Lost Illusions by Honoré de Balzac

  ‘You shall be our aristocracy,’ he added, with a glance at Eve. ‘When your step falters, my arm will be there to sustain you. If you have some act of treachery to complain of, you will take refuge in our undying affection. Protection, favour, the good-will of others, if there were two people to share it, might flag, and we should do one another harm. Go on ahead: if I should need it, you can take me in tow. Far from envying you, I devote myself to your interests. What you have just done for me at the risk of alienating your benefactress, who may become your mistress, rather than leaving me in the lurch or repudiating me… this simple magnanimous act, well, Lucien, it would bind me to you for ever even if we were not already like brothers. Have no misgivings or scruples about taking the foremost role. It suits me thus to allow you the lion’s share. In short, even if you caused me much anxiety, who can say that I should not still be under an obligation to you?’

  As he said this, he cast the most timid of glances at Eve, whose eyes were full of tears, for she guessed all his motives.

  ‘So then,’ said David to his astonished friend. ‘You are well-built, you have a graceful figure, you carry your clothes well, you look like a gentleman in your blue coat with yellow buttons and your plain nankeen trousers. In such a circle I should look like a working-man. I should be awkward, ill at ease. I should talk nonsense or else keep my mouth shut. Whereas you, in order to conform to the snobbery about patronymics, can adopt your mother’s name and be known as Lucien de Rubempré. I am and always shall be David Séchard. Everything in the society you are entering is in your favour and my disfavour. Success awaits you. The women will worship you for your angelic beauty. Is that not so, Eve?’

  Lucien threw his arms round David’s neck and kissed him. David’s modesty nipped many doubts and difficulties in the bud. Could Lucien have failed to show redoubled affection to a man who, out of friendship, had just made the same reflections as he had made through ambition? As an aspirant to fame and love he felt that his path was being smoothed; his heart overflowed with youthful and friendly exuberance. This was one of those rare moments in life when one’s vital forces are agreeably tensed, when every cord vibrates and renders its full volume of sound. None the less David’s high-souled wisdom awakened in Lucien the normal tendency a man has to view everything in terms of self. We all say, more or less, like Louis XIV: ‘I am the State!’ The tenderness which his mother and sister lavished on him, David’s devotion, and the habit of seeing the secret efforts of these three beings directed towards himself, gave him the defects to which children of good family are prone and bred in him the egoism which devours the nobility. Madame de Bargeton was fanning the flame by urging him to forget his obligations to his sister, his mother and David. He had not yet come to this; but was it not to be feared that, by widening the circle of his ambition, he might be forced to think only of himself in order to maintain himself within it?

  Once the emotion had subsided, David observed to Lucien that his poem on Saint John of Pathmos was perhaps too biblical to be read in a circle which had little acquaintance with apocalyptic poetry. Lucien seemed upset at this, because he had to show his quality before the most critical public in the Charente valley. David advised him to take the André Chénier volume with him and exchange a dubious pleasure for a certain one. Lucien was a splendid reader, he would necessarily win applause, and this gesture of modesty would no doubt serve him well. Like most young people, they supposed that people in society were endowed with their own intelligence, and virtues. Youth, when it has not yet fallen from grace, may show no pity for others’ faults, but it also credits them with its own magnificent ideals. In fact one needs much experience of life to realize, as Raphael so aptly put it, that to understand others is to rise to their level. Generally speaking, that special sense needed for the understanding of poetry is rare in France, where wit promptly dries up the holy well of ecstatic tears and where nobody will bother to break fresh ground, explore the sublime and discover the infinity it contains. Lucien was going to have his first taste of mundane ignorance and coldness of heart. He went to David’s house to pick up the volume of poetry.

  When David was alone with his beloved, he felt more embarrassed than ever before. A prey to a thousand terrors, he both wished for and feared a word of praise; he would have liked to run away, for even modesty has its special coquetry I Overwhelmed by love, he dared not utter a word which might make it seem that he was looking for gratitude; he felt that any remark he made would give him away, and so he kept quiet and looked as if he had committed a crime. Eve could guess to what torture his diffidence was putting him and found this silence enjoyable; but when he started twiddling his hat as a prelude to departure, she said with a smile:

  ‘Monsieur David, since you are not spending the evening with Madame de Bargeton, we can spend it together. The weather is fine. Shall we take a stroll along the Charente? We will talk about Lucien.’

  David would have liked to throw himself at the feet of this delightful girl. Her very tone of voice gave him his unhoped-for reward: her affectionate accents had resolved the difficulties of the situation; her proposal was more than an eulogy, it was the first favour bestowed by love.

  ‘Only,’ she said, at the gesture which David made, ‘let me have a minute or two to get ready.’

  David had never in his life had an ear for a tune, but he went out humming one. This surprised the honest Postel and gave him violent suspicions about the relations between Eve and the printer.

  3. A social evening and a riverside stroll

  LUCIEN’S character made him attentive to first impressions, and the most trivial incidents of this evening in society were to have a great effect on him. Like all inexperienced lovers, he arrived so early that Louise had not yet come into the drawing-room. Monsieur de Bargeton was there alone. Lucien had already begun his apprenticeship in the petty cowardice with which a married woman’s admirer pays for his bliss and which shows women how far they can go in their demands; but he had not yet come face to face with Monsieur de Bargeton.

