Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics) (74 page)
Read Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics) Online
Authors: Honore de Balzac
T
HE
next morning Lucien received an issue of the Angoulême newspaper and turned pale with pleasure when he saw that he was the subject of a leading article, one of those
Premiers-Angoulême
imitated from the Paris press by an estimable news-sheet which, like a provincial Academy or a properly brought-up young lady, as Voltaire puts it, never got itself talked about.
Let Franche-Comté take pride in having given birth to Victor Hugo, Charles Nodier and Cuvier; Britanny for having produced Chateaubriand and Lamennais; Normandy for its Casimir Delavigne; Touraine because it can lay claim to the author of
Eloa.
Today the province of Angoulême, where already, under Louis XIII, the illustrious Guez, better known as de Balzac, had been one of our fellow-countrymen, need not envy any of those provinces, nor yet Limousin, which nurtured Depuytren, nor yet Auvergne, the home of Montlosier, nor Bordeaux, which has been lucky enough to engender so many great men. We too have a poet I The author of those fine sonnets entitled
Les Marguerites
has made his name not only as a poet but also as a prose-writer, since we are indebted to him for a splendid novel:
The Archer of Charles the Ninth
I One day our nephews will be proud of their fellow-countryman Lucien Chardon, a rival of Petrarch!!!’ [In the provincial journals of those times, exclamation marks were like the
hurrahs!
which greet the
speeches
made at
meetings
in England.]
Despite the brilliant success our young poet has met with in Paris, he has remembered that the Hôtel de Bargeton was the cradle of his triumphs, that the aristocracy of Angoulême had been the first to applaud his poetry, that the consort of Monsieur le Comte du Châtelet, our Prefect, had encouraged the first steps he took in the cult of the Muses. He has returned to our midst!… The whole of L’Houmeau was stirred yesterday when our Lucien de Rubempré arrived there. The news of his return has everywhere aroused the liveliest excitement. It is certain that the city of Angoulême will not lag behind L’Houmeau in doing honour to a man who, in the fields both of journalism and literature, has gloriously represented his native town in Paris. As both a religious and a royalist poet Lucien
has stood up to partisan fury; and now, it is said, he has come home to rest from the fatigue of a struggle which would exhaust even athletes of stronger build than men of poetry and reverie.
With an eminently politic motive in view, one which we applaud, one which, it is said, Madame la Comtesse du Châtelet was the first to conceive, the question has arisen of restoring to our great poet the name and title of the illustrious Rubempré family, of which Madame Chardon, his mother, is the sole inheritor. To rejuvenate in this way, by dint of talent and renewed glory, our old families when they are on the point of dying out, is a fresh proof of the steady purpose of His Majesty, the immortal creator of the
Charte,
which he expressed in the words:
let us unite and forget!
Our poet is staying with his sister, Madame Séchard.
In the column of local news were the following items:
Our Prefect, Monsieur le Comte du Châtelet, who already holds an appointment as Gentleman-in-Ordinary of the Privy Chamber, has been appointed Councillor of State with special duties.
Yesterday all the civic authorities came to pay their respects to Monsieur le Préfet.
Madame la Comtesse Sixte du Châtelet will be at home on Thursdays.
The Mayor of L’Escarbas, Monsieur de Nègrepelisse, representing the junior branch of the d’Espards, father of Madame du Châtelet, recently gazetted Count, Peer of France and Commander of the Royal Order of Saint-Louis, is, according to report, nominated to preside over the electoral college of Angoulême for the forthcoming elections.
‘Look at this,’ said Lucien, taking the journal to his sister. After attentively reading the article, Eve returned the sheet to Lucien with a pensive air.
‘Well, what have you to say about it?’ asked Lucien, astonished at her reticence, which to him looked like coldness.
‘My dear,’ she replied, ‘this journal belongs to the Cointets, who can insert absolutely any articles they choose and are only obliged to print what is sent them from the prefectural and episcopal offices. Do you suppose that your former rival, now Prefect, is generous enough to sing your praises in this way? Are you forgetting that the Cointets are suing us in Métivier’s name and undoubtedly want to force David to
let them share in the profits from his discoveries?… From whatever source this article comes, I find it disturbing. Here, formerly, you excited nothing but hatred and jealousy and were slandered by virtue of the proverb: “No man is a prophet in his own country.” And now everything is changed in a twinkling!’
