Lost Illusions (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

By Honoré de Balzac and Marie-Rose Logan

Lost Illusions, by Honore de Balzac, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

• New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars
• Biographies of the authors
• Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
• Footnotes and endnotes
• Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
• Comments by other famous authors
• Study questions to challenge the readers viewpoints and expectations
• Bibliographies for further reading
• Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate

All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each readers understanding of these enduring works.   Among the best known of Balzac’s novels, Lost Illusions chronicles the rise and fall of Lucien Chardon, a vain but naive young poet who leaves his provincial home to seek success and fortune in Parisian society. Paralleling Lucien’s disastrously ambitious journey is the story of his friend and brother-in-law, hard-working inventor David Séchard, who is beset by unscrupulous competitors and cheated in his printing business by his own father.
 
Considered the founder of French realism, Balzac painted equally faithful pictures of the glittering but superficial world of society and the lonely struggle of impoverished men of genius. The city has a corrosive effect on Lucien’s artistic talent and moral strength, while David takes a brave stand against the constraints of provincial small-mindedness. Balzac plays out their contrasting but intertwined stories against the enduring themes of love, ambition, greed, loyalty, vanity, and betrayal. Will Lucien’s debts be the ruin of both?
 
Published between 1837 and 1843, Lost Illusions is part of La Comédie Humaine, into which Balzac grouped more than ninety interlocking novels. In Lost Illusions, scores of minor characters from these other works help bring early-nineteenth-century France to brilliant life.   Marie-Rose Logan received her Ph.D. from Yale and has held teaching appointments at Yale, Rice, Temple, and Columbia. Professor Logan is a recipient of the French government’s Palmes Académiques and of awards from several foundations, including the National Endowment for the Humanities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble Classics
• Release date: Jun 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411433649

Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) was a French novelist, short story writer, and playwright. Regarded as one of the key figures of French and European literature, Balzac’s realist approach to writing would influence Charles Dickens, Émile Zola, Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, and Karl Marx. With a precocious attitude and fierce intellect, Balzac struggled first in school and then in business before dedicating himself to the pursuit of writing as both an art and a profession. His distinctly industrious work routine—he spent hours each day writing furiously by hand and made extensive edits during the publication process—led to a prodigious output of dozens of novels, stories, plays, and novellas. La Comédie humaine, Balzac’s most famous work, is a sequence of 91 finished and 46 unfinished stories, novels, and essays with which he attempted to realistically and exhaustively portray every aspect of French society during the early-nineteenth century.

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Introduction

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Honoré de Balzac was born in Tours — a city in the Loire Valley — on May 20, 1799, and died in Paris on August 18, 1850. Although he spent most of his life in Paris, Balzac often returned to the Loire Valley, in particular to Saché, a village near Tours where he stayed with his friend M. de Margonne. It is there that he began writing in 1833 the first pages of a long novella entitled Lost Illusions. Published in January 1837; it was the story of Lucien, David, and Eve, and ended with Lucien’s arrival in Paris with Madame de Bargeton. In the preface Balzac announced that he would devote another volume to Lucien’s adventures in Paris. When this second installment appeared in 1839, Balzac reiterated his intention to further the project:

A third part of Lost Illusions remains to be written. The departure of the hero and his stay in Paris somehow illustrate two moments in a trilogy which comes around full circle with the hero’s return to the province. This last part will be called An Inventor’s Tribulations (in Illusions perdues, edited by jean-Claude Lieber, 1976, p. xl; translated by Marie-Rose Logan).

In 1843 Balzac published Lost Illusions as a trilogy. He renamed the first part The Two Poets and gave the original title of the first part to the entire novel. In a letter to his mistress and future wife, Eveline Hanska, Balzac refers to Lost Illusions as the crucial work in the entire work. The entire work refers to The Human Comedy, the umbrella title Balzac chose in the early 1840s for his novels, short stories, and tales. Indeed Balzac viewed his writings as forming a gigantic novel of sorts. The nod to Dante’s Divine Comedy underscored the grandiose nature of a project undertaken by a writer who enjoyed melodrama and grandiosity in life as well as in fiction.

In many of his prefaces Balzac resorts to architectural metaphors, such as a stone in the edifice that will become a cathedral of paper, indicating that he does not write isolated works. Many characters reappear in different novels as if they were recurring motifs on the façade of an edifice: gargoyles, devils, and very few saints. For instance, Rastignac and Vautrin, two of the major characters in Balzac’s much-acclaimed novel Père Goriot (1835), return in Lost Illusions. Eugène de Rastignac, like Lucien Chardon de Rubempré, hails from Angoulême, a town located some 350 miles southwest of Paris. In Père Goriot, Rastignac, the son of an impoverished yet aristocratic family, has been sent to study law in Paris. He quickly realizes that his good looks, his family ties, and women — not the law — will win him money and fame. At the close of the novel, Rastignac has fulfilled his ambitions: He is heading for dinner with his mistress, Madame de Nucingen, a Parisian socialite.

In Lost Illusions Rastignac turns up at the Opera on the evening Lucien has been invited to join the box of his beloved Madame de Bargeton and her cousin, the Marquise d‘Espard. From his box Rastignac can see Lucien. With the wit of a seasoned Parisian, Rastignac asks his friends to look at the mummy whom Madame d’Espard called her cousin, and the precaution that lady took to have an apothecary in her train (page 167). When the socially conscious Marquise d‘Espard gets wind of these comments she immediately excludes Lucien from her entourage. She also forbids Madame de Bargeton to have anything to do with her provincial protégé. Such, in the second decade of the 1820s, is the power of the particle — the preposition de, du, de la, or des, which, when set before the family name, distinguishes aristocrats from the bourgeoisie and the rest of the French citizenry. During the 1789 Revolution many aristocrats went into hiding or exile to escape the guillotine. Some young ladies, like Charlotte de Rubempré, Lucien’s mother, married outside their social class in order to avoid the scaffold. The particle became fashionable again with the restoration of the monarchy after the fall of Napoleon.

Under the reign of Louis XVIII, which began in 1814, the aristocrats sought to regain their place at the top of the social hierarchy.

Throughout the novel, Lucien adopts the name de Rubempré as if it were his family name, only to be reminded by Rastignac and the like that his actual family name is Chardon. In French a chardon is a kind of wild thistle, easily uprooted by the wind. Much like the wild thistle, Lucien does not settle anywhere: He follows the wind of fortune. In Part I, The Two Poets, Lucien dreams of leaving L‘Houmeau, the bourgeois and working-class suburb of Angoulême where he was born. When he is invited to read his poetry in the salon of Anais de Nègrepelisse, also known as Louise de Bargeton, Lucien crosses an invisible barrier between worlds that are so far apart that, upon hearing of Lucien’s infatuation with Madame de Bargeton, his friend and future brother-in-law David Séchard exclaims, ‘But you are more separated from her by the prejudices of social life than if she were at Pekin and you in Greenland’ (p. 30).

