Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics) (79 page)

Once he had made his resolve, Lucien fell to deliberating about the means: as a poet he wanted to make a poetic end. He had first of all thought of simply throwing himself into the Charente; but as he walked down the slopes of Beaulieu for the last time he could hear in advance the hubbub his suicide would arouse and visualize the appalling spectacle of his body, swollen and deformed, being dragged from the
water and the inquest which would follow: as is the case with a number of suicides, his self-esteem looked beyond death. During the day he had spent at Courtois’s mill he had walked along the river and had noticed, not far from the mill, one of those round pools such as are formed along a small water-course, whose tremendous depth is emphasized by the calmness of the surface. The water is neither green, nor blue, nor yellow: it looks like a mirror of polished steel. The edges of this basin presented neither blue nor yellow flags, nor the wide leaves of the water-lily; the grass on the bank was short and close, and it was surrounded by weeping willows, all of them picturesquely spaced. One could easily guess that it was unfathomably deep. Anyone with the courage to fill his pockets with stones must inevitably drown in it, and his body would never be recovered. ‘This spot,’ the poet had said to himself while admiring the pretty scene, ‘would be a delicious one to drown in.’

The memory of this came back to him just as he was reaching L’Houmeau. So he made his way towards Marsac, his mind full of final and funereal thoughts, but firmly resolved to use this means of keeping his death secret, not to be the subject of an inquest, not to be buried in earth, not to be seen in the horrible state of drowned men coming up to the surface. He quickly arrived at the foot of one of those slopes too frequently found on the roads of France, and especially between Angoulême and Poitiers. The stage-coach from Bordeaux to Paris was speeding along and no doubt the passengers would soon be getting down in order to walk up this long hill. Lucien did not want to be seen, so he hurried down a little sunken lane into a vineyard where he began to pick flowers. When he returned to the main road he had in his hand a big bunch of stonecrop, a yellow flower which grows on the pebbly soil in vineyards. He emerged just behind a traveller dressed entirely in black, with powdered hair, wearing shoes of Orleans calf-skin with silver buckles, his face tanned and seamed as if it had been accidentally scorched when he was a child. This traveller, in a patently clerical garb, was walking slowly and smoking a cigar. On hearing Lucien
jumping on the road from the vineyard, the stranger turned round and seemed to be struck by the poet’s profoundly melancholy beauty, his symbolic bouquet and his elegant clothes. He looked like a hunter coming upon a prey long and vainly tracked. In naval fashion, he waited for Lucien to reach him and slackened his pace as if he wished to survey the plain below the slope. Lucien did likewise and noticed a little barouche drawn by two horses and a postilion who was leading them.

‘You have let the stage-coach pass by, Monsieur. You will lose your seat unless you care to get into my carriage to catch up with it, for the stage-coach goes quicker than the local omnibus.’ The traveller pronounced these words with a markedly Spanish accent and his offer was made with exquisite courtesy. Without waiting for a reply, the Spaniard took a cigar-case from his pocket, opened it and offered Lucien a cigar.

‘I am not travelling,’ Lucien replied, ‘and I am too near the end of my term of life to allow myself the pleasure of smoking.’

‘You are hard on yourself,’ the Spaniard rejoindered. ‘Although I am an honorary canon of Toledo cathedral, I treat myself now and then to a little cigar. God gave us tobacco to quiet our passions and soothe our grief… You seem to have some sorrow, or at least you are carrying an emblem of sorrow, like that sad deity, Hymen. Come… all your woes will fly away with the smoke…’

‘Forgive me, father,’ Lucien dryly replied. ‘No cigar-smoke can blow away my sorrows.’ As he spoke, his eyes became wet with tears.

‘Young man! Can it be divine providence which prompted me to take a little exercise to dispel the drowsiness that overtakes those who travel in the mornings, so that by offering you consolation I can fulfil my mission here below?… But what sorrows can you have at your age?’

‘Your consolations, father, would be in vain. You are Spanish, I am French. You believe in the precepts of Holy Church. I am an atheist…’

‘Santa Virgen del Pilar!
… You are an atheist!’ the priest
exclaimed, passing his arm through Lucien’s with maternal eagerness. ‘Why, that’s one of the curious phenomena I promised I would study in Paris! In Spain we do not believe in atheists… It’s only in France, and only when one is nineteen, that one can have such opinions.’

‘Oh! I’m an out-and-out atheist. I don’t believe in God, or in society, or in the possibility of happiness. Take a good look at me, father, for in a few hours’ time I shall no longer exist. I shall never see the sun again!’ said Lucien, somewhat bombastically, pointing to the heavens.

‘Come now, what have you done that you should die? Who has sentenced you to death?’

‘A sovereign court: myself!’

‘Child that you are!’ cried the priest. ‘Have you committed murder? Does the scaffold await you? Let’s reason things out. If, as you say, you want to return to nothingness, everything on earth is a matter of indifference to you.’

Lucien gave a nod of assent.

‘Well then, why can’t you tell me your troubles?… No doubt some love affair which has gone wrong?…’

Lucien gave a very significant shrug.

‘You want to kill yourself to avoid dishonour or because life has lost its meaning? Very well, you can kill yourself as easily at Poitiers as at Angoulême, or at Tours as easily as at Poitiers. The quicksands of the Loire do not give back their prey…’

‘No, father,’ Lucien replied. ‘I have found what I want. About three weeks ago I came upon a most attractive harbour where a man disgusted with this world can come ashore in the next one.’

