Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics) (7 page)

The outside of the Séchard premises was in keeping with the squalor reigning inside: the old ‘bear’ had never carried out any repairs. Rain, sun and every variety of inclement weather had made the door opening on to the alley look like an old tree-trunk, so deeply was it scored with cracks of unequal sizes. The house-front, an unsymmetrical medley of stone and brick, seemed to be drooping under the weight of a decrepit roof overladen with concave tiles such as are used for all roof-structures in the southern parts of France. The worm-eaten window-frames were furnished with the enormous shutters supported by thick cross-beams which the hot climate necessitates. It would have been difficult in the whole of Angoulême to find a building so full of cracks and so held together by the strength of its cement. Imagine the workshop itself, having light at both ends but dark in the centre, its walls plastered with posters, the lower half of them worn brown by the workmen who had been rubbing against them for thirty years, its ceiling encumbered with rope-tackle, its piles of paper, aged presses, stacks of stone slabs for flattening out the wetted sheets, rows of case and, at one end, the two cages in which master and foreman took their respective stances. This will show you what sort of existence the two friends led.

In 1821, in the early days of May, David and Lucien were standing by the window overlooking the court at about two in the afternoon, just as their four or five workmen were going off to dinner. When the master-printer saw his apprentice shutting the street door, which had a bell, he took Lucien out into the courtyard, as if he could no longer endure the smell of paper, ink-troughs, presses and old wooden utensils. The two of them sat down under the arbour from which they could descry anyone entering the workshop. The sunbeams frolicking among the vine-branches caressed the two poets and threw a halo of light around them. The contrast between the physiognomy and characters of the two men was so strongly accentuated that it might have tempted a painter to take up his brush. David had the physical conformation which nature bestows on beings predestined to arduous effort, whether spectacular or unobserved. His broad chest was set
between robust shoulders which had the same fullness as all his members. His face, tanned brown, but florid and plump, rising from a sturdy neck, and framed in an abundant forest of black hair, reminded one at first of Boileau’s cathedral canons, ruddy and glowing with health. But further inspection revealed, in the curve of his full lips, his cleft chin, the square cut of his nose with its sensitively chiselled nostrils – and above all in his eyes! – the steady flame of a first and only love, the sagacity of a thinker, the ardent melancholy of a mind capable of scanning the horizon from end to end and taking cognizance of all its undulations, one which readily found disillusion in imagined joys after subjecting them to the hard, clear light of analysis. If one could divine in this countenance the darting flashes of genius in eruption, one could also see the cinders lining the crater: the hope burning within it was damped down by a profound consciousness of the social obscurity in which humble birth and lack of means confine so many lofty spirits. In contrast with this needy printer nauseated with his occupation though it brought him so much in contact with intellectual activity, in contrast with this squat, ungainly Silene who drank as from a goblet deep draughts of science and poetry, seeking intoxication from them in order to forget the miseries of provincial life, Lucien had the grace of bearing with which sculptors have endowed the Indian Bacchus. His face had the distinction of line found in antique beauty: he had a Grecian brow and nose, the smooth whiteness of a woman’s skin, and eyes of so deep a blue that they seemed to be black – eyes brimming with tenderness, their whites so limpid as to vie with those of a child. Above these fine orbs, edged with long, light brown lashes, were eye-brows such as a Chinese brush might have traced. A silky down gave a touch of colour to the cheeks and harmonized with that of his fair, naturally curly hair. An Olympian suavity shone forth on his golden-white temples. His short but gently curving chin bore the impress of incomparable nobility. The smile of a mourning angel hovered over lips whose coral was off-set by impeccably white teeth. He had the hands of a well-born man, elegant hands whose every gesture men felt
constrained to obey and which a woman would have wanted to kiss. He was slender but of average height. Any man looking at his feet would have been tempted to take him for a girl in disguise, the more so because, like most men of subtle, not to say astute mind, he had a woman’s shapely hips. This is usually reliable as a clue to character, and was so in Lucien’s case, for his restless turn of mind often brought him, when he came to analyse the present state cf society, to adopt the depravity of outlook characteristic of diplomats, who believe that any means however shameful they may be, are justified by success. One of the great misfortunes to which great intelligence is subjected is the necessity of comprehending all things, vice and virtue alike.

These two young people passed sovereign judgement on society the more readily because of the inferiority of their own status, for unappreciated men make up for their lowly position by the disdainful eye they cast upon the world. Moreover their despair was the more bitter because it made them press on more impetuously to what they regarded as their true destiny. Lucien had done much reading and much comparing; David did much thinking and much pondering. Although the printer seemed to enjoy the robust health of a peasant, he was a man of melancholic, even sickly genius and was lacking in self-confidence; whereas Lucien, possessing more initiative but less stability of mind, displayed an audacity which tallied ill with his languid, almost frail though femininely graceful physique. His was superlatively a Gascon temperament, bold, courageous, adventurous, overrating the bright and minimizing the gloomy side of things, never recoiling from a profitable misdeed and making light of vice if it served as a stepping-stone. These ambitious tendencies were so far kept in check by the beautiful illusions of youth which inclined him towards the nobler means which men enamoured of glory adopt in preference to any others. As yet he was at grips only with his own desires and not the difficulties of life, with his own potentialities and not that moral laxity which sets a terrible temptation to volatile spirits. Deeply fascinated by Lucien’s brilliance of mind, David continued to admire
him even while correcting the errors into which the
furia francese
flung him. The upright David’s timidity of character was in conflict with his robustness of constitution, though he did not lack the doggedness of northern Frenchmen. Quick at discerning all difficulties, he was nevertheless ready to face them without losing heart; and he tempered the firmness of a truly apostolic rectitude with gracious and inexhaustible forbearance. In this long-established friendship, one of them loved the other to the point of idolatory: it was David. And so Lucien assumed control like a woman conscious of being loved, while David gave willing obedience. His friend’s physical beauty implied an ascendancy which David acknowledged, believing himself to be uncouth and commonplace.

