Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics) (43 page)

The dinner at the Rocher de Cancale was exquisite. Lucien found Florine’s guests there, except for the envoy, the Duke, the dancer and Camusot; these were replaced by two actors and Hector Merlin with his mistress, a delightful women who went by the name of Madame du Val-Noble, the most beautiful and elegant of those women who then constituted a special world in Paris, the women who today are decorously dubbed
lorettes
.
¹
Lucien, who for the last forty-eight hours had been living in Paradise, learnt of the success of his article. Seeing himself lionized and envied, the poet felt self-assured; he sparkled with wit and became the Lucien de Rubempré who for a few months was to be a shining light in the literary and artistic
world. Finot, a man of uncontestable skill in divining talent, who could nose it out as an ogre scents raw flesh, cajoled Lucien in an attempt to recruit him for the squad of journalists under his command. Lucien nibbled at the bait of his flattery, but Coralie observed the tactics of this man who battened on other people’s intelligence and tried to put Lucien on his guard.

‘Don’t commit yourself, my love,’ she said to the poet. ‘Wait. They want to exploit you. We’ll talk about it this evening.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Lucien answered. ‘I feel I can be as spiteful and cunning as they are.’

Finot, who no doubt had not definitively fallen out with Hector Merlin over the blank spaces, introduced him and Lucien to one another. Coralie and Madame du Val-Noble fraternized and overwhelmed each other with caresses and attentions. Madame du Val-Noble invited Lucien and Coralie to dinner.

Hector Merlin, the most dangerous of all the journalists present at the dinner, was a spare little man with pinched lips, inordinate ambition and unbounded jealousy. He delighted in all the evil he saw done around him and took advantage of the hostilities which he himself fostered; he had much wit and little will-power, but in lieu of that he had the instinct which guides upstarts to the regions where money and influence serve as beacon lights. Lucien and he took a dislike to each other, and it is not difficult to explain why. Merlin was tactless enough to talk out loud to Lucien while Lucien was quietly thinking. By the time dessert was served, the bonds of the most moving friendship appeared to unite all these men, though each of them thought himself a cut above the rest. As a newcomer Lucien was the object of their flattering attentions. They chatted freely. Hector Merlin alone remained serious. Lucien asked him the reason for this.

‘Well, I see that you are entering the world of literature and journalism with your illusions intact. You believe in friendship. We are all friends or enemies according to circumstances. We are the first to belabour one another with the
weapons we ought only to use on other people. You’ll soon perceive that you’ll get nowhere with fine sentiments. Are you kind-hearted? Become ill-natured. Be cross-grained on principle. Perhaps no one has told you of this overriding law: I’m disclosing it to you, and it’s by no means an unimportant disclosure. If you want to be loved, never leave your mistress without making her weep a bit. To make your fortune in literature, always hurt everybody’s feelings, even those of your friends. Wound their self-esteem: everybody will fawn on you.’

Hector Merlin was happy to see by the neophyte’s air that his words had gone home like the thrust of a dagger. They played cards. Lucien lost all his money. Coralie took him away, and the delights of love made him forget the terrible emotions of the gaming table, to which, later, he was to fall a victim. The next day, as he left her rooms and walked back to the Latin quarter, he found that she had put in his purse the money he had lost. This attention saddened him at first, and he thought of returning to the actress to give back her humiliating present; but he had already reached the rue de La Harpe and went on his way to the Hôtel Cluny. As he walked along he thought over Coralie’s kind act and saw in it a proof of the maternal love which women of her sort mingle with their passions, for with them passion includes all kinds of sentiment. As one thought followed another, Lucien found in the end an excuse for accepting. He said to himself: ‘I love her, we’ll live together as husband and wife and I’ll never leave her!’

‘Our friends are almost satisfied with your work, dear poet.
You can offer it with increased confidence, they say, to friends and enemies alike. We have read your charming article on the Panorama-Dramatique play: you must be arousing as much envy in the literary world as regret in us.’

