Arthez.
‘You wouldn’t be able to stand steadfast against the constant antagonism between pleasure and toil of which a journalist’s life consists, and steadfastness is the foundation of virtue. You would be so delighted to wield power, to pass sentence of life or death on the productions of thought, that you would become a hardened journalist in two months. To be a journalist is to become a proconsul in the republic of letters. The man who can say what he likes ends up by doing what he likes. This, as one might guess, was one of Napoleon’s maxims.’
‘But will you not still be with me?’ asked Lucien.
‘We shall no longer be with you,’ Fulgence exclaimed. ‘Once
a journalist, you would no more think of us than a brilliant, idolized Opera singer in her silk-lined carriage thinks of her native village with its cows and clogs. You only too obviously possess the qualities of a journalist: brilliance and versatility of thought. You would never deny yourself a shaft of wit, even if it reduced a friend to tears. I meet journalists in the theatre
foyers,
and they horrify me. Journalism is an inferno, a bottomless pit of iniquity, falsehood and treachery: one can only pass through it and emerge from it unsullied if one is shielded as Dante was by the divine laurels of Virgil.’
The more the Cénacle tried to turn Lucien away from this path, the more did his desire to brave the peril invite him to take the risk. He began to argue with himself: was it not ridiculous to let himself be once more overtaken by penury without doing anything to avert it? In view of the failure he had met with in regard to his first novel, Lucien felt little inclined to settle down to a second one. Besides, what would he have to live on while he was writing it? A month of privation had exhausted his stock of patience. Could he not do nobly what journalists did unworthily and without scruples of conscience? The mistrust of his friends was an insult to him, and he wanted to show them what mental vigour he had. Perhaps he might come to their help one day and be a herald of glory for them.
‘Anyway, what sort of friendship is it that shies at complicity?’ he asked one evening of Michel Chrestien as he was seeing him back home in company with Léon Giraud.
‘We shy at nothing,’ Michel answered. ‘If you had the misfortune to kill your mistress, I would help you to conceal the crime and could still feel some respect for you. But if you took to espionage I should shrink from you in horror, for you would be adopting treachery and infamy as a system. That, in a word, is what journalism does. Friendship condones mistakes and the rash impulses of passion, but it must be implacable to anyone who decides to barter away his soul, his intellect and his thought.’
‘Could I not take to journalism in order to sell my book of poems and my novel, and then give it up immediately?’
‘That is how Machiavelli would behave, but not Lucien de Rubempré,’ said Léon Giraud.
‘Very well,’ cried Lucien. ‘I will prove to you that I am as capable as Machiavelli!’
‘Ah!’ cried Michel, clasping Léon by the hand. ‘You have just sealed his doom.’ – ‘Lucien,’ he added, ‘You have three hundred francs, enough to live comfortably for three months. Very well, get to work, write a second novel. D’Arthez and Fulgence will help you to plan it, you will grow in stature, you will be a novelist. I instead will make my way into one of those mental brothels and become a journalist for three months. I will sell your books for you to some publisher after attacking his publications. I will write articles and get articles written about you. We will arrange a success for you, you will become a great man and you will still be our Lucien.’
‘You really must despise me if you think that I should come to grief and that you will come through it unscathed!’ said the poet.
‘Lord forgive him! He’s just a child!’ cried Michel Chrestien.