Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics) (55 page)
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Authors: Honore de Balzac
‘Mademoiselle Coralie has left her apartments and moved to another house, the address is written on this piece of paper.’
Too drunk to be surprised at anything, Lucien got back into the cab which had brought him and had himself taken to the rue de la Lune, amusing himself by making puns on the name of the street. That very morning the bankruptcy of the Panorama-Dramatique had become public news. The frightened actress had hastened to sell all her furniture, with the consent of her creditors, to little Père Cardot who, in order not to change the purpose this flat had served, installed Florentine in it. During this operation, which she called ‘getting the washing done’, Bérénice was having indispensable articles of second-hand furniture moved into a little three-roomed flat on the fourth floor of a house in the rue de la Lune, close to the Gymnase. There Coralie was waiting for Lucien. All she had saved from the wreck was her unsullied love and the modest sum of twelve hundred francs.
Lucien drunkenly related his misfortunes to Coralie and Bérénice. ‘You did right, my angel,’ the actress said to him, throwing her arms round him. ‘Bérénice will manage to negotiate your bills with Braulard.’
T
HE
next morning Lucien awoke to the enchanting joys which Coralie lavished upon him. The actress was more loving and tender than ever, as if she wanted to make up for the poverty of their new ménage with the richest treasures of her heart. She was ravishingly beautiful; her hair was peeping out
from a scarf wrapped round her head; she was immaculate and fresh, with laughing eyes and speech as gay as the beams of the rising sun stealing through the windows to gild this charming penury. The room, still in decent condition, was hung with a sea-green wall-paper with a red border and adorned with two mirrors, one over the mantelpiece, the other over the chest of drawers. A second-hand carpet, which Bérénice had bought with her own slender resources despite Coralie’s orders, covered the bare, cold tiles. There was room enough in the chest of drawers and a mirror-fronted wardrobe for the clothes of the two lovers. The mahogany furniture was upholstered in a blue cotton material. From the wreckage Bérénice had saved a clock, two porcelain vases, four silver forks and spoons and six small spoons. The dining-room, which led to the bedroom, would have been suitable for a government clerk earning twelve hundred francs a year. The kitchen was opposite the landing. Above was an attic room in which Bérénice was to sleep. The rent was not more than three hundred francs. This squalid house had a false
porte-cochère,
and behind one of its leaves, permanently closed, the concierge had his lodge. A small window had been let into it through which he kept watch on his seventeen tenants. Such beehives are called ‘investment properties’ in the language of notaries. Lucien perceived a desk, an arm-chair, ink, pens and paper. The gaiety shown by Bérénice, who was reckoning on Coralie’s
début
at the Gymnase, and by Coralie who was studying her part – half a dozen sheets of paper with a bit of blue ribbon tied round them – banished the anxiety and sadness of the now sober poet.
‘So long as no one in society knows anything of this comedown,’ he said, ‘we shall get over it. After all, we can look forward to four thousand five hundred francs a year! I shall make the most of my position in the royalist newspapers. Tomorrow we are launching
Le Réveil.
I now know all about journalism and shall settle down to it.’
Coralie, discerning nothing but love in these words, kissed the lips which had spoken them. Bérénice had set the table near the fire and had just served a modest lunch of scrambled
eggs, two cutlets and coffee with cream. There was a knock at the door. Lucien’s three candid friends, d’Arthez, Léon Giraud and Michel Chrestien appeared before his astonished eyes. Keenly moved, he asked them to share his lunch.
‘No,’ said d’Arthez. ‘We know everything, having just left the rue de Vendôme, but we have come for a more serious motive than mere condolence. You know my views, Lucien. In any other circumstances I should rejoice to see you adopting my political convictions; but, in the situation you have put yourself into by writing for the Liberal press, you simply cannot join the ranks of the Ultras without permanently staining your character and besmirching your life. We have come to conjure you in the name of our friendship, however much it may be impaired, not to sully your reputation. You have been attacking the Romantics, the right wing and the Government: you cannot now start defending the Government, the right wing and the Romantics.’