In the beginning of Part II, A Great Man from the Provinces in Paris, Madame de Bargeton arrives in Paris with Lucien and drops the provincial lad, who decides to avenge himself by becoming famous. He is welcomed by the Cénacle, a group of serious young writers. Lucien enjoys their company although he finds them somewhat stodgy. After an evening in the company of journalists and actresses, Lucien is carried away by the picturesque aspects of this bohemian life. In a matter of days his witty articles bring him good money and free passes to the theater. A young and beautiful actress, Coralie, drops Camusot, a rich merchant, to become Lucien’s mistress. Lucien’s choice will cost him dearly. By the end of the second part of the trilogy, Lucien has lost everything because of his gambling, drinking, and partying. Coralie dies of exhaustion. Furthermore, Lucien defrauds his brother-in-law, David Séchard. To dodge his creditors he returns on foot to Angoulême.

In Part III, An Inventor’s Tribulations, as Lucien is contemplating suicide a Spanish prelate and diplomat named Carlos Herrera comes to his rescue. In Carlos Herrera the reader of Père Goriot will recognize Vautrin, an ex-convict whose real name is Jacques Collin. Vautrin had unsuccessfully tried to seduce Rastignac while they were both boarders at the Pension Vauquer. In contrast, Lucien is an easy prey. By the time he meets Carlos Herrera/Vautrin, Lucien’s life has come full circle. He first left Angoulême under the auspices of Madame de Bargeton, a provincial aristocrat. Eighteen months later, he finds himself again on the road to Paris. This time he is taken in charge by a socially marginal character who, in exchange for money and renewed dreams of Parisian success, exacts total allegiance from his new protégé. In A Harlot High and Low (1838-1847), a novel considered the sequel of Lost Illusions, Lucien is back in Paris, where he commits suicide in prison.

This brief outline of Lucien’s trajectory underlines how Balzac developed a narrative strategy that enabled him to link Lucien’s adventures to his previous fiction as well as to add new episodes to a novel composed over nearly a decade. In more ways than one, Lucien’s journeys — from the province to Paris, back to Angoulême, and back again to Paris — provide, as we shall see, the indispensable thread that lends coherence to Lost Illusions. Lucien and two other characters, Madame de Bargeton and Sixte du Châtelet, are the only characters who appear in every part of the trilogy.

Between 1789 and 1830 France went through dramatic political upheavals that shaped the life of Balzac and in turn reverberated in the characters he created, especially those in Lost Illusions. The novel begins in 1819 with the return of David Séchard from Paris to Angoulême, where he is to take over his father’s printing house. The intellectual gap between father and son, if shocking, results from the many social upheavals that took place in the wake of the Revolution. During the period of the National Convention (a legislative body that governed France from September 1792 to October 1795), Old Séchard had been able to buy the printing house from the widow of his boss, the master-printer. There were no children who could take over the business. Furthermore, most workmen in L’Houmeau had been drafted in the war France was waging — amidst the Revolution — against Prussia. Séchard, who had escaped the draft, was the only workman left in the shop; the printing house was about to shut down. So representatives of the people, eager to promote the new egalitarian regime, bestowed the title of master-printer on the shrewd, but illiterate, Séchard. Citizen Séchard, in turn, took advantage of the fact that many members of the aristocracy and the clergy needed an alibi to avoid the guillotine: The Comte de Maucombe did the typesetting and corrected the proofs of the revolutionary decrees that came out of the Séchard printing house, and Séchard also added to his staff a priest who had not taken the oath that the Convention required from members of the clergy who wished to avoid the scaffold. In the meantime, the newly minted master-printer was able to send his son to a Lyceum where the latter received an education that until the reign of Napoleon had been available only to members of the upper class. Then David went up — as the French expression goes — to Paris for an apprenticeship with Firmin Didot, the best and most fashionable printer in Paris (see endnote 2 to Part 1).

In Part II of Lost Illusions, the journalist Emile Blondet declares that for twenty years France has undergone four dramas the Revolution, the Directory, the Empire, and the Restoration. Born during the Directory — about six months before Bonaparte’s 1799 coup d‘état — Balzac lived through three of these dramas. He grew up during the Consulate and the Empire. Balzac was an adolescent when the monarchy was restored in 1814. The reign of Louis XVIII, followed by that of Charles X, would last until a three-day revolution in July 1830 placed Louis-Philippe d’Orléans, the citizen king, on the throne; he held it until ousted in 1848 by the future Napoleon III.

During the 1830s Balzac became a prolific and known writer, following a period in which he had nurtured business ambitions. At one point he owned a printing house, a foundry, and a publishing house, ventures that ended in bankruptcy in part because Balzac always spent far more than he earned. Much like Lucien de Rubempré, Balzac led the peripatetic life of a social gadfly. During those years he published under various pseudonyms La derniere _ fee (1823; The Last Fairy), Annette et le criminel (1824; Annette and the Criminal), and other minor works. By 1828 Balzac had moved several times within Paris because his creditors were constantly on his heels. Finally he fled to the house of his friend General de Pommereul in Brittany. There he composed Les Chouans, a historical novel about the guerrilla warfare that took place in 1799 between royalists and republicans. This novel, published in 1829 under the name Balzac, earned him some recognition. In the same year the publication of Physiologie du Mariage: Essais de philosophie (Physiology of Marriage: Essays in Eclectic Philosophy) brought him real success and opened the doors of the literary salons of Madame de Récamier and Madame Girardin, where he was introduced to Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, Alexandre Dumas, and the painter Delacroix. From then on Balzac juggled writing — he sometimes wrote for sixteen hours in one sitting — with a very busy social life.

In Lost Illusions, more than in any other work, Balzac explores the socio-economic challenges that took place during the Restoration in Paris and in the provinces. Balzac was equally fascinated with the two worlds, yet he usually kept them apart. For instance, The Vicar of Tours (1832), Eugénie Grandet (1833), and The Lily of the Valley (1836) are entirely set in the provinces, whereas Sarrasine (1831), Père Goriot (1835), and A Harlot High and Low take place in Paris. When he undertook to classify his works for publication in the monumental Human Comedy, Balzac grouped the first three under the heading Scenes from Provincial Life, and the second group as Scenes from Parisian Life. One of the reasons Lost Illusions is such a tour de force is the subtle permeability Balzac establishes between Paris and the province. Balzac usually characterizes provincial life as monotonous, petty, and boring. In contrast, Parisian life translates into mobility, passion, and genius. Money, greed, and social prestige are driving forces, but they do not operate in the same way in the two places.