‘Regret? What does he mean?’ cried Lucien, surprised at the tone of politeness prevailing in this note. Was he then a stranger to the Cénacle? After devouring the delicious fruit which the Eve of the greenroom had offered him he was even keener on keeping the esteem and friendship of the brethren of the rue des Quatre-Vents. For a few moments he remained plunged in meditation, comparing his present life in this room with the future awaiting him in Coralie’s flat. Oscillating between honourable and corrupting thoughts, he sat down and began to examine his work in the state in which his friends had returned it to him. How great was his astonishment! From chapter to chapter, the skilful and devoted pen of these great but as yet unknown men had changed dross into rich ore. A full, close, concise and vigorous dialogue had been substituted for the conversations which he now realized were idle chatter compared with a discourse breathing the very spirit of the times. His portraits, somewhat woolly in outline, had been brought into strong and colourful relief; all of them were linked up with the interesting phenomena of human life by means of physiological comments, due no doubt to Bianchon, expressed with subtlety and infusing life into them. His verbose descriptions had taken on substance and vividness. In place of the misshapen, ill-clad child of his imagination he found an entrancing white-robed maiden with rose-coloured girdle and scarf, a ravishing creation. When night came, it caught him with streaming eyes, overwhelmed at this greatness of heart, realizing the value of such a lesson, admiring these emendations which taught him more about literature and art than his four years of reading, comparison and study had done. The correction of a badly-sketched cartoon by masterly touches taken direct from life always reveals far more than theories and observations.

‘What friends! What hearts of gold! How fortunate I am!’ he exclaimed as he locked the manuscript up.

Carried away by an impulse natural to poetic and excitable
natures, he rushed to Daniel’s room. However, as he mounted the staircase, he felt less worthy of these great-hearted men whom nothing was able to divert from the path of honour. A voice was telling him that, if Daniel had loved Coralie, he would have refused to share her with Camusot. He was also aware in what deep horror the Cénacle held journalists, and he knew that he was already on the way to being one. He found his friends, except Meyraux, who had just left, a prey to the despair written on their faces.

‘What’s the matter, my friends?’ asked Lucien.

‘We have just heard of a terrible catastrophe: the greatest intellect of our time, our dearest friend, who had been our guiding light for two years…’

‘Louis Lambert,’ said Lucien.

‘… is in a state of catalepsy which leaves no hope,’ said Bianchon.

‘He will die with no feeling in his body and his head in the clouds,’ Michel Chrestien added with solemnity.

‘He will die as he has lived,’ said d’Arthez.

‘Love, thrown like a burning torch into the vast realm of his intelligence, has set it on fire,’ said Léon Giraud.

‘Yes,’ said Joseph Bridau, ‘it has raised him to such a state of rapture that we have lost contact with him.’

‘We are the ones to be pitied,’ said Fulgence Ridal.

‘But perhaps he will get better,’ cried Lucien.

‘According to what Meyraux has told us, no cure is possible,’ Bianchon replied. ‘His brain is possessed by phenomena which are beyond medical control.’

‘But surely medicinal treatment is possible,’ said d’Arthez.

‘Yes,’ said Bianchon. ‘Now he’s only cataleptic: we can make an imbecile of him.’

‘Oh! Why can’t we offer the evil spirit another brain in exchange! I would willingly give mine!’ cried Michel Chrestien.

‘And what would become of the federation of Europe?’ asked d’Arthez.

‘Ah! That’s true,’ Michel Chrestien replied. ‘Before belonging to an individual, one belongs to Humanity.’

‘I came here,’ said Lucien, ‘with my heart full of gratitude towards all of you. You have changed my bullion into gold currency.’

‘Gratitude? Who do you take us for?’ asked Bianchon.

‘We were happy to do it,’ said Fulgence.

‘So then, you’re a journalist?’ said Léon Giraud. ‘The report of your
début
has even reached the Latin quarter.’

‘I’m not one yet,’ answered Lucien.

‘Ah! So much the better!’ cried Michel Chrestien.

‘I told you so,’ d’Arthez continued. ‘Lucien has the heart of one who knows the value of a pure conscience. Is it not a tonic and a viaticum to lay one’s head on one’s pillow at night still able to say: “I have not passed judgement on other people’s work; I have caused affliction to no one; my wit has not been plunged like a dagger into an innocent person’s heart; no one’s happiness has been sacrificed to my pleasantries; they have not even disturbed the self-complacency of fools or put an unjust strain on genius; I have disdained the facile triumphs of the epigram; in short I have not given the lie to my convictions.”’