‘You don’t know the self-pride of provincial towns,’ Lucien replied. ‘In one little southern town they even went out to the city gates to welcome a young man who had won the first prize in a national competition and treated him as a great man in embryo!’
‘Listen to me, my dear Lucien, I don’t want to preach you a sermon. I’ll say everything in one single word: here you must be on your guard about the slightest things.’
‘That’s true enough,’ Lucien replied, though he was surprised to find his sister so unenthusiastic. He himself was at the height of joy at seeing his mean and shameful return to Angoulême metamorphosed into a triumph.
‘You’re not impressed by this small tribute which is costing us so dear!’ Lucien exclaimed after an hour of silence during which something like a storm was gathering in his heart. Eve’s only answer was the look she gave him, one which made him ashamed to have made such an accusation.
A few moments before dinner, a commissionaire from the prefecture brought a letter addressed to Monsieur Lucien Chardon which seemed to justify the poet’s vanity and show that society was competing for him with his family. It was an invitation:
Monsieur le Comte Sixte du Châtelet and Madame la Comtesse du Châtelet have the pleasure of inviting Monsieur Lucien Chardon to do them the honour of dining with them on the fifteenth of September following.
R.S.V.P.
A visiting-card was enclosed:
LE COMTE SIXTE DU CHÂTELET
Gentleman-in-Ordinary of the Privy Chamber, Prefect of the Charente, Councillor of State
‘You’re in favour,’ old Séchard said. ‘They’re talking about you in the town as if you were a somebody… Angoulême and L’Houmeau are arguing about which of them shall weave garlands for you.’
‘My dear Eve,’ Lucien whispered to his sister. ‘I’m in absolutely the same position as I was in L’Houmeau the day I was invited to go to Madame de Bargeton’s: I haven’t evening clothes for the Prefect’s dinner.’
‘You’re surely not going to accept this invitation?’ Madame Séchard cried out in alarm.
An argument ensued between brother and sister about whether he should accept or not. Eve’s provincial good sense told her that a man should only show himself in society with smiling face, proper evening clothes and impeccably groomed. But she concealed what she was really thinking: ‘What will this dinner with the Prefect lead up to? What can high society in Angoulême do for Lucien? Isn’t some conspiracy being hatched against him?’
Lucien ended up by saying to his sister, before they went to bed: ‘You don’t know how much influence I have. The Prefect’s wife is afraid of me as a journalist. Besides, the Comtesse du Châtelet is still Louise de Nègrepelisse at heart. A woman who has recently obtained so many favours could save David! I’ll tell her about the invention my brother has just made, and it would be child’s play for her to obtain a grant of ten thousand francs from the Government!’
At eleven o’clock that night, Lucien, his sister and mother, old Séchard, Marion and Kolb were awakened by the city band reinforced by the regimental one; they found the Place du Mûrier full of people. Lucien Chardon de Rubempré was being given a serenade by the young people of Angoulême. Lucien stood at his sister’s window and, after the last piece of music, said amid the deepest silence: ‘I thank my fellow-citizens for the honour they are doing me. I shall try to make myself worthy of it. They will forgive me for not saying more: I am so moved that I could not go on.’
‘Long live the author of
The Archer of Charles the Ninth!’
‘Long live the author of
Les Marguerites!’
‘Long live Lucien de Rubempré!’
After these three salvos shouted out by a number of voices, three laurel wreaths and three bouquets were adroitly thrown through the apartment window. Ten minutes later the Place du Mûrier was empty and silence reigned once more.
‘Ten thousand francs would be more use,’ said old Séchard, turning the wreaths and bouquets over with a supremely derisive air. ‘Well, you’ve given them marguerites, they’re giving you bouquets in return. You’re doing well in the flower trade.’
‘That’s how you appreciate the honours bestowed on me by my fellow-citizens!’ cried Lucien, whose countenance, from which all melancholy had vanished, was positively beaming with satisfaction, ‘If you had any knowledge of men, Papa Séchard, you’d realize that moments like this only occur once in a lifetime. Such triumphs can only be due to genuine enthusiasm!… This, my dear mother and my good sister, wipes out many disappointments.’ Lucien embraced his mother and sister in the way people do embrace at moments when their joy overflows so abundantly that they simply have to pour it out into a friendly heart. – Bixiou had once remarked: ‘If an author intoxicated with success hasn’t a friend, he goes and embraces his concierge.’