‘What I am doing is determined by far-reaching considerations: the end will justify the means,’ said Lucien.
‘Perhaps you don’t understand the present situation,’ said Léon Giraud. ‘The Government, the Court, the Bourbons, the absolutist party or, if you like to include everything in a comprehensive term, the system opposed to the constitutional system, divided though it is into several divergent factions once the question arises about the methods to be followed for stamping out the Revolution, is at least of one mind about the need for abolishing the Press. All these papers,
Le Réveil, La Foudre
and
Le Drapeau Blanc,
have been founded as a counter-blast to the calumnies, insults and mockery of the Liberal press. – I do not approve of it,’ he added by way of parenthesis, ‘because the failure to recognize the greatness of our mission is precisely what has led us to launch a grave and reputable newspaper whose influence will soon command respect and make itself felt by its weight and dignity – Well, this royalist and ministerial artillery is a first attempt at reprisals against the Liberals, shot for shot and wound for wound. What do you think will happen, Lucien? Subscribers to the left wing newspapers are in a majority. In the Press, as in
war, victory will be on the side of the big battalions! You Royalists will be branded as infamous men, liars, enemies of the people: those on the other side will be defenders of the fatherland, honourable men and martyrs, though perhaps they’ll be more hypocritical and perfidious than you yourselves. By this means the pernicious influence of the Press will be increased and its most odious enterprises legitimized and hallowed. Insult and personal attack will become one of its public rights, will be adopted for the benefit of subscribers and taken for granted as a practice followed by both sides. When the full extent of this evil is made plain, restrictive and prohibitive laws, in a word censorship, first applied when the Duc de Berry was assassinated but removed at the opening session of the Chamber of Deputies, will return. Do you know what the French people will conclude from this conflict? It will accept the insinuations of the Liberal press, it will believe that the Bourbons intend to attack vested interests established by the Revolution, will rise one fine day and drive the Bourbons out. Not only are you making your own life unclean: one day you’ll find that you’ve joined the losing side. You’re too young, too much of a newcomer to the Press; you know too little about its ulterior motives and wirepulling. You have excited too much jealousy in the Liberal newspapers to be able to stand the hue and cry it will raise against you. You’ll be swept along in the raging current of party strife: partisan fever is still at its height, though now it expresses itself not in brutal acts as in 1815 and 1816, but in quarrels over ideas, verbal conflicts in the Chamber and wrangles in the Press.’
‘My friends,’ said Lucien. ‘I am not the featherbrain poet you like to take me for. Whatever may happen, I shall have won an advantage that the triumph of the Liberal party could never give me. By the time you have won your victory I shall have made good.’
‘We shall cut off your… hair!’ said Michel Crestien with a laugh.
‘By then I shall have children,’ Lucien replied. ‘Even cutting off my head would make no difference!’
The three friends failed to understand Lucien, in whom relations with society had developed pride of caste and aristocratic vanity to the highest degree. The poet foresaw – with some reason – an immense fortune to be made out of his beauty and his wit, with the name and title of Comte de Rubempré to support them. Madame d’Espard, Madame de Bargeton and Madame de Montcornet held him by this thread as a child holds a cockchafer. The words ‘He’s one of us, he has the right ideas!’ uttered three days before at Mademoiselle des Touches’s reception, had intoxicated him; so also had the congratulations he had received from the Duc de Lenoncourt, the Duc de Navarreins, the Duc de Grandlieu, Rastignac, Blondet, the lovely Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, the Comte d’Esgrignon, Des Lupeaulx and members of the royalist party who were the most influential and most in favour at Court.
‘Well, there’s no more to be said,’ d’Arthez rejoindered. ‘You’ll find it harder than any other man to keep yourself unsullied and preserve your self-esteem. I know you, and you’ll suffer a lot when you see yourself despised by the very people to whom you have devoted yourself.’