‘But,’ said Lucien. ‘I believe one can be like that even when working on a newspaper. If I had positively no other means of subsistence I should certainly have to come to it.’

‘Oh! Oh! Oh!,’ said Fulgence, his tone of voice rising at each exclamation. ‘We are capitulating!’

‘He will become a journalist,’ said Léon Giraud gravely. ‘Ah! Lucien, if you were willing to become one with us – we are going to bring out a journal in which neither truth nor justice will ever be outraged, in which we shall disseminate doctrines useful to humanity – perhaps…’

‘You won’t have a single subscriber,’ Lucien interjected with Machiavellian malice.

‘They will have five hundred subscribers who will be worth five hundred thousand others,’ replied Michel Chrestien.

‘You’ll need a lot of capital,’ Lucien answered.

‘No,’ said d’Arthez, ‘only self-devotion.’

‘He smells like a scent-shop,’ cried Michel Chrestien, sniffing at Lucien’s hair with a comical gesture.

‘We saw you in a superlatively-gleaming carriage, drawn by horses worthy of a Beau Brummell, with a mistress worthy of a prince: Coralie.’

‘Well,’ said Lucien. ‘Is there anything wrong in that?’

‘You say it as if there were,’ Bianchon exclaimed.

‘I could have wished Lucien might have had a Beatrice,’ said d’Arthez. ‘A noble-hearted woman who would have been his inspiration through life.’

‘But Daniel,’ said the poet. ‘Is not love everywhere alike?’

‘Ah!’ said the republican. ‘In this matter I’m an aristocrat. I couldn’t love a woman whose cheek is kissed in public by an actor, a woman addressed as “darling” in the wings, who cheapens herself in front of the groundlings and smiles on them, who dances with lifted skirts and puts on male attire in order to display what I want to be the only man to see. Or, if I loved such a woman, she would give up the theatre, and my love would purify her.’

‘And supposing she could not give up the theatre?’

‘I should die of disappointment, jealousy and a thousand other ills.’

‘But one cannot wrest love from one’s heart as if one were pulling out a tooth.’

Lucien became sombre and pensive. ‘When they know that I tolerate Camusot, they’ll despise me,’ he was saying to himself.

‘Look now,’ the fierce republican said to him with cruel frankness. ‘You may become a great writer, but you’ll never be anything but a little humbug,’ and taking up his hat he went out.

‘He’s a hard man, Michel Chrestien,’ said the poet.

‘Hard and salutary like the dentist’s forceps,’ said Bianchon. ‘Michel foresees your future, and perhaps even now is weeping for you in the street.’

D’Arthez was gentle and consoling and tried to cheer Lucien up. After an hour the poet left the Cénacle, tortured by his conscience which was crying out to him: ‘You’ll be a journalist!’ as the witch cries out to Macbeth: ‘Thou shalt be king hereafter.’

From the street he looked up at the long-suffering d’Arthez’s casement window, through which shone a dim light, and returned to his room, sad at heart and unquiet of soul. A kind of presentiment told him that he had been clasped to the heart of his true friends for the last time. On entering the rue de Cluny via the Place de la Sorbonne, he caught sight of Coralie’s carriage. In order to see her poet for one moment and simply to wish him good-night, the actress had covered the distance from the Boulevard du Temple to the Sorbonne. Lucien discovered his mistress in tears at the sight of his garret; she wanted to share her lover’s destitution; she wept as she stowed away his shirts, gloves, cravats and handkerchiefs in the hideous lodging-house chest of drawers. Her despair was so genuine, so great, and expressed so much love that Lucien, who had been reproached for associating with an actress, thought of Coralie as a saint who would not hesitate to wear the hair-shirt of poverty. In order to come to him, this adorable creature had invented the pretext of informing her friend that Camusot, herself and Lucien were jointly to return hospitality to Matifat, Florine and Lousteau by giving them supper, also of asking Lucien if he had any invitation to suggest which might be useful to him. Lucien replied that he would talk it over with Lousteau. After a few moments the actress hurried off, without revealing that Camusot was waiting for her downstairs.