‘Come now, my dear child,’ Lucien said to Eve, ‘why are you crying?… Ah! it’s with joy!’
‘Alas!’ Eve said to her mother when they were alone and before they went back to bed: ‘In every poet, it seems to me, there’s a pretty woman of the worst sort.’
‘You’re right,’ her mother replied, shaking her head. ‘Lucien has already forgotten not only his own troubles, but ours too.’
Mother and daughter parted without daring to express all their thoughts.
I
N
countries where the sentiment of social insubordination – egalitarianism – is rampant, any triumph is a miracle, and, like certain other miracles for that matter, it does not come off without the co-operation of expert stage-managers. Out of ten ovations obtained by men still living and offered to them with patriotic acclamation, nine are due to causes quite alien to the achievements of those thus honoured. Was not Voltaire’s triumph on the stage of the Théâtre-Français in reality that of the eighteenth century philosophic movement? In France a triumph is only possible when the garland placed on the triumphant person’s head is a garland for all and sundry. And so the two women’s presentiments were well-founded. The success of the provincial ‘great man’ was too little in keeping with the moral stagnation of Angoulême not to have been engineered through self-interest or by the agency of an enthusiast for stage-managing: a perfidious operation in either case. Eve’s misgivings – like those of any woman indeed – were a matter of intuition and not reasoned out logically. She asked herself as she fell asleep: ‘Who in Angoulême is fond enough of my brother to have stirred up local feeling? Besides,
Les Marguerites
are not yet in print, and how can he be congratulated on success which is yet to come?’
In fact this triumph was the work of Petit-Claud. The day when the parish priest of Marsac announced Lucien’s return, the solicitor was dining for the first time with Madame de Sénonches, so that she might receive the formal request for the hand of her ward. It was one of those family dinners whose formal purpose is brought out more by the clothes worn than by the number of guests. It may be an intimate affair, but one knows it is a stage performance, and the motive for it is written plain on every face.
Françoise was dressed as for shop-window display. Madame de Sénonches had given great care to her toilet and looked like a ship with all its pennons flying. Monsieur du Hautoy was
wearing a dinner-jacket. Monsieur de Sénonches, whom his wife had informed by letter of Madame du Châtelet’s impending visit – the first she was to make at their house – and of the formal presentation of a suitor for Françoise, had come home from Monsieur de Pimentel’s manor. Cointet, in his best maroon suit with its clerical cut, was sporting on his shirt-frill a diamond worth six thousand francs – a rich tradesman taking his revenge on an impoverished aristocracy. Petit-Claud, close-shaven, well-kempt, spick and span, had still not been able to shed his dry little air. It was impossible not to liken this skinny little lawyer, in his close-fitting garments, to a cold-blooded adder; but hopefulness had so much heightened the gleam in his eye, there was so much frostiness in his looks and so much starch in his demeanour that he just managed to achieve the dignified bearing of an ambitious little public attorney. Madame de Sénonches had begged her close friends not to say a word about this first interview between her ward and a prospective husband, or about the presence of the Prefect’s wife: in consequence she expected her salons to be crowded.
In fact, Monsieur le Préfet and his wife had made their official calls by leaving cards, reserving the honour of personal calls as a means of action. Therefore the Angoulême aristocracy was worked up to so high a pitch of curiosity that several persons from the Chandour camp were proposing to present themselves at the ‘Hôtel Bargeton’, which they carefully refrained from calling the ‘Hôtel Sénonches’. Proofs of the credit the Comtesse du Châtelet enjoyed had awakened many ambitions, and besides that she was said to have changed so much for the better that everyone was bent on forming his own judgement about her. Petit-Claud, having heard from Cointet on the way to the house the great news of the favour Zéphirine had obtained from the Prefect’s wife, namely the privilege of introducing dear Françoise’s future husband to her, felt sure of being able to take advantage of the embarrassing position in which Louise de Nègrepelisse found herself thanks to Lucien’s return.
Monsieur and Madame de Sénonches had committed themselves
so heavily in buying their house that, like typical provincials, they did not think of making the slightest alterations. And so Zéphirine’s first word to Louise, as she advanced to meet her when she was announced, was: ‘My dear Louise, look… You are still at home here!’ She pointed to the little crystal chandelier, the panelling and the furniture which once had fascinated Lucien.
