Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics) (41 page)

‘Madame de Bargeton got rid of Lucien as if he had been a tramp,’ said Lousteau.

‘Such a handsome young man!’ said the envoy.

The dinner, served in new silver-plate, in Sèvres porcelain on linen damask, was lavishly sumptuous. Chevet had supplied the food and the wines had been chosen by the most famous merchant in the Quai Saint-Bernard, a friend of Camusot, Matifat and Cardot. Thus, for the first time, seeing Parisian luxury in full swing, Lucien met with one surprise after another, but concealed his astonishment like the man of wit, feeling and style he was – according to Blondet’s testimony.

As they crossed the salon, Coralie had whispered to Florine: ‘Get Camusot so thoroughly drunk that he’ll be forced to sleep in your flat.’

‘So you’ve
made
your journalist?’ asked Florine, using a word from the vocabulary peculiar to women of the street.

‘No, my dear, I love him!’ Coralie rejoindered with an enchanting little shrug.

These words were carried to Lucien’s ears by the fifth of the deadly sins. Coralie was superbly dressed, every detail of her attire artfully setting off her special charms – each woman’s beauty has its own particular perfections. Her dress, like Florine’s, was all the prettier for being made of a delicate
material which was then new – silk muslin, the exclusive use of it belonging for a few days to Camusot, whose large orders from Paris, in his capacity as head of the ‘Golden Cocoon’, were a godsend to the Lyon factories. Thus both love and adornment, which are as paint and perfume to a woman, enhanced the happy Coralie’s seductiveness. A pleasure awaited with a feeling of certainty holds a tremendous power of seduction for young people. Perhaps such certainty is what constitutes in their eyes the attraction of evil haunts. Therein perhaps lies the secret of long-lasting fidelity. Pure and sincere love, first love in fact, in conjunction with the impetuous infatuations which assail these poor creatures, also the admiration Coralie felt for Lucien’s great beauty, endowed her with the wit which comes from the heart.

‘I should love you even if you were ugly and ill!’ she murmured to Lucien as they sat down to table.

What words for a poet to hear! Camusot vanished and Lucien no longer saw him when he looked at Coralie. Could a man whose every instinct was for enjoyment and sensation, bored with the monotony of provincial life, drawn into the vortex of Parisian society, weary of poverty, tormented by enforced continence, tired of his monastic seclusion in the rue de Cluny and his unfruitful labours, could such a man have held aloof from this glittering banquet? Lucien had one foot in Coralie’s boudoir and the other caught in the bird-lime of the daily press which he had run after so hard without succeeding in catching up with it. After vainly standing sentry so often in the rue du Sentier, here he found the Press sitting at table, drinking deep, jovial, good-humoured. All his grievances had just been avenged by an article which the very next day would pierce two hearts into which he had vainly sought to pour all the fury and pain with which his cup had been filled. Looking at Lousteau, he thought: ‘There’s a friend!’ without suspecting that Lousteau already feared him as a dangerous rival. Lucien had made the mistake of expending too much wit: a dull article would have served him admirably. Blondet counterbalanced the envy that was gnawing at Lousteau by telling Finot that one had to surrender to such forceful talent.
This verdict determined Lousteau’s conduct: he resolved to remain friendly with Lucien and come to an understanding with Finot in order to exploit so dangerous a newcomer by keeping him in a state of need. This decision was rapidly taken by these two men and its significance was fully implied in two muttered phrases:

‘He’s a man of talent!’

‘He’ll want too much.’

‘Oh!’

‘Right!’

‘I never sup without trepidation with French journalists,’ said the German diplomat, with calm and dignified good nature, as he glanced towards Blondet whom he had met in the Comtesse de Montcornet’s salon. ‘There’s a prophecy of Blucher which it will be your business to fulfil.’

‘What did he say?’ asked Nathan.

‘When Blucher arrived at the heights of Montmartre with Saacken in 1814 – forgive me, gentlemen, for taking you back to so disastrous a day for you – Saacken, who was a brutal man, said: “And so we are going to burn Paris!” – “Take care you don’t. Down below there is what will be the death of France!” Blucher replied, pointing to the enormous cankerous growth they saw at their feet, fiery and smoke-laden, in the valley of the Seine.’