Balzac perceived distinct differences between the aristocratic circles in Angoulême and those in Paris. Madame de Bargeton invites the elite of Angoulême to one of Lucien’s poetry readings. As the guests arrive, Balzac sarcastically notes: There was no difference between them — gesture and movement were extremely rare (p. 71). Balzac turns these aristocrats’ sartorial attire into ridicule: Their creased coats gave them the look of supernumeraries who figure as guests at a wedding on the boards of a petty theatre (page 73). In other words, they are stupid and dull. In contrast, Madame de Bargeton, who stages the evening in preparation of her future career in Paris (p. 36), displays her knowledge of Latin and her sensitivity to lyric poetry. In the midst of the Angoulême aristocracy, Madame de Bargeton stands out as an exception. She dresses like a Romantic heroine, wearing as the fashion then was, a head-dress of black velvet which suggested recollections of the middle-ages, and to Lucien’s eyes gave a certain stateliness to her head (p. 45). On another occasion she opts for the Oriental look — also in vogue among the Romantics: She wore a turban fastened with an oriental buckle. A gauze scarf, beneath which could be seen a cameo necklace, was gracefully twined about her throat. The short sleeves of her painted muslin gown enabled her to wear several tiers of bracelets on her beautiful white arms (pp. 70-71). In other words, Madame de Bargeton’s outfits reflect her literary taste and her ambitions. Once in Paris she undergoes a felicitous transformation thanks to the Marquise d’Espard, the queen of socialites. The following passage perhaps best illustrates the contrast between the outmoded, static aristocracy of the province and the gracious and dynamic Parisian ultras, as the aristocrats called themselves during the Restoration. Lucien, now alone in Paris, spots a nearly unrecognizable Madame de Bargeton in a horse-drawn carriage on the Champs-Elysées:

The colors of her toilet were chosen in a way to set off her complexion ; her gown was charming, her hair most becomingly arranged, while a dainty bonnet of exquisite taste was remarkable beside even that of Madame d’Espard, who controlled the fashion.... She played with an elegant vinaigrette [a small bottle of smelling salts] fastened to one of the fingers of her right hand by a little chain, exhibiting thus her slender and well-gloved hand without apparently intending it (p. 172).

Nor does the Parisian nobility escape Balzac’s sarcasm. Madame d’Espard’s letters to her cousin are termed charming, their style so fascinating that it takes some time to perceive their want of depth (p.147) . The journey of Lucien and Madame de Bargeton from Angoulême to Paris highlights mostly dif ferences, but also similarities inherent in the aristocratic milieu of the period, including the longing for a return to the pre-1789 regime, a sense of belonging, and an alliance with the clergy. These values set the nobility apart from the Liberals or Republicans.

If the Angoulême aristocracy deserves recognition for its inertia, the residents of L’Houmeau distinguish themselves by their conspicuous greed and dishonesty. For example, David’s father, Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard, lives in a world of his own. This miser can turn anything into gold. In Part I, he hands his business over to his son in order to retire to the country, where he spends most of his time in his vineyards. When he reappears in Part III, he is making a handsome income from the product of his grapes. There is no need to know how to read and write to make money in the printing or in the wine business when your name is Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard. He resents every penny he has spent toward the education of his son, and throughout Parts I and III, he remains determined not to help his son in any way. At first he does not even approve of David’s marriage to Eve, though toward the end he will warm up to his daughter-in-law. In many ways Old Séchard is one of the most pathetic characters in the novel: selfish, heartless, and manipulative.

There can only be rivalry when there are two printing houses in one provincial town. Both Boniface, the tall Cointet, and Jean, the stout Cointet, are paper-makers and printers in Angoulême. The two quickly realize that there will be profit in siding with those who favor the monarchy, and the church provides them with a conduit to the aristocracy: They kept all fasts ostentatiously; lingered in the cathedral; cultivated the priests; and brought out new editions of pious books the moment the want of them was felt (p. 20). Dreaming of becoming the sole printers in town, the Cointets see an opportunity when young Séchard takes over. They gossip about David’s Liberalism and atheism, and attempt to short-circuit every effort his wife makes to keep the business alive. They ultimately succeed and even try to profit from David’s patents on the paper he has invented. Along the way they are helped by a sinister individual, Pierre Petit-Claud, whose name is mentioned in passing in Part I of Lost Illusions, along with that of other classmates of Lucien and David. Petit-Claud takes on a life of his own in Part III, An Inventor’s Tribulations, where he becomes the chief architect of the downfall of David and Lucien. Petit-Claud is not an ordinary man. Balzac, who was well versed in physiognomy (the science of perceiving character through outward appearance), describes the provincial lawyer as follows: Despised by his schoolmates, Pierre Petit-Claud seemed to have had a certain amount of gall infused into his blood. His face had the dirty, muddy tints which indicate former illnesses, privations, nights of anxiety, and, nearly always, evil feelings (p. 479).

Seeking advice in order to take legal action against David Séchard, Boniface Cointet meets with Petit-Claud. Driven by ambition, hatred, and envy, Petit-Claud follows Cointet’s instructions to the letter. At the same time he presumes to counsel David and his wife, who blindly trust him. Petit-Claud is unmarried. Only a wife with a fat dowry can help him wipe out the debt he has accumulated in borrowing money to buy the practice of his boss. Thanks to Boniface Cointet, Petit-Claud is introduced to Mademoiselle de la Haye, the illegitimate daughter of a member of the Angoulême aristocracy. Here we reach into the sordid pail of provincial pettiness. No aristocratic gentleman would marry an illegitimate daughter, so why not marry Mademoiselle de la Haye to a successful bourgeois lawyer? Boniface Cointet flatly tells the rather ugly little lawyer that he could not have hoped for better. Petit-Claud is so crass that he does not even invite his mother to the wedding. In the end, Petit-Claud becomes one of the king’s attorneys, and Boniface Cointet is elevated to the rank of peer of France. Pierre Petit-Claud and Boniface Cointet have become great men of the province.

Balzac was fond of enriching the plots of his novels with lengthy descriptions, and Lost Illusions is no exception. The novel opens with a detailed description of the Séchard printing press and of the house, including the design of the wallpaper, and continues with descriptions of the Tuileries, the Champs-Elysées, and the jail in Angoulême. It is noteworthy that there are no topographical or other descriptions of the countryside between Angoulême and Paris. Lucien and Madame de Bargeton’s trip from Angoulême to Paris is summarized in a few words: Neither [Lucien], nor Louise de Bargeton, nor Gentil, her footman, nor Albertine the waiting-maid, ever spoke of the events of that journey (p. 139). And when Lucien returns on foot to Angoulême the surroundings are barely evoked: When he reached Orléans he was very weary and almost worn-out; but a boatman took him for three francs down the river to Tours, during which trip he spent two francs for food. It took him five days to walk from Tours to Poitiers (p. 445). This strategy is part of a narrative process through which Balzac focuses on the philosophical import of his exploration of the socio-cultural substratum of the provinces and Paris.

In Part I, Balzac lays the groundwork for an exploration of Romanticism that he continues in Part II when Lucien immerses himself into the literary, journalistic, and intellectual milieu of Paris. In The Two Poets, Lucien is called the Chateaubriand of L’Houmeau and another Chatterton. Lucien owes his invitation to the salon of Madame de Bargeton to his ability to write verses in the manner of Chatterton (see endnote 25 to Part I). The Baron Sixte du Châtelet comments : Poor and modest, the lad was another Chatterton, but without... the ferocious hatred against social grandeur which drove the Englishman into writing pamphlets to insult his benefactors (p. 43). Chateaubriand and Vigny were about the same age, and as mentioned earlier, the two men were members of the same social circle. Balzac was not a poet but a sharp observer of society who longed to become a profound philosopher, yet he understood and appreciated lyric poetry. Few passages are as moving as the one where David and Lucien read to one another poems by André Chénier, the true precursor of French Romantic poetry:

Lucien read aloud the epic fragment of the Aveugle and several elegies. When he chanced upon the line — If they have no joy, is there joy upon earth? he laid down the book, and they both wept, for each loved to idolatry. The vine-leaves glowed, the fissures of the old stone walls, cracked, battered, and split, took to their eyes the semblance of carvings and mouldings and bas-reliefs of some unknown or fairy architecture. Fancy scattered her roses and her rubies into the dark little court. André Chénier’s Camille was to David his adored Eve, and to Lucien a great lady with whom he was in love (pp. 28-29) .