‘That, my dear, is what I should least wish to remember,’ Madame la Préfète graciously replied as she looked round at the assembly.
Everyone avowed that Louise de Nègrepelisse bore no resemblance to what she had been. The Parisian world in which she had lived for eighteen months, the first happy days of married life, which had transformed the woman as Paris had transformed the provincial, the kind of dignity conferred by prestige, everything resulted in the Comtesse du Châtelet resembling Madame de Bargeton as a girl of twenty resembles her mother. She was wearing a charming lace bonnet trimmed with flowers and negligently fastened with a diamond-headed pin. Her English hairstyle set off her features admirably, softened the contours of her face and gave her a more youthful appearance. She wore a daintily-fringed dress of light silk with the bodice in point lace, a creation by the celebrated Victorine which was excellently moulded to her figure. Her shoulders, under a pale-coloured fichu, were veiled by a scarf of gauze, skilfully draped round her rather long neck. As a finishing touch, she was toying with the pretty trinkets which provincial women find it fatally difficult to manage: a charming little
cassolette
hung by a chain from her bracelet, and in one hand she was holding her fan and a folded handkerchief without a trace of self-consciousness. The exquisite taste revealed in these slightest details, her pose and mannerisms, copied from the Marquise d’Espard, showed that Louise had studied the Faubourg Saint-Germain with scientific thoroughness.
As for the elderly beau of Imperial times, marriage had ripened him like a melon – the sort which, green one day, turns yellow in a single night. The male guests, discerning on his
wife’s face the bloom and freshness which Sixte had lost, whispered typically provincial pleasantries from ear to ear, with all the more gusto because all the women were enraged at the way the former queen of Angoulême was reasserting her supremacy: the tenacious intruder had to act as scapegoat for his wife. Except for Monsieur and Madame de Chandour, the defunct Bargeton, Monsieur de Pimentel and the Rastignacs, the salon was almost as crowded as on the evening when Lucien had given his recital: my lord bishop also arrived with his vicars-general trailing behind him.
Petit-Claud, impressed at the sight of the Angoulême aristocracy, in whose midst, four months ago, he had despaired of ever finding himself, felt his hatred for the upper classes abating. He thought the Comtesse Châtelet was ravishing and he said to himself: ‘She’s just the sort of woman to get me the post of deputy public attorney!’
Halfway through the evening Louise, after chatting for some time with each of the ladies in turn, suiting the tone of her conversation to the importance of the person concerned and to the attitude he or she had adopted concerning her elopement with Lucien, withdrew into the boudoir with the bishop. Thereupon Zéphirine took Petit-Claud, whose heart was racing, by the arm and showed him into the boudoir in which Lucien’s misfortunes had begun and in which they were about to reach their consummation.
‘This, my dear, is Monsieur Petit-Claud, and I will recommend him to you the more keenly because anything you do for him will no doubt redound to my ward’s advantage.’
‘You are a solicitor, Monsieur?’ asked the august daughter of the Nègrepelisses as she scanned Petit-Claud.
‘Alas, yes,
Madame la Comtesse.’
Not once in all his life had the tailor’s son had the opportunity to use these three words, so he savoured them well as he spoke. ‘But,’ he went on, ‘I am dependent on Madame la Comtesse to obtain for me a standing in the public prosecution department. They say Monsieur Milhaud is transferred to Nevers…’
‘But is not one first of all assistant deputy, then deputy attorney?’ asked the Comtesse. ‘I should like you to be deputy
attorney straight away… But before taking steps to obtain this favour for you, I must be quite certain of your devotion to the legitimate monarchy, the Church, and above all to Monsieur de Villèle.’
‘Oh, Madame!’ said Petit-Claud, drawing close in order to speak in her ear. ‘I am a man whose absolute obedience to His Majesty can be relied on.’
‘That is what we need today,’ she rejoindered, drawing away from him in order to make him understand that she wanted no more of such confidential utterances. ‘If Madame de Sénonches continues to favour your suit you may count on me,’ she added, making a regal gesture with her fan.
‘Madame,’ said Petit-Claud as he saw Cointet appearing at the door of the boudoir: ‘Lucien is home again.’
‘What of that, Monsieur?’ the Comtesse replied in a tone which would have paralysed the organs of speech in any ordinary man.