‘The patient ox should draw the plough, the bird should be carefree,’ the printer told himself. ‘I will be the ox, Lucien shall be the eagle.’

For nearly three years therefore, the two friends had had one common destiny, one bright future ahead of them. They read the masterpieces which, once peace was proclaimed, loomed up on the literary and scientific horizon: the works of Schiller, Goethe, Lord Byron, Walter Scott, Jean-Paul Richter, Berzelius, Sir Humphry Davy, Cuvier, Lamartine etc. They drew warmth from these flaming hearths, made their own abortive writing efforts, took them up, laid them down, took them up again with ardour, toiling on continually without exhausting their unflagging youthful energy. Both were poor but fired with the love of art and science, and they forgot their present poverty in their efforts to lay the foundation of their future renown.

‘Lucien, do you know what I have just received from Paris?’ asked the printer, drawing a little 18
^mo
volume from his pocket. ‘Listen.’

And David read, as only a poet could read, André Chénier’s bucolic poem entitled
Néère
and the one entitled
The Love-Sick Youth,
followed by the elegy on suicide which is couched in the style of antiquity, and finally Chénier’s last two iambic poems.

‘So that is what André Chénier is like!’ Lucien exclaimed
again and again. ‘It drives one to despair,’ he repeated for the third time when David, too moved to go on reading, handed the volume over to him, – ‘A poet discovered by another poet!’ he cried, when he saw by whom the preface was signed.

‘After writing all these poems,’ David continued, ‘Chénier still thought he had produced nothing worthy of publication.’

In his turn Lucien read out the epic passage from
The Blind Poet
and several elegies. When he came to the fragment:

‘Monsieur,’ he said to David, pulling an enormous copybook from his pocket. ‘Here is a memoir I should like to have printed. Would you give me an estimate of the cost?’

‘Monsieur, we do not print such sizable manuscripts,’ David replied without even glancing at the copybook. ‘Go and see Messrs Cointet.’

‘But we have a case of very pretty type which would be suitable,’ Lucien added, taking the manuscript. ‘Perhaps you would be good enough to come again tomorrow and leave us your work so that we may reckon up the cost of printing.’

‘Is it not Monsieur Lucien Chardon whom I have the honour…?’

‘Himself, sir,’ answered the proof-reader.

‘I am happy, sir,’ the author said, ‘to make the acquaintance of a young poet of such brilliant promise. I come from Madame de Bargeton.’

Lucien reddened on hearing this name and stammered a few words to express his gratitude for the interest Madame de Bargeton was taking in him. David noticed the blush and his friend’s embarrassment, and left him in conversation with this country gentleman, who had written a memorandum on the culture of silkworms, and was impelled by vanity to get into print so that his colleagues of the Agricultural Society could read his monograph.

‘Well, well, Lucien!’ said David when the gentleman had gone away. ‘Can it be that you’re in love with Madame de Bargeton?’

‘Desperately!’

‘But there’s a wider gulf of prejudice between you and her than if she were in Pekin and you in Greenland!’

‘Where there’s a will there’s a way between people in love,’ said Lucien, with his gaze turned down.

‘You’ll forget all about us,’ replied the beautiful Eve’s timorous admirer.

‘On the contrary, it may be that I have given up my lady for your sake,’ cried Lucien.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Although I love her, and in spite of the diverse interests which prompt me to obtain a footing in her house, I have told her I would never return there if a man whose talents are superior to mine, who is worthy of a glorious future, if David
Séchard, my brother and friend, were not accepted there. Her reply should be waiting for me at home. But although all the local aristocracy is invited there for this evening to a reading of my verses, if the reply is negative, I will never set foot again in Madame de Bargeton’s house.’

David gave Lucien a vigorous handshake after wiping the tears from his eyes. The clock struck six.

‘Eve will be getting anxious. Good-bye,’ said Lucien abruptly. He made off, leaving David a prey to emotions which at his age alone are felt with such intensity, and above all in the case of two cygnets whose wings had not yet been clipped by life in the provinces.

‘A heart of gold!’ cried David, following Lucien with his eye as he walked through the workshop.

Lucien strode down to L’Houmeau through the handsome Promenade de Beaulieu, the rue du Minage and the Porte Saint-Pierre. You may know by the fact of his taking the longest way that Madame de Bargeton’s house was situated on this route. It gave him so much pleasure to pass under her windows – even though she was unaware of it – that for two months he had not returned home by the Porte-Palet.

As he passed beneath the trees of Beaulieu, he surveyed the distance separating Angoulême from L’Houmeau. Local manners and customs had raised spiritual barriers between them which were much more difficult to cross than the slopes which Lucien was now descending. This ambitious young man, who had just gained admission to the Bargeton mansion by making his poetic reputation a bridge between town and suburb, was as anxious about his patroness’s decision as can be a court favourite apprehensive of disgrace when he has tried to extend his power. These words must seem obscure to those who have not yet observed the manners peculiar to cities divided into an upper and a lower town; but it is all the more necessary at this point to make some remarks on Angoulême because they will help us to understand Madame de Bargeton, one of the most important characters in this story.