Paris offers a sharp contrast to this idyllic and idealistic view of poetry. Aesthetic values do matter, but so do sales. Thus the publisher Dauriat deals a severe blow to the Chateaubriand of L’Houmeau when he declares: For the last two years poets have swarmed like cockchafers; I lost twenty thousand francs on them last year! and adds: There are but four poets: Béranger, Casimir Delavigne, Lamartine and Victor Hugo (p. 256).

In those days, newspapers regularly ran articles about the fate of young persons from the provinces who had come to Paris in search of literary fame. Most of them were duped and disappointed; they starved, became ill, and sometimes committed suicide. The satirical newspaper Vert-Vert went as far as to suggest that suicide had become a contagious disease among young writers. In Angoulême, Lucien had written a novel, L Archer de Charles IX ( The Archer of Charles IX) , and a volume of poetry, Daisies. Lucien dreamed of fame; he fancied his name displayed in the windows of Parisian bookstores. Yet he could not find a publisher for his work; he was starving. Could he ever earn money with his pen? Circumstances worked in his favor. Lucien often ate in a cheap restaurant called Flicoteaux. There he befriended Etienne Lousteau, who would introduce him to the world of journalism.

Under the Restoration and the rule of Louis-Philippe, the Parisian press began to play a crucial role in heating up the political turmoil of the period — most journals exhibited either royalist or Liberal tendencies. Also contributing to the influence of the press were the growing number of people who could read and advances in the technology of the printing industry. Newspapers proliferated, and journalists were in demand. Their reviews of literary works, plays, and concerts influenced the public and helped drive the sales of books and tickets to the opera and the theater. As a group, journalists, like actors and actresses, are capable of thriving on rivalry, greed, and insincerity.

As he chooses the path of journalism, Lucien discovers with great enthusiasm that it is a profession in which one can derive immediate gratification — including money, sex, and some kind of fame. He will discover the accompanying betrayal, compromise, and rivalry only when it is too late. Lucien writes articles and reviews that win him praise. One of Blondet’s comments to him deserves to be quoted: As Monsieur de Chateaubriand has already called Victor Hugo ‘the sublime child’ ... I can only say of you that you were born a man of wit, heart, and style (p. 288). These lines announce Balzac’s dedication of the final edition of Lost Illusions to Victor Hugo:

You were already a great man when other men were still so little, you, like Chateaubriand and all talented men, have fought against the envious people who dodge behind columns or hide in the underground passages of the Newspaper. So I wish to see your victorious name associated with the victory of this work which I dedicate to you; this work according to some people is a courageous effort and a true story (in Illusions Perdues, edited by Jean-Claude Lieber, p. 5; translated by Marie-Rose Logan).

Hugo, as well known as he was, had his own quarrels with the Parisian press Balzac attacks in Lost Illusions. Balzac’s two allusions to Chateaubriand resonate with each other. First, journalists are capable of anything; they can destroy a novel, as Lucien does with Nathan’s novel. The publisher Dauriat buys Lucien’s Daisies only to prevent Lucien from writing unfavorable reviews of works by other authors he publishes. Dauriat treats Lucien and Coralie to a sumptuous dinner. Reveling in his good fortune, Lucien admits that in choosing to pursue a journalistic career he gave up the creative integrity that had attracted him to genuine writers like Daniel d’ Arthèz. Lucien draws a rather cynical analogy between the craft of the actress and that of the journalist: Print is to manuscript what the theatre is to women; it brings into a strong light both beauties and defects; it injures as much as it embellishes; a defect catches the eye even more vividly than a fine thought (p. 341).

Second, in evoking the name of Chateaubriand, Balzac reminds the reader of the declaration of the young Hugo: I will be Chateaubriand or nothing. Hugo published his first poems when he was an adolescent, and his literary successes had spanned nearly a quarter of a century by 1843, when Balzac published the trilogy Lost Illusions. The name Victor Hugo embodied the continuity of Romanticism in the person of a gifted youth who was now a member of the French Academy. By the same token it validated the most Romantic of Balzac’s novels — novels that bear more affinities with the hyperbolic frenzy of a Romantic writer like Alexandre Dumas than with those of Stendhal or Hugo.

In Paris, unlike in Angoulême, the literary world is closely associated with mercantilism — as well as politics. When Etienne Lousteau asks Lucien: Are you a Classicist or a Romanticist? the poet is too disconcerted to give an answer. Lousteau explains that the Romantics support the throne and the clergy while the Liberals favor a more constitutional and progressive regime. Then Lucien inquires: Which side is the stronger? The response is phrased in financial terms: The liberal journals have many more subscribers than the royalist and ministerial journals (p. 224). Etienne Lousteau’s sharp distinction between Romantics and Liberals does not quite correspond to the literary-historical situation of the period. For instance, Stendhal was a Liberal and a great supporter of Romanticism. In 1823 Stendhal published Racine and Shakespeare, in which he argues: that Romantic drama is superior to classical drama. Balzac, for his part, never took part in the literary quarrel between classicism and romanticism. Deep down he was in favor of the monarchy and had some nostalgia for the old order; after all, he changed the family name Balssa to de Balzac.

Lost Illusions is certainly not an autobiographical novel. Yet, as one would expect, in it Balzac incorporated many aspects of his views on the role of the writer in society. The episode that deals with the Cénacle, the brotherhood of writers, is most telling in this respect. Shortly after being sent into exile by Madame de Bargeton and her cousin, Lucien has to find a way to survive in Paris. He rents a room in a neighborhood near the Sorbonne and frequently visits the Sainte-Geneviève library, where he befriends a young intellectual named Daniel D‘Arthèz. D’Arthèz, who returns in Balzac’s Les Secrets de la princesse de Cardignan (1839; The Secrets of the Princess of Cardignan) is a very special person. He and his friends who make up the Cénacle welcome Lucien. D’ Arthèz, the most gifted member of the Cénacle, takes the trouble of reading and correcting the manuscript of Lucien’s novel, The Archer of Charles IX- He had even written some of the finest pages, and a noble preface, which does in fact excel the book, and throws a strong light on the dawning of literature of the day (p. 222). The narrator’s description of d’Arthèz is worth quoting because it represents Balzac’s own ambitions, which were philosophical in nature:

[D’Arthèz] believed in no great, incomparable talent without a deep, a profound metaphysical knowledge. At the present moment he was culling the philosophic riches of ancient and modern times to assimilate them. He wished, like Molière, to be a deep philosopher before making comedies. He studied the written world and the living world; the thought and the fact (p. 200).

Like D’Arthèz, Balzac studied the written world and the living world, and his encyclopedic knowledge challenges the reader at every turn of the page. Balzac was also interested in the unfolding of the imaginative process. Lucien and David are called poets, although Lucien is the only one who writes poems. Within the framework of the novel, the word poet, which Balzac frequently capitalizes, is used with a meaning that is very close to its etymological one. It derives from the ancient Greek poiein (to make, to fashion). Both David and Lucien are poets in that they fashion a universe of their own.