‘Madame la Comtesse does not take my meaning,’ Petit-Claud continued in the most respectfully formal language. ‘I wish to give her a proof of my devotion to her person. How does Madame la Comtesse desire the “great man” of her making to be received in Angoulême? There is no middle way: he must be either an object of contempt or of adulation.’
Louise de Nègrepelisse had not thought of this dilemma, in which she was obviously concerned more on account of her past than her present. Now the success of the plan the solicitor had conceived for securing Séchard’s arrest depended on the feelings which the Comtesse bore Lucien at that moment.
‘Monsieur Petit-Claud,’ she said, putting on an air of great haughtiness and dignity, ‘you wish to belong to the Government. Learn then that its first principle must be never to be in the wrong, and that women, more even than ministries, have the instinct for power and the sense of their own dignity.’
‘That is exactly what I was thinking, Madame,’ he briskly replied, observing the Countess with close attention without appearing to do so. ‘Lucien is coming home in utter destitution.
But, if he is to receive an ovation here, I can use that very ovation to compel him to leave Angoulême, where his sister and brother-in-law David are being hotly pursued by the law.’
A slight tremor on Louise de Nègrepelisse’s countenance betrayed her pleasure, which she was trying to repress, on hearing this. In surprise at seeing her thoughts so well divined, she looked hard at Petit-Claud as she flicked her fan open: Françoise de La Haye was coming in, and that gave her time to think out her reply.
‘Monsieur,’ she said with a meaningful smile, ‘it won’t be long before you are a public attorney…’ Without committing herself, she was making the position clear.
‘Oh, Madame!’ cried Françoise as she came up to thank the Prefect’s wife. ‘And so I shall owe you my life’s happiness!’ Leaning towards her patroness with a girlish gesture, she whispered to her: ‘To be the wife of a provincial solicitor would be like dying in a slow fire!’
As for Zéphirine, if she had thrown herself at Louise, it was because she had been urged to do so by Francis, who was not without a certain knowledge of the bureaucratic world. ‘During the early days of any accession, whether that of a prefect, a dynasty or even a development company,’ the former consul-general had said to his mistress, ‘one finds people all agog to do one service. But it doesn’t take them long to find out that patronisation has its drawbacks: and then they freeze. Just now Louise will take steps on behalf of Petit-Claud that in three months’ time she wouldn’t take even for your husband.’
‘Has Madame la Comtesse thought,’ asked Petit-Claud, ‘of all the obligations our poet’s triumph will impose on her? She will have to receive Lucien during the week or so this adulation lasts.’
The Prefect’s wife gave a little nod of dismissal to Petit-Claud and stood up in order to go and chat with Madame de Pimentel whose face was showing at the boudoir door. Impressed by the news that Louise’s worthy father had been raised to the peerage, the Marquise had deemed it advisable
to pay deference to a woman who had so cleverly increased her prestige by committing what was practically a lapse from virtue.
‘Tell me, dear, why you bothered to get your father into the Upper House?’ the Marquise asked in the course of a confidential conversation during which she was virtually dropping curtseys to the superiority of ‘her dear Louise’.
‘My dear, this favour was the more readily granted me because my father has no other children and will always vote for the Crown. But if I have any male children I can count on the eldest inheriting his grandfather’s title, escutcheon and peerage.’
Madame de Pimental, who had hoped to get her husband raised to the peerage, was chagrined to perceive that there was no chance of her making use of a woman whose ambitions were already reaching out to her prospective children.
‘I’ve won the Prefect’s wife over,’ Petit-Claud was saying to Cointet as they left, ‘and I promise you your deed of partnership… In one month I shall be assistant deputy attorney, and you will have Séchard where you want him. Now try and find someone to buy my practice – in five months I’ve made it the best one in Angoulême.’
‘All you needed was a leg-up,’ said Cointet. He was almost jealous of what he had done for Petit-Claud.
So now the reason for Lucien’s triumph in the town of his birth is made plain. Following the example set by the ‘King of the French’ who abstained from avenging the injuries done to him as Duke of Orleans, Madame du Châtelet was ready to forget the insults she had received in Paris as Madame de Bargeton. Her object was to patronize Lucien, crush him under the weight of her patronage and get rid of him in a respectable way.
Petit-Claud had learnt through gossip the whole story of what had happened in Paris, and he easily sensed the undying hatred which women bear to the man who has not been clever enough to love them at the time when they wanted to be loved.