‘I thank God there are no newspapers in my country,’ the minister continued after a pause. ‘I haven’t yet got over my fright at the sight of that little fellow in his paper cap. He’s only ten, but he reasons like a hardened diplomat. And so, this evening, I feel as if I were supping with lions and panthers who are doing me the honour of sheathing their claws.’

‘It is clear,’ said Blondet, ‘that we can tell Europe, and prove it, that your Excellency had disgorged a serpent this evening and has only just missed injecting its venom into Tullia, our loveliest dancer. On that theme we could make glosses about Eve, the Bible, the first and the last sin. But have no fear: you’re our guest.’

‘It would be quite an amusing thing to do,’ said Finot.

‘We could print scientific dissertations on all the serpents
found in the human heart and body before they reach the diplomatic corps,’ said Lousteau.

‘We could show there’s some sort of a serpent in that jar of brandied cherries,’ said Vernou.

‘In the end you’d come to believe it yourself,’ said Vignon to the diplomat.

‘Gentlemen,’ said the Duc de Rhétoré, ‘don’t unsheathe your claws: they’re so nicely padded at the moment.’

‘The influence and power of newspapers are only just dawning,’ said Finot. ‘Journalism is in its infancy; it will grow up. In ten years from now, everything will be subject to publicity. Thought will enlighten the world…’

‘It will blast the world,’ said Blondet, interrupting Finot.

‘That’s saying something,’ said Claude Vignon.

‘It will bring forth kings,’ said Lousteau.

‘And bring down monarchies,’ said the diplomat.

‘Therefore,’ said Blondet, ‘if the Press didn’t exist, it would be folly to invent it. But it’s here, and we live on it!’

‘You’ll die of it,’ said the diplomat. ‘Don’t you see that the superiority of the masses, supposing that you were to enlighten them, will make it difficult for the individual to achieve greatness? By sowing the seeds of argument in the minds of the lower classes you’ll reap a harvest of revolt, and you will be its first victims? What do they smash in Paris when there’s a riot?’

‘Street-lamps,’ said Nathan. ‘But we are too modest to have any apprehensions: we shall only get a few slight cracks.’

‘The French are too intelligent to let any kind of government get firmly into the saddle,’ said the diplomat. ‘Otherwise you would start conquering Europe all over again; a conquest which you were unable to maintain with your swords.’

‘Newspapers are an evil,’ said Claude Vignon. ‘An evil which could be utilized, but the Government wants to fight it. There’ll be a conflict. Who will go under? That’s the question.’

‘The Government,’ said Blondet. ‘I’m shouting myself hoarse saying this. In France wit is a most potent weapon,
and the papers have not only all the wit which witty men have, but the hypocrisy of Tartuffe into the bargain.’

‘Blondet! Blondet!’ said Finot. ‘You’re going too far. Some of our subscribers are present.’

‘You’re the owner of one of those poison warehouses. No doubt you’re afraid; but I don’t care a rap for any of your news-shops although I make my living by them.’

‘Blondet is right,’ said Claude Vignon. ‘Instead of being a priestly function, the newspaper has become a political party weapon; now it is becoming merely a trade; and like all trades it has neither faith nor principles. Every newspaper is, as Blondet says, a shop which sells to the public whatever shades of opinion it wants. If there were a journal for hunchbacks it would prove night and morning how handsome, how good-natured, how necessary hunchbacks are. A journal is no longer concerned to enlighten, but to flatter public opinion. Consequently, in due course, all journals will be treacherous, hypocritical, infamous, mendacious, murderous; they’ll kill ideas, systems and men, and thrive on it. They’ll be in the happy position of all abstract creations: wrong will be done without anybody being guilty. I shall be Vignon, you will be Lousteau, you Blondet, you Finot: a bunch of Aristides, Platos, Catos, disciples of Plutarch. We shall all be innocent, we shall all be able to wash our hands of all infamy. Napoleon gave the explanation of this phenomenon – moral or immoral, whichever you like – in a superb aphorism dictated to him by his study of the Convention:
In corporate crimes no one is implicated
. A newspaper can behave in the most atrocious manner and no one on the staff considers that his own hands are soiled.’

‘But the Government will bring in represssive laws,’ said Du Bruel. ‘It’s already drawing them up.’

‘Bah!’ said Nathan. ‘What can the law do against French wit, the most subtle of all dissolvents?’