David is bent on finding a cheaper way to make paper. He becomes entirely absorbed in his own universe. An Inventor’s Tribulations brings to mind Balzac’s Le chef d’oeuvre inconnu (1831; The Unknown Masterpiece). In that novella, the painter Frenhofer is obsessed with painting a woman in an absolutely perfect way. Like David, Frenhofer works in secrecy. By the end of his life he has painted only one foot. Neither David nor Frenhofer are looking for fame or money. The narrator tells us: [David] fought so desperately with his difficulties that to any man but Cointet the spectacle would have seemed sublime : for no thought of self-interest entered the mind of the brave fighter. There came a time when he desired success for its own sake only (p. 625).

Much has been written about Lucien’s androgynous beauty. The young man turns his body and his looks into a most magnificent poem. From the moment he realizes, in the salon of Madame de Bargeton, the power of his magnetic presence, he relentlessly and solely seeks the company of those, men or women, who fall prey to this walking mirror in which are reflected the narcissism of his admirers.

But then Lost Illusions is itself a great mirror that reflects the narcissism of a whole society: of great ladies and low schemers, of conservatives and liberals, of provincial aspiration and urban condescension, of need and excess, of love of money and love of love. It reflects what was true in early nineteenth century France and is still true, in many parts of the world, to this day.

Marie-Rose Logan, who received her Ph.D. from Yale University, is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of several volumes, including Contending Kingdoms: Historical, Psychological, and Feminist Approaches to the Literature of Sixteenth-Century England and France; Graphesz’s: Perspectives in Literature and Philosophy; Rethinking History: Time, Myth, and Writing, and Cérard Genette, Figures of Literary Discourse. She is Associate Editor of The Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature and General Editor of the transnational and interdisciplinary journal Annals of Scholarship: Art Practices and the Human Sciences in a Global Culture. Her numerous essays on critical theory, the Renaissance, Modernism, and Post-Modernism have appeared in New Literary History, Journal of Modern Literature, Modern Language Notes (MLN), and other professional journals. Professor Logan has held teaching appointments at Yale University, Rice University, Temple University, and, most recently, at Columbia University. In 2005 she joined the faculty of Soka University of America (Aliso Viejo) as Professor of European and Comparative Literature. Professor Logan is also a permanent member of the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University. She is a recipient of the French government’s Palmes Académiques and of awards from several foundations, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Humanities Center, the Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies, the Newberry Library, and the University of Edinburgh Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities.

PART I.

THE TWO POETS

007

1.

A PRINTING-HOUSE IN THE PROVINCES

AT the period when this history begins, Stanhope’s press and cylinders for the distribution of ink were unknown to provincial printing-houses.¹ In spite of the specialty which brought Angoulême into close relations with Parisian typography, that town was still making use of wooden presses, — from which the term, now meaningless, a groaning press, was derived. The antiquated leathern pads, daubed with ink, with which the pressmen stamped the type, were still in use. The movable frame where they now place the form, filled with letters on which the paper is applied, was then of stone, and justified its technical name of marble. The ravenous mechanical presses of our day have made us forget so completely this old-time mechanism (to which, in spite of its imperfections, we owe the noble work of Elzevir, of Plantin, Aldini, Didot, and others)2 that it is necessary to mention these old tools for which their owner, Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard, felt a superstitious affection; they have a part to play in this great little history.

Séchard was formerly a journeyman printer, of the kind which the workmen whose duty it was to collect the letters called, in typographic slang, a bear. The incessant coming and going and turning, very like that of a bear in his cage, with which the pressmen moved from the ink to the press, and from the press to the ink, was no doubt the origin of the nickname. In return, the bears called the compositors monkeys, on account of the agility with which those gentry were obliged to catch up the letters from the hundred and fifty little cases which contained them. At the disastrous period of the Revolution, Séchard, then about fifty years old, was lately married. His age and his marriage saved him from the great draft which swept nearly all the workmen of France into the army. The old pressman was left alone in the printing-office, the master of which (otherwise termed the naifa) had just died, leaving a widow and two children. The establishment seemed threatened with immediate collapse. The solitary bear could not be transformed into a monkey for the reason that, in his capacity as a pressman, he had not known how to read or write. At this juncture a representative of the people, eager to distribute the noble decrees of the Convention bestowed upon the pressman, without paying any heed to his incapacity, the license of a master-printer, and gave him the work to do.

Having accepted this perilous license, citizen Séchard bought out the widow of his master with the savings of his own wife, paying for the establishment about half its actual value. But that was nothing. He was now constrained to print, without error or delay, all the Republican decrees. At this difficult juncture Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard, luckily for him, met a Marseilles nobleman who was anxious to neither emigrate (and lose his property), nor be noticed (and lose his head), but who was forced to earn his living by some form of toil. Accordingly he, Monsieur le Comte de Maucombe, donned the humble jacket of a foreman of a provincial printing-office. He set up in type and corrected the proofs of the very decrees which condemned to death all citizens who harbored and hid the nobles; the bear (now become a naif) struck them off and posted them; and the pair, thus employed, remained safe and sound.

In 1795, when the whirlwind of the Terror was over, Nicolas Séchard was obliged to look out for another foreman. An abbé, afterwards bishop under the Restoration, who had refused the oath,³ took the place of the Comte de Maucombe until Napoleon restored the Catholic worship. The count and the bishop met later on the same bench in the Chamber of peers.

Though Jerome-Nicolas Sechard knew no more about reading and writing in 1802 than he did in 1793, he had, nevertheless, accumulated enough of this world’s goods to hire a foreman. The journeyman once so careless of his future had now become extremely terrifying to his monkeys and his bears. Avarice begins where poverty ends. The day on which the printer perceived that he might possibly make his fortune, self-interest developed in him a material intelligence, keen as to his trade, greedy, suspicious, and penetrating. His practice set theory at defiance. He learned to estimate at a single glance the cost of a page or a sheet, according to the type employed. He proved to ignorant customers that large letters cost more to handle than small ones, — unless it were a question of the small ones, for then they became the more difficult of the two to manage. Composition being a part of typography of which he knew nothing, he was so afraid of making mistakes that he never trusted himself on any but sure ground. If his compositors worked by the hour, his eye never left them. If a paper-dealer were in difficulties, he bought up his stock at a low price and stored the paper. By this time he owned the house in which the printing business had been carried on by his predecessors from time immemorial. He had all sorts of good luck. He became a widower, and had but one son; whom he sent to the town lyceum,⁴ less for the sake of benefiting the youth than to get himself a successor. He treated his son sternly, to prolong the period of parental power; he made him spend his holidays at the cases, telling him to learn how to make his living, and some day reward his poor father, who was using his life’s blood to bring him up.

