Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics) (60 page)
Read Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics) Online
Authors: Honore de Balzac
U
NDER
the stimulus of a sombre, cold and speechless fury, Lucien began to compose the wittiest articles he had yet written, as he watched over Coralie by lamplight. When he had to search for ideas, his eye fell on that adored creature, white as porcelain, beautiful as dying persons can be, smiling at him with her two pale lips, showing him eyes which were shining like those of all women struck down both by sickness and sorrow. Lucien sent his articles to the newspapers; but as he could not go to the offices to pester the editors, the articles did not appear. When he did decide to go to his newspaper office, Théodore Gaillard, who had made him advance payments and later was to make a profit from these literary gems, received him coldly.
‘Better look to yourself, my dear,’ he said. ‘You’ve lost your sparkle. Don’t get disheartened. Show some spirit!’
‘Our little Lucien only had his novel and his earliest articles inside him,’ exclaimed Félicien Vernou, Merlin and all those who hated him, whenever there was talk of him at Dauriat’s or in the Vaudeville theatre. ‘He’s sending us pitiable stuff.’
To have nothing inside you
– a stock phrase in journalistic parlance – amounts to a sovereign judgement against which it is difficult to appeal once it is pronounced. The phrase, which was being peddled everywhere around, was destroying Lucien without his knowing it, for at that time his trials were greater than he could bear. In the midst of his overwhelming labours, he was sued in respect of the David Séchard bills: he went to draw on Camusot’s experience. Coralie’s former lover was generous enough to take his part. This fearsome predicament lasted for two months during which summonses were showered on him; on Camusot’s recommendation, Lucien sent them to the barrister Desroches, a friend of Bixiou, Blondet and Des Lupeaulx.
At the beginning of August Bianchon told the poet that Coralie was beyond hope and had only a few days to live. Bérénice and Lucien spent these fateful days weeping, and were unable to hide their tears from the poor girl, who for Lucien’s sake was in despair at dying. By a strange reversion, Coralie insisted that Lucien should bring a priest to her. She wished to be reconciled with the Church and die in peace. Her repentance was sincere, and she made a Christian end. Her agony and death robbed Lucien of his last shreds of strength and courage. The poet remained in a state of complete dejection, sitting in an armchair at the foot of Coralie’s bed, not ceasing to gaze on her until the moment when he saw her eyes covered with the film of death. It was then five in the morning. A bird flew down on to the pots of flowers standing outside the window and twittered a few notes. Bérénice, on her knees, was kissing Coralie’s hand as it grew cold under her tears. There were then only eleven sous on the the chimney-piece. Lucien went out in such a state of despair that he was ready to beg for alms in order to bury his mistress, or to go and throw himself at the feet of the Marquise d’Espard, the Comte du Châtelet, Madame de Bargeton, Mademoiselle des Touches or the terrible dandy De Marsay.
He felt he had no pride or strength left in him. He would have enlisted as a soldier in order to get a little money I He walked towards Camille Maupin’s house with the stooping and shuffling gait characteristic of deep unhappiness, went in without paying attention to the slovenliness of his attire and asked the man-servant to beg her to receive him.
‘Mademoiselle didn’t go to bed till three this morning,’ the footman told him, ‘and no one would dare to go to her room before she rings.’
‘When does she ring for you?’
‘Never earlier than ten o’clock.’
Lucien then wrote one of those appalling letters in which men once elegant, but now reduced to beggary, throw their self-respect to the winds. One evening, when Lousteau was telling him of the requests made by talented young men to Finot, he had expressed doubt about the possibility of such self-abasement; yet now his pen perhaps carried him beyond the limits to which his predecessors had been driven. As he returned through the boulevards in a state of feverish stupefaction, without suspecting what a masterpiece despair had just dictated to him, he met Barbet.
‘Barbet, let me have five hundred francs,’ he said, holding out his hand.
‘No, two hundred,’ the publisher replied.
‘Oh, have you no heart?’
‘Yes, but I also have a business to run. I’m losing money through you,’ he added after telling him the details about Fendant and Cavalier’s bankruptcy. ‘And so earn me some more.’
Lucien shuddered.
‘You’re a poet and must be able to write all kinds of verse,’ the publisher continued. ‘Just now I need some ribald songs to mix up with
chansons
I’ve borrowed from different authors, so as not to be prosecuted for infringement of copyright and so that I can sell a pretty collection of
chansons
in the streets for ten sous. If you like to send me tomorrow ten good drinking or spicy songs… you know what I mean!… I’ll pay you two hundred francs.’
Lucien went home: there he found Coralie laid out stiff
on a trestle-bed, wrapped in a shabby bed-sheet in which Bérénice was sewing her. The fat Norman woman had put a lighted candle at each corner of the bed. On Coralie’s face gleamed the bloom of beauty which speaks so eloquently to living people because it expresses absolute calm: she looked like a girl afflicted with chlorosis, and it seemed at moments that those two purple lips were about to open and murmur ‘Lucien!’, whose name, together with the name of God, she had murmured with her dying breath. Lucien asked Bérénice to go to the undertaker’s and order a funeral costing no more than two hundred francs, inclusive of a service at the mean little church of Bonne-Nouvelle.
As soon as Bérénice had gone, the poet sat down at his table near the body of his mistress and composed the ten songs, which called for gay thoughts and popular tunes. He went through agonies before he could begin the task; but in the end intelligence came to the help of necessity, just as if he had known no suffering. He was already giving effect to Claude Vignon’s terrible judgment on the divorce which occurs between heart and mind. What a night this poor young man spent racking his brains for poems to be sung at smoking-parties, while he scribbled in the light which fell from the tapers at the side of the priest who was praying for Coralie’s soul! Next morning Lucien had finished the last song, and was trying to adapt it to a then popular tune. As they heard him singing, Bérénice and the priest were afraid he had gone mad.