‘Ideas,’ Vignon continued, ‘can only be neutralized by ideas. Terror and despotism alone can stifle the French genius, whose language lends itself admirably to allusion and
double entendre
. The more repressive the law becomes, the more will
wit spurt forth like steam through a safety-valve. Thus, when the King does something good, if the newspapers are against him it will be the minister who has done it all, and
vice versa
. If a newspaper invents some outrageous calumny, it attributes it to information received. If a private person complains it will get off with an apology for the liberty taken. If it is hauled before the courts, it complains that it was not asked to rectify its statement. But ask it for a rectification and it will laughingly refuse, making light of the crime it has committed. Finally, if the victim wins his case, it ridicules him. If a penalty is imposed, if the damages are too high, it will pillory the plaintiff as an enemy of liberty, his country and enlightenment in general. It will show up Monsieur So-and-So as a thief while making out that he is the most honest man in the kingdom. So its crimes are trifles, those who attack it are monsters! And in a given space of time it can make its readers believe anything it wants. Also, nothing it doesn’t approve of can be patriotic and it is never in the wrong. It will use religion to attack religion and the Charter to attack the King; it will scoff at the judicial bench when the judicial bench offends it and praise it when it has pandered to popular passions. In order to get subscribers it will invent the most moving fables; it will play the clown like Bobèche. A newspaper will serve up its father raw, with no other seasoning than its jokes, rather than fail to interest or amuse its public. It will be like an actor putting his son’s ashes
into
the cinerary urn so that he can weep real tears, or like a mistress sacrificing everything to her lover!’

‘In short it’s the common people in folio size,’ Blondet exclaimed, interrupting Vignon.

‘Yes,’ Vignon continued, ‘but a common people which is hypocritical and ungenerous. It will put a ban on talent, just as Athens put it on Aristides. We shall see the newspapers, which originally were run by men of honour, fall subsequently into the hands of the greatest mediocrities possessing the patience and india-rubber faint-heartedness lacking in men of fine genius, or into the hands of grocers with money enough to buy the products of the pen. We can already see
this happening! But in ten years’ time any urchin fresh from school will believe he’s a great man; he’ll climb on to the column of a newspaper in order to kick his predecessors in the teeth; he’ll pull their feet from under them in order to get their place. Napoleon was very right to muzzle the Press. I would wager that, under a government which they had themselves brought into power, the Opposition news-sheets would use the same arguments and the same articles to topple it over as they now use to attack the King’s ministry, once it refused them anything whatsoever. The more concessions are made to the journalists, the more demanding they’ll become. The journalists who have made the grade will give place to famished and poverty-stricken journalists. It’s an incurable sore which will become more and more cancerous, more and more insufferable; and the greater the evil, the more it will be tolerated, until the day comes when, thanks to their abundance, the newspapers will be in a confusion like that of Babel. We know, the whole lot of us, that the papers will go further in ingratitude than kings, further in speculation and calculation than the dirtiest kind of commerce, that they will rot our intelligences by selling us their mental fire-water every morning. But we shall all write for them, like the people who work a quicksilver mine knowing that they’ll die of it. Look at the young man over there, sitting beside Coralie – what’s his name? Lucien. He’s handsome, he’s a poet and, what is worth more for him, a man of wit. Well, he’ll enter one of those intellectual brothels called newspapers, throw his best ideas into it, dry up his brains, corrupt his soul, commit those anonymous acts of treachery which, in the war of ideas, stand in lieu of stratagems, pillages, arson, shifts and tacks in the wars waged by bandits. When he, like a thousand others, has been at great expense of genius for the profit of the shareholder, these vendors of poison will let him die of hunger if he’s thirsty, and of thirst if he’s hungry.’

‘Thank you,’ said Finot.

‘But, Heaven forgive me,’ said Claude Vignon. ‘I knew all that. I’m in the same convict prison, and the arrival of a new convict gives me pleasure. Blondet and I have more in us
than Monsieur X and Monsieur Y who batten on our talent. None the less we shall always be exploited by them. We have some feeling underneath our intelligence, but we haven’t enough ferocity to qualify as exploiters. We’re lazy, contemplative, meditative, critical of all and sundry: they’ll suck out our brains and then accuse us of loose living.’