When the abbé left the office Séchard chose a foreman from among the four compositors whom the future bishop assured him were as honest as they were intelligent. In this way he managed to carry on his establishment until his son was old enough to direct it. David Séchard made brilliant progress at the Lyceum of Angoulême. Though old Séchard — as a bear who had made his way in life without knowledge or education — despised learning, he sent his son to Paris to study the best typography; but he gave him such vehement orders to amass a good round sum in a city which he called the workman’s paradise (telling him not to expect a penny from the parental purse) that he must have seen a means to his secret ends in this sojourn of the lad in the land of knowledge.

While learning the trade David finished his education. The Didot’s foreman became a man of science. Toward the close of the year 1819⁵ he returned from Paris without having cost his father a single penny. The old man had recalled him to put the helm of the business into his hands. The printing-house of Nicolas Séchard published the only journal of legal advertisements which existed in the department; it had also the custom of the prefecture, and that of the bishopric, — three sources of prosperity which ought to bring fortune to an active young man.

Just at this very time the Cointet Brothers, papermakers, bought up the second printing license in Angoulême, which Séchard had hitherto managed to reduce to inaction, thanks to the various military crises which, under the Empire, repressed all industrial enterprise. For this reason he had neglected to buy it; and this parsimony was one cause of the ultimate ruin of the old printing-house. When he heard of the purchase old Séchard complacently reflected that the struggle with the Cointets would now be carried on by his son and not by himself. I should have broken down, thought he; but a young man trained by the Didots will pull through it. The old man was longing for the time when he could live as he pleased. He had, it is true, little acquaintance with the upper walks of typography, but he was thought very able in the art which workmen have called in jest sofilog-raphie,b an art highly esteemed by the marvellous author of Pantagruel;⁶ the culture of which, persecuted by what are termed temperance societies, is now, we may almost say, abandoned. Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard, true to the destiny which his name bestowed, was gifted with an inextinguishable thirst. His wife had managed for a long time to keep within due limits this passion for grape-juice, — so natural to a bear that Monsieur de Chateaubriand⁷ observed it among the real bears of America. But philosophers have recorded that the habits of youth are wont to return with added strength in old age. Séchard was an example of this moral law; the older he grew, the more he loved drink. This passion left upon his ursine countenance certain marks which gave it originality; his nose had taken the form and development of a capital A; his veiny cheeks, like vine-leaves covered with purple gibbosities and streaked with various colors, gave to his head the appearance of a monstrous truffle clasped by the shoots of autumn. Hiding behind thick eyebrows, which resembled bushes covered with snow, his small gray eyes, glittering with the avarice which had killed every other emotion within him, even that of paternity, kept their intelligence when he himself was drunk. His bald head, fringed with grizzly hair that curled at the points, recalled to the imagination the friars of La Fontaine.⁸ He was short and corpulent like the old-fashioned church lamps which consume more oil than wick; for excess in anything forces the body in the direction of its own tendencies; drunkenness, like study, makes a fat man fatter and a thin man thinner.

For the last thirty years Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard had worn the famous three-cornered municipal hat, which in some of the provinces may still be seen on the head of the drum-majors of the neighborhood. His waistcoat and trousers were of greenish velveteen, and he wore an old brown coat, blue and white cotton stockings, and shoes with silver buckles. This costume, in which the workman and the tradesman were combined, was so well suited to his habits, it expressed his being so admirably, that he seemed to have been born ready dressed; you could no more imagine him without his clothes than you could see an onion without its layers of skin.

If the blind and besotted greed of the old printer were not already well known, his method of getting rid of his printing business would suffice to show his character. In defiance of the better knowledge which his son was certain to bring back from the great house of the Didots, old Séchard intended to strike the hard bargain he had long meditated, — a bargain of which he was to make a good thing and his son a bad one. But to his mind there was no such thing as father or son in business matters. He may at first have considered David in the light of an only child, but he now saw him only as a purchaser, whose natural interests were opposed to his own. He meant to sell dear; David, of course, would wish to buy cheap; his son became, therefore, an enemy to conquer. This transformation of feeling into selfish interest, which is ordinarily slow, tortuous, and hypocritical in educated persons, was rapid and undisguised in the old bear, who lost no time in showing how wary grogginess could get the better of educated typography. When his son arrived he received him with the commercial tenderness which all clever dealers show to their dupes; he showed as much solicitude as a lover for his mistress; gave him his arm, told him where to walk out of the mud, had his bed warmed, a fire lighted, and a supper made ready. The next day, after trying to intoxicate his son at a copious dinner, Jérôme S6chard (himself very drunk) said suddenly, Now we’ll talk business, — a proposal emitted between two hiccoughs in so singular a manner that David at once proposed to put off the matter till the next morning. But the old bear knew too well how to make use of his drunkenness to give up the battle he had long been planning. Besides, having carried his ball and chain for fifty years he was determined not to bear it an hour longer; his son should be its victim on the morrow.

Here we must say a word about the printing-office. It stood at the corner of the rue de Beaulieu and the place du Mûrier, in a house it had occupied since the close of the reign of Louis XIV.⁹ All parts of the building had long been arranged for the different departments of a printer’s trade. The ground-floor made one enormous room, lighted towards the street by an old casement, and by a very large window opening on an inner court. The master’s private office could be reached by a small alley-way ; but the various processes of typography are the objects of such lively curiosity in the provinces that the clients and customers preferred to enter by a glass door which opened on the street, although they were obliged to go down some steps, the floor of the printing-room being below the level of the roadway. Inquisitive visitors, who were always bewildered by the scene, paid little or no attention to the intricacies of the place. While they gazed at the vault of paper, stretched on ropes, hanging from the ceiling, they stumbled against the rows of cases, or had their hats knocked off by the iron bars which held up the presses. If they watched the active motions of a compositor, picking his letters from the hundred and fifty-two compartments of his case, reading his copy, rereading his composed line, then slipping in the lead, they would blunder into reams of damp paper, pressed by weights, or catch their hips against the angles of a form, to the great delight of bear and monkeys. No one had ever reached, without some such accident, the two large cages at the farther end of this cavern, which formed two dismal pavilions looking on the courtyard, in one of which the foreman had his desk, while the other was the master’s office.

The walls of the courtyard were agreeably decorated with trellises covered with vines, which, in keeping with the reputation of the owner, had an appetizing local color. At the farther end, backing on the division wall, was a shed where the paper was damped and cut. There, too, was the sink in which they washed the forms, or, to use the common term, the type-boards ; a decoction of ink flowed from this sink and mingled with the household drainage, making the peasants who came to town on the market days imagine that the devil had been cleaning himself in that house. This shed was flanked on one side by the kitchen, on the other by the wood-pile. The first floor of the house, above which there were only two attic chambers, contained three rooms. The first, lighted towards the street by a small oblong window and on the courtyard by a circular one, served as antechamber and dining-room in one. The cynical simplicity of commercial stinginess was shown by the whitewashed walls; the tiles of the floor were never washed; the furniture consisted of three rickety chairs, a round table, a sideboard placed between two doors, which opened, one into a bedroom, the other into the salon. Doors and windows were dingy with dirt. White or printed paper usually choked up this room, and Nicolas Séchard’s bottles and dinner dishes might often be seen on the bales and reams.