  This noble gentleman had a small mind comfortably poised between an inoffensive vacuity which has some glimmer of comprehension and an arrogant stupidity which refuses either to give or take. Very conscious of his duties to society and doing his best to be agreeable, he had adopted the smile of a dancing-partner as his sole language. Content or dissatisfied, he smiled. He smiled on hearing a disastrous piece of news and also when a happy event was announced. This smile answered all purposes thanks to the variety of expression he gave it. If unhesitant approval was absolutely necessary, his smile was reinforced by a complaisant laugh; only in the last extremity would he utter a word. A tête-à-tête plunged him into the only kind of embarrassment which ever complicated his vegetative existence, for it obliged him to ransack the immense void within him in order to find something to say. He generally got over the difficulty by returning to the simple habits of childhood: he would think out loud and initiate you in the slightest details of his life; he would tell you of his needs or his aches and pains, and this was as near as he could get to expressing ideas. He was unable to chat about this or that, he abstained from the small talk in which imbeciles take refuge, and found matter for conversation in his most intimate private concerns. ‘To please Madame de Bargeton,’ he would say, ‘I ate some veal this morning – she’s very fond of it – and my stomach is completely upset. I knew it would be: it always takes me like that! Can you explain it?’ Or else: ‘I’m going to ring for a glass of lemonade. Would you like to join me?’ Or else: ‘I’m going riding tomorrow to see my father-in-law.’ Brief sentences like these lent themselves to no discussion; they evoked a ‘Yes’ or a ‘No’, and the conversation fell flat. Monsieur de Bargeton then implored his guest’s assistance by giving a westerly slant to his nose, which was like that of a wheezy old pug, and looked at you with his big eyes – they were of different colour – as if to ask: ‘What were you saying?’ Bores eager to talk of themselves he cherished: he listened to the
m with an honest and delicate attentiveness which made him so dear to them that the windbags of Angoulême credited him with a deep kind of intelligence and claimed that he was misjudged. And so, when they fell short of listeners, they would come to this gentleman to finish off their stories or their arguments, being quite sure of receiving an appreciative smile. Since his wife’s drawing-room was always full, he usually felt at ease in it. He busied himself with the most trivial details. He watched for visitors coming in, smilingly bowed to them and led them up to his wife; he kept his eye open for parting guests, saw them out, and responded to their farewells with his eternal smile. When discussion was lively and he saw that everyone was busy talking, mute but happy, he stood perched like a stork on his two long legs and looked as if he were listening to a political debate; or he went over to study the hands at the card-tables, without understanding a thing about it, for he knew no card-games. Or he walked about taking his snuff and letting his dinner digest. Anaïs represented the bright side of life for him and afforded him unlimited enjoyment. When she was performing as mistress of the house, he relaxed in an easy chair and admired her, for it was she who did all the talking. Also he had come to take pleasure in trying to discern the wit in her remarks, and as quite often he only understood them long after they had been uttered, his face broke into smiles which went off like cannon-balls exploding underground. Moreover his respect for her amounted to adoration – and does not adoration of some sort make for happiness in life? As a person of wit and generosity, Anaïs had not exploited her advantage, for she discerned in her husband the easy-going temperament of a child who asks nothing better than to be ruled. She had taken care of him as one takes care of a favourite garment: she kept him spick and span and well-groomed, looked after him and humoured him. Monsieur de Bargeton, conscious of this humouring, this grooming, this attention, had contracted a dog-like devotion for his wife. Happiness is so easy to bestow when it costs nothing! Madame de Bargeton, realizing that good food was her husband’s sole pleasure in life, had excellent dinners cooked for him; she pitied him; she had never uttered a complaint; and some persons who did not understand that her silence was due to pride credited Monsieur de Bargeton with hidden virtues. Besides this, she had subjected him to military discipline, and he gave passive obedience to his wife’s commands. She would say to him: ‘Call on Monsieur or Madame So-and-So,’ and he went off like a soldier mounting guard. And so in her presence he remained rigidly at the shoulder-arms position. At the moment there was a question of getting this tongue-tied man elected to the Chamber of Deputies.

  Lucien had not been frequenting the house long enough to have lifted the veil behind which this unimaginable character sheltered. Monsieur de Bargeton, buried in his easy chair, seeming to hear everything and take everything in, achieving dignity by virtue of his silence, appeared to Lucien to be a prodigiously imposing person. Instead of taking him for what he was – a granite boundary-post – Lucien looked on this nobleman as an awesome sphinx, thanks to the tendency of imaginative minds to magnify all they see and to attribute a soul to everything in human shape; he deemed it advisable to flatter him.

  ‘I am the first arrival,’ he said, bowing to him with more respect than was usually accorded to the worthy man.

  ‘That’s quite natural,’ replied Monsieur de Bargeton.

  Lucien took this remark for the epigram of a jealous husband; his face reddened and he looked at himself in the mirror to keep himself in countenance.

  ‘You live in L’Houmeau,’ said Monsieur de Bargeton. ‘People from far off always arrive earlier than those who live close by.’

  ‘I wonder why that is,’ said Lucien, trying to look affable.

  ‘I don’t know,’ replied Monsieur de Bargeton, and he relapsed into immobility.

  ‘You have not thought it worth while to find out,’ replied Lucien. ‘A man who can make such an observation is capable of discovering the cause.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Monsieur de Bargeton. ‘Final causes! Ha! Ha!…’

  Lucien racked his brains to revive the conversation, but it had petered out.

  ‘No doubt Madame de Bargeton is dressing?’ he asked, and shuddered at the silliness of the question.

  ‘Yes, she is dressing,’ the husband naturally replied.

  Lucien looked up at the two exposed beams, painted grey, and the ceiling in between them, and could think of nothing further to say; but he then noticed, not without terror, that the small chandelier with its antique crystal pendants was stripped of its gauze and supplied with candles. The furniture covers had been removed, thus exposing the scarlet lampas with its faded flowers. These preparations indicated that the gathering was to be an exceptional one. The poet felt doubtful about the suitability of his attire, for he was wearing boots. In a daze of apprehension, he went and studied a Japanese vase which adorned a festooned Louis Quinze console-table; then he feared he might displease Louise’s husband