My friends, we’ll have no sermons here
While we’re imbibing wine or beer.
Can there be any rhyme or reason
In moralizing out of season?
A song goes better, so I’m thinking,
When jolly souls are busy drinking.
This all the epicures assert:
Apollo is no welcome guest
When Bacchus give us of his best.
Laugh! Quaff!
The devil take the rest!
If you would live a hundred years
– Hippocrates is my authority –
Drink lustily and drown your fears
Before and after your majority.
What matter if our tottering legs
Can’t reach our Mollies or our Megs?
So long as we can crack a jest
And pour good liquor down our chest?
Laugh! Quaff!
The devil take the rest!
The place we came from well we know:
Of such a thing there is no question.
But as for knowing where we’ll go
How now could that help our digestion?
Then thank the gods and live in clover,
Taking no thought until it’s over.
True, life is short, but why protest?
Enjoy it while you may, with zest.
Laugh! Quaff!
The devil take the rest!
Just while the poet was singing the last dreadful couplet, Bianchon and d’Arthez entered and found him in a paroxysm of despondency. He was shedding floods of tears, and had not even the strength to make a fair copy of the songs. When, torn with sobs, he explained his predicament, he saw tears in the eyes of his listeners.
‘This,’ said d’Arthez, ‘atones for many misdeeds.’
‘Happy they who find their hell here below,’ said the priest in grave tones.
The sight of this beautiful corpse smiling on eternity, her lover paying for her funeral with indecent rhymes, Barbet paying for her coffin, the four tapers round an actress whose basque skirt and red stockings with green clocks had once put a whole auditorium into a flutter of excitement, and, at the door, the priest who had brought her back to God returning to the church to say mass for one who had loved so much! – this grandeur and this infamy, so much grief, ground under the heel of poverty, chilled the hearts of the gifted writer
and the talented doctor, who sat down without being able to utter a word. A man-servant appeared and announced Mademoiselle des Touches. This great-hearted and beautiful woman took in everything, moved swiftly towards Lucien, clasped him by the hand and slipped two thousand-franc notes into it.
‘It’s too late,’ he said, with the look of a dying man.
D’Arthez, Bianchon and Mademoiselle des Touches did not leave Lucien before they had soothed his despair with the kindest of words; but he was a completely broken man. At midday the Cénacle – except Michel Chrestien, although he had been enlightened on the question of Lucien’s guilt-assembled in the little church of Bonne-Nouvelle; also Bérénice and Mademoiselle des Touches, two extras from the Gymnase, Coralie’s dresser and the unhappy Camusot. All the men escorted the actress to the Père-Lachaise cemetery. Camusot, weeping hot tears, solemnly swore to Lucien that he would buy the burial plot in perpetuity and erect a tombstone with the inscription: CORALIE, and underneath this:
Died August 1822, aged nineteen.
Lucien lingered until sunset on this hill-top from which his gaze took in the whole of Paris. ‘Who could possibly love me?’ he asked himself. ‘My real friends despise me. Whatever my misdeeds, all I did appeared good and noble to the one who lies there! All I have now is my sister, David and my mother! What are they thinking of me at home? ‘The wretched provincial prodigy returned to the rue de la Lune, where his feelings were so excruciatingly painful as he looked round the flat, that he took lodgings in a mean hotel in the same street. The two thousand francs which Mademoiselle des Touches had given him, with the price he got for the furniture, settled all his debts. Bérénice and Lucien had a hundred francs between them and these kept them going for two months, during which Lucien remained in a state of morbid dejection: he could neither write nor even think. He abandoned himself to his grief, and Bérénice took pity on him.
‘If you went back home, how would you travel?’ she asked
in response to an exclamation from Lucien, who was thinking of his sister, his mother and David Séchard.
‘On foot,’ he said.
‘But you’ll still need food and lodging on your journey. If you do thirty miles a day, you’ll need at least twenty francs.’
‘I’ll get them,’ he said.
He took his clothes and fine linen, only keeping on what was strictly necessary, and went to Samanon who offered him fifty francs for all his cast-off finery. He entreated the usurer to give him enough to go by stage-coach, but was unable to soften him. Enraged, Lucien went hot-foot to Frascati’s, tried his luck there and came back without a farthing.
Back in his miserable room in the rue de la Lune, he asked Bérénice for Coralie’s shawl. This kind woman eyed him and realized – he had confessed his loss at the gaming tables – that this poor desperate poet was minded to hang himself.
‘Are you crazy, Monsieur?’ she asked him. ‘Go for a walk and come back at midnight. I shall have earned the money you need. But stay in the boulevards and keep away from the riverside.’
Lucien walked about the boulevards, stupefied with grief, watching the carriages and passers-by. He felt dwarfed and isolated in this crowd swirling about him, driven along by the multifarious interests to which Parisians are inclined. Returning in thought to the banks of his native Charente, he thirsted for family joys; then there came to him one of those flashes of inspiration by which all such half-feminine natures are duped: he would not throw up the sponge before he had unburdened himself to David Séchard and taken counsel of his three remaining guardian angels.
While he was wandering about, he saw Bérénice in her best clothes, chatting with a man in the muddy Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, where she had taken up her stance at the corner of the rue de la Lune.
‘What are you doing?’ cried Lucien, aghast at the suspicion which the sight of the Norman woman aroused in him.
‘Here are twenty francs. The price may be dear, but you’ll
be able to go home,’ she replied, slipping four five-franc coins into the poet’s hand.
Bérénice made off without Lucien seeing which way she had gone. Be it said in his favour, this money burned his fingers and he wanted to return it. But he was forced to keep it as the last stigma with which life in Paris was branding him.