The bedroom, the window of which, with its leaded panes, looked on the courtyard, was hung with old tapestry, such as we often see draping the walls of provincial houses on the occasion of the Fête-Dieu. c In it was a four-post bedstead with curtains, valance, and coverlet of red serge, two worm-eaten armchairs, two other chairs covered with tapestry, an old desk, and a clock on the chimney-piece. The salon, modernized by the late Madame Séchard, presented a horrible combination of woodwork, painted a vivid blue; panels, papered with Oriental landscapes, and colored with sepia on a white ground; and six chairs, covered with sheep-skin, dyed blue, the backs of which represented lyres. The two windows were clumsily arched and looked out, curtainless, on the place du Mûrier. The chimney-piece had no ornament, neither clock, candlesticks, nor mirror. Madame Séchard died in the midst of her projects of embellishment, and the bear, seeing no use in adornments which brought him nothing, discontinued his wife’s plans.

It was to this room that Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard, µede titubante,d brought his son to show him, on a round table, the inventory of the establishment, made out under his directions by the foreman.

Read that, my lad, said he, rolling his tipsy eyes from the paper to his son, and from his son to the paper. You’ll see what a jewel of a business I’m going to let you have.

David began to read: -

‘Three wooden presses held together by iron bars, with beds of marble in iron frames — ’

That’s an improvement of mine, said old Séchard, interrupting his son.

‘With all their utensils, — ink-pots, balls, banks, etc., sixteen hundred francs’ — But, father, said David, letting fall the inventory, your presses are old-fashioned things, not worth three hundred — in fact, they are only fit for firewood.

Old-fashioned! cried his father. Old-fashioned! Take the inventory, and let’s go down and look at them. You shall see that your trumpery mechanical inventions can’t work like these long-tried tools. When you’ve seen them, you won’t have the heart to villify honest presses which roll like mail-coaches, and can go a lifetime without repairs. Old-fashioned, indeed! Yes, old fashions, which will give you porridge; old fashions, which your father has handled these twenty years, and which served him to make you what you are now.

So saying he shambled down the rickety, trembling staircase without tripping, rushed at the first press, which had just been craftily oiled and cleaned, and pointed to its strong oaken sides freshly polished by an apprentice.

Isn’t that a love of a press? he cried.

A marriage invitation happened to be on it. The old bear lowered the frisket on the tympan, and the tympan on the slab, which he rolled beneath the press; then he pulled the bar, unrolled the rope to draw back the slab, and raised the frisket and the tympan with the agility which a young bear might have given to it. The press thus handled emitted a cry like that of a bird which strikes against a window-pane and flies away. Where’s there a single English press able to work as fast as that? he said to his amazed son.

The old fellow hurried to the second press, then to the third, on both of which he performed the same manoeuvre with the same agility. The last betrayed to his vinous eye a spot neglected by his apprentice, and the old drunkard with edifying oaths took the tail of his coat and rubbed it clean, as a jockey polishes the hide of a horse he wants to sell.

With those three presses you can earn nine thousand francs a year without a foreman, David. As your future partner, I oppose your replacing them with those cursed cast-iron things which wear out the type. You all cried miracle in Paris over the invention of that damned Englishman, the enemy of France, whose only object was to make the fortune of foundries. Ha! you wanted stanhopes, did you? a fig for your stanhopes, which cost two thousand five hundred francs apiece, nearly twice what those three jewels of mine are worth, — machines which crack the type in two for want of elasticity. I’m not a learned man like you, but just remember this that I tell you; the life of stanhopes is the death of type. These three presses will do you good service, the work will be properly done, and what more do you want? Whether you print with iron or wood or with gold or silver, you won’t earn a farthing the more by it. ‘ ‘Item,’ continued David: ‘five million pounds of type from the foundry of M. Vafiard — ’

The pupil of the Didots could not repress a smile at the name.

Laugh! oh, yes, you may laugh! After twelve years’ use that type is as good as new. M. Vafiard is what I call a good founder; he’s an honest man, who supplies lasting stuff. To my thinking the best founder is the one to whom you seldom go.

‘appraised at ten thousand francs’ said David, reading on. "Ten thousand francs, father! Why, that is forty sous a pound, and Messrs. Didot ask only thirty-six for their pica when new. Your nail-headse are worth nothing more than the weight of the iron, ten sous a pound."

"Do you call such letters as those nail-heads? Why, they were made by Gillé, formerly printer to the Emperor!¹⁰ Type which was worth six francs a pound; masterpieces of the art, bought five years ago, and still as bright as the day they were cast. See here! and old Séchard caught up several scoopsful of sorts" which had never been used, and showed them to his son.

I’m not learned, he said, "I can’t read or write, but I know enough to make a guess that the type of the firm of Gillé were the patterns used by your Didots and your Englishmen. Here’s a ronde," pointing to a case, and taking out an M, — a ronde of pica which has never yet been undone.

David saw that there was no way of discussing the matter with his father. He must either agree to all or refuse all. He was held to a yes or a no. The old bear had put everything into the inventory, even to the ropes in the drying-room. The smallest job-case, wetting-board, water-jug, even the scrubbing-brushes, were reckoned into the account with the minuteness of a miser. The total was thirty thousand francs including the license of the master and the good-will of the business. David asked himself whether or not the matter were feasible.

Seeing that his son was silent after hearing the amount demanded, old Séchard became uneasy; for he much preferred a violent discussion to a silent acceptance. In such dealings as these a discussion is the test of a business man who is able to hold his own. He who demurs to everything, old Séchard was wont to say, pays nothing. While watching the mind of his son, he ran over the list of his wretched utensils, and showed David a press for glazing, and another for trimming edges, boasting of their long usage and solidity.

Old tools are always the best, he said. In the printing business they ought to bring more than new ones, just as they do in the gold-beater’s trade.

Horrible vignettes representing Hymen, or Cupid, or the dead raising the stones of their sepulchres and forming huge V’s and M’s, and enormous masked frames for theatrical posters became, under the vinous eloquence ofJérôme-Nicolas, items of immense value. He told his son that the habits of provincials were so deeply rooted that he might try in vain to give his clients better things. He,Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard, had endeav ored to sell better almanacs than the Double Liégeois,f which was printed on the commonest paper! Well, that old Liégeois was preferred, actually preferred, to his magnificent almanacs! David, he knew, would soon find out the importance of old things, which would always sell for more than newfangled ones.

Remember this, my lad, the provinces are the provinces, and Paris is Paris. If a man from l’Houmeau were to come to you for his marriage notice, and you printed it without a Cupid and garlands, he wouldn’t think himself married; I tell you, he’d send it back if you printed him the sort of thing they do at your Didots, who may be an honor to typography, but whose inventions won’t be adopted in the provinces for the next hundred years, so there now!

Generous souls are defective in business faculty. David had one of those modest, tender natures which dread argument and yield to their opponent the moment he touches their heart. His own noble feelings, and the sway the old drunkard had always held over him, made him still more unfit to hold his own in a money discussion with his father, more especially as he thought him actuated by good intentions: for he honestly attributed the old printer’s voracity of self-interest to a genuine love of his tools. However, as jérôme Séchard had bought the whole establishment originally for ten thousand francs in assignats, ¹¹ and the price he now asked was exorbitant, David did exclaim with some vehemence, Father, you will ruin me!