‘The next world?… I thought you were an atheist.’

‘Oh, what I mean by the next world is my future metamorphosis into an animal or a plant.’

‘Have you an incurable illness?’

‘Yes, father.’

‘Ah, we’re coming to it,’ said the priest. ‘And what is it?’

‘Poverty.’

The priest looked at Lucien with a smile and said to him,
with infinite grace and an almost ironical smile: ‘A diamond has no idea of its value.’

‘Only a priest,’ cried Lucien, ‘could flatter a man who is destitute and intends to die!’

‘You will not die,’ the Spaniard firmly declared.

‘I’ve often heard,’ Lucien retorted, ‘of people being robbed on the highway, but never of their being enriched.’

‘You are going to hear of it,’ said the priest after ascertaining that his carriage was far enough away for them to go on walking along together.

Lucien took a cigar and lit it at the priest’s cigar in Spanish fashion, thinking as he did so: ‘He’s right. I’ve plenty of time to kill myself.’ The Spaniard continued:

‘It’s often just when young people are most in despair about their future that their luck turns. That is what I wanted to tell you, but I preferred to prove it by an example. The handsome secretary, condemned to death, was in so much more desperate a plight because the King of Sweden was powerless to reprieve him since he had been sentenced by the Swedish States-General. But he was ready to wink at an escape. The good-looking little secretary got away in a barge with a few crowns in his pocket and came to the court of Kurland armed with a letter of recommendation from Gœrtz to the Duke, to whom the Minister explained the misadventure and his protégé’s mania. The Duke appointed the young man secretary to his major-domo. The Duke had spendthrift habits, a pretty wife and a major-domo: three causes of ruin. If now you were to imagine that this personable young man, after being sentenced to death for having eaten the Finnish Treaty, shook off this depraved taste, you know nothing of the hold a vice has on men: even the threat of execution won’t stop them indulging in a pleasure of their own invention.

‘How does a vice get such a strangle-hold? From its inherent strength or from human weakness? Are there certain cravings which border on insanity? I can’t help laughing at the reformers of morals who try to combat such disorders with eloquent exhortations. There came a time when the Duke, alarmed at his major-domo’s refusal to satisfy his requests for money, asked to see the account-books. A foolish notion! There’s nothing easier than to produce an account: that’s not where the difficulty lies. The major-domo handed all the documents to his secretary so that he could draw up the balance-sheet of the Kurland Civil List. He settled down to this task and sat up all night to finish it. Half-way through, the little paper-eater discovered that he was masticating a receipt for a considerable sum of money, signed by the Duke himself. Panic-stricken, he stopped before he had eaten his way through the signature, ran and flung himself at the feet of the Duchess, explained his mania to her and implored his sovereign lady to shield him – what’s more, this took place in the middle of the night I The young clerk’s beauty made such an impression on Her Grace that, when she became a widow, she married him.

‘Thus, right back in the eighteenth century, in a country where armorial bearings were all that mattered, a goldsmith’s son became a sovereign prince!… He did even better for himself: he became Regent at the death of Catherine the First, ruled over the Empress Anne and set out to be the Richelieu of Russia. Well, young man, learn this fact: you may be better-looking even than Biron, but I’m worth more than Baron Gœrtz although I’m only a canon. Come along, get in! We’ll find you a Duchy of Kurland in Paris; or, if we can’t find a duchy, at any rate we’ll find a duchess.’

The Spaniard slipped his arm through Lucien’s, literally forced him up into the carriage, and the postilion closed the door on them.

‘Now talk, I’m listening,’ said the Canon of Toledo to the stupefied Lucien. ‘I’m an old priest to whom you can tell everything without risk. So far no doubt you’ve only devoured your patrimony or Mamma’s money. You’ve done your little
moonlight flit and, bless us! you’re all sense of honour right down to the tip of your pretty, dainty little boots!… Come, make a clean confession; it will be absolutely as if you were talking to yourself.’

Lucien felt he was in the situation of the fisherman in an Arabian tale who, trying to drown himself in mid-ocean, is borne down into a country under the sea where he is made king. The Spanish priest seemed so genuinely affectionate that the poet did not hesitate to open his heart to him. And so, as they travelled from Angoulême to Ruffec, he recounted his whole life, leaving out none of his misdeeds and finishing up with the latest disaster for which he was responsible. At the moment when he was ending his story, the more poetically delivered because Lucien was repeating it for the third time in a fortnight, they arrived at a point on the road near Ruffec, where the Rastignac family had their domain. The first time he mentioned this name, the Spaniard gave a start.
¹

‘It’s from there,’ said Lucien, ‘that young Rastignac set out. He’s certainly not up to my standard, but he’s had better luck than I have.’

‘Ah!’

‘Yes, that quaint little country seat is his father’s manor. As I told you, he became the lover of Madame de Nucingen, the wife of the famous banker. As for me, I gave myself over to poetry. He was more clever and went in for more solid things.’

The priest halted his barouche, wishing out of curiosity to walk along the little avenue from the main road to the manor-house. He looked at it all with more interest than Lucien would have expected from a Spanish priest.

‘So you know the Rastignacs?’ Lucien asked him.

‘I know everyone in Paris,’ said the Spaniard, getting back into the carriage.