The three friends took their leave of Lucien without giving him a friendly handshake. For a few moments Lucien remained pensive and sad.
‘Come along now, forget all about those ninnies,’ said Coralie, jumping on to Lucien’s knees and throwing her lovely cool arms round his neck. ‘They take life seriously, and life’s a joke. Besides, you’ll be the Comte Lucien de Rubempré. If necessary, I’ll flirt with people at the Chancellery. I know how to deal with that rake Des Lupeaulx and make him get your ordinance signed. Haven’t I told you that if you need one more stepping-stone in order to reach your prey, you can step on Coralie’s dead body?’
The next day, Lucien allowed his name to be included among the contributors to
Le Réveil.
His name was announced in the prospectus as an acquisition, and the Government had a hundred thousand of these prospectuses distributed. Lucien went to the triumphal banquet – it lasted nine hours – at Robert’s restaurant, quite near Frascati’s, and the leading
lights of the royalist press were there: Martainville, Auger, Destains and a crowd of authors, still with us in 1839, who at that time ‘stood by Throne and Altar’ as the stock phrase went.
‘How we’ll let fly at the Liberals!’ said Hector Merlin.
‘Gentlemen!’ replied Nathan, who was enlisting under this standard because he firmly believed it was better to have the authorities for him rather than against him in the theatre enterprise on which he was proposing to embark. ‘If we are to make war on them, let’s do it in real earnest. Let’s not shoot popguns at them! Let’s go for all the classicist and Liberal writers without distinction of age or sex. They shall run the gauntlet of our mockery, and we’ll give no quarter.’
‘But let’s be honourable and not be won over with copies of books, presents, publishers’ bribes. Let’s put journalism on its feet once more.’
‘Very good,’ said Martainville.
‘Justum et tenacem propositi virum!
Let’s be implacable and mordant! I’ll show Lafayette up for what he is: Tom Fool the First!’
‘As for me,’ said Lucien, ‘I’ll take on the heroes of
Le Constitutionnel:
Sergeant Mercier, Monsieur Jouy’s
Complete Works
and the illustrious orators of the Left!’
A fight to the death was resolved on and voted for unanimously, at one in the morning, by this band of journalists who drowned all their differences in a flaming bowl of punch.
We’ve given our meerschaums a splendid monarchical and clerical colouring!
said one of the most celebrated writers of the Romantic movement as he left the room.
This historic witticism appeared the next day in
Le Miroir.
It had been divulged by a publisher present at the dinner, but this leakage was laid at Lucien’s door. His defection was the signal for a fearful uproar in the Liberal papers: Lucien became their
bête noire
and was flayed in the cruellest manner. They related the unhappy story of his sonnets, told the public that Dauriat preferred to lose three thousand francs rather than sell them and called him ‘the sonnetless sonneteer’.
One morning, in the same paper in which Lucien had made so brilliant a start, he read the following lines directed solely
at him, for the public could scarcely be expected to understand the joke:
If Dauriat the publisher persists in not publishing the future French Petrarch’s sonnets, we will act like generous adversaries and open our columns to these poems, which must be quite piquant, judging by the following, which a friend of the author has communicated to us.
And under this terrible announcement, the poet read the sonnet in question, which brought him to bitter tears:
One morning in a well-stocked flower-bed
Sprang up a sickly, unattractive plant.
‘How fair my bloom will be, how elegant!’
It bragged, ‘in one so exquisitely bred!’
Kindly received, on vanity it fed,
And soon no charm of colour would it grant
To other flowers. – ‘Since you’re so arrogant,
Come, prove your lineage!’ its neighbours said.
Its blossom opened: ne’er was any clown
More mocked, derided, hissed and shouted down
Than this coarse weed, so vulgar its display.
The gardener tore it out – well-earned dismissal.
Its only requiem was a donkey’s bray:
Only an ass is partial to a
THISTLE
.
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