I, who gave you life! said the old drunkard, with a wave of his hand to the drying lines. Why, David, you don’t consider the value of the business. Do you know what the Journal brings in for advertisements at ten sous a line? Five hundred francs for the last month! Open those books, my lad, and see for yourself what the advertisements and police notes and the custom we get from the mayor’s office and the bishopric bring in. You’re a soft one who can’t see your way to fortune; you want to cheapen the horse that is going to take you there.

A deed of partnership was annexed to the inventory. By it the worthy father leased his house to the buyer for twelve hundred francs a year (though he had only

Reviews for Lost Illusions (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

[jwhenderson_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of Balzac's best novels, the story of Lucien Chardon draws in the reader as he explores both the high and low aspects of Parisian society. His rise and fall is a story that could have happened yesterday, While filled with digressions the story carries the reader into realms of life that continual beckon and intrigue and thus maintain your interest.

[colligan · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

If one enjoys excellent writing coupled with a superb presentation of historical periods, Lost Illusions is a book not to be missed. The author's wit and eye for all matter of detail carrys the patient reader through a plot which, at times, wanders into lengthy digressions. Definitely not what a modern reader might call a page turner, yet a great work by a master writer.

[stillatim · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

At the risk of sounding self-aggrandizing, I read this while holidaying in Paris, and that was a great choice. It's only my second Balzac, and already I'm pretty sure what I'm going to get: straight plot, semi-mythical characters, and not a whole lot of style. This isn't really my kind of thing, but Balzac is just so all-in that it's hard not to get pulled along in his wake. And anyway, he's so explicitly writing about great abstractions (here: Art, Media, Capitalism, Class, Love) that I'll always enjoy his work.

And 'Lost Illusions' is perfect for me--the satire of the press still functions perfectly (even if the technical details about typesetting are rather out of date) and the characters' debates about selling out will appeal to anyone who has a little punk in them. But what you really need from the book is that plot: a young man from the provinces,* a bit pretentious**, goes to the capital, but fails to hold on to his dream because he's an idiot and the system is set up in such a way that he's bound to fail.*** He returns to the provinces, where his fecklessness has more or less damned his family and friends; he tries to be noble, but appears to be getting swindled yet again. It's didactic, it's moralizing, it's sentimental. And yet you really have to read it.



* over-identifying here
** really over-identifying
*** hoping to avoid this one

[jonfaith · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

While there were issues with the structure of the novel, the disparate scenarios involving Lucien and David are removed from one another to a cumbersome degree. Compounding this, the tragedy which envelops David and Eve is soaked and blurred in jargon and legal asides. I sense that Balzac was thinking long-term and indifferent to these quibbles. That said, Lost Illusions is a narrative triumph and one i will treasure.

[thorold_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Illusions perdues, written intermittently over a period of nearly ten years in the late thirties and early forties, draws mostly on Balzac's time as a struggling writer in the Paris of 1821-22 (unlike other novelists of the time, he never seems to be shy of pinning himself to the calendar), but also brings in material from his legal training and his time as a printer, papermaker and publisher (clearly, nothing was ever wasted!). It's pretty clear from the title where Balzac wants the plot to go: provincial poet Lucien dreams of literary glory and his friend David dreams of making his family's fortune by a radical improvement to the paper-making process that will slash the cost of printing. We know from the start that the author is going to dangle the prospect of success in front of both of them, only to whip it savagely away at the last minute. But he takes his time about it, and obviously changed his mind a few times along the way about just how he is going to get there. Lucien is slapped down and humiliated multiple times, both in his native Angoulême and in Paris, but keeps bouncing up to try again in a new direction, without ever reflecting that his enemies will remember him from last time. Meanwhile (the stories are concurrent and interlinked, even though Balzac obviously wrote them several years apart) David is caught in a ludicrously complex plot involving multiple competing parties all trying to steal his invention and/or force him to sign it over for a fraction of what it's worth. There's a huge amount going on, and it never gets even remotely dull, even if it is occasionally difficult to remember who is supposed to be on which side. And a wealth of fascinating, cynical comment on the literary and commercial world and the people who make their money out of it in more or less (usually less) legal and ethical ways. Glorious moments like the incident of the publisher who comes to see Lucien in his Paris lodgings to buy his novel - the advance he's intending to offer starts off at a thousand francs, but the sight of the squalid street Lucien lives in already makes him knock a couple of hundred off, and by the time he's got to the fourth floor he's under two hundred. And insights into the way the press uses its power to blackmail producers, publishers and public figures - if the editors aren't paid off, the papers will attack with negative reviews or - much worse - ignore the items concerned altogether. There are a couple of lovely scenes where an experienced journalist explains to Lucien how to write a lethal review of a good novel (simply attack it for not being something other than what it is) or a favourable review of a terrible play. Very often you get the feeling that Balzac would have been right at home in the era of social media and "fake" news. Plus ça change,...There's a great bit of Balzac chutzpah in the magnificent but quite irrelevant scene towards the end of the book, where he spends twenty pages introducing a major character we've been vaguely expecting to turn up, but have forgotten all about by the time we've read 600 pages. Wasted space as far as the plot is concerned, but it does somehow give you an irresistible urge to find out what happens by reading the next book in the sequence!

[jonarnold_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I’d never read Balzac before seeing this recommended, after reading it I wondered why it took me so long to get around to him. The prose style might seem overly didactic at times (in the translation I read anyway) but otherwise it charts the decline and fall of a talented poet who tries his hand at making it in the big city. The title alone should tell you that it’s not going to be the most uplifting of reads, Balzac refusing to graft a happy ending on and instead pursuing his story with relentless logic. Balzac is also uncompromising in his criticism of the society of the times and its institutions – he’s particularly harsh on journalism and the banking and legal systems and their power against individuals. There is something of a deus ex machina ending, which ameliorates the fate of a few of the main characters and provides space for a sequel, but that’s a minor blemish.

[unreachableshelf · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Although this book paints a wonderful picture of life in Paris in the early 19th century, something about the pacing stops working for me near the end. Possibly it's the long backtracking to fill in the reader on what has been happening with David and Eve since Lucien left that makes me feel like I've lost the thread of the story, and it would work better for me if there were short sections on Lucien's sister's family throughout his story so they ran more or less concurrently. Still, for the first five hundred or so pages it is a brilliant story of what happens when ambition outreaches talent and work ethic.

[whitrichardson_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An excellent book. One of Balzac's best, in my opinion.

[garyseverance-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

From the frenetic world of writers and booksellers in Paris to the grueling life of hard work and boredom in villages, Balzac traces the systematic destruction of illusions in his characters. No one can be trusted (friends, foes, or family) when the creative or inventive person attempts to reach a goal. The flicker of hope and joy related to an artistic or business accomplishment is extinguished within days or hours. The enduring artists and producers are those who live almost without hope, guided by a strict code of ethics protected by keeping their accomplishments secret. Ultimately, these survivors reach their goals after they no longer place high value in them, after they have given up all of their illusions.

[psiakrew_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Quite simply, anyone can tell everything one needs to know about a reader's intelligence and insight by asking him or her if Lost Illusions is or isn't in a "top three" of all greatest novels. Shakespearean, indeed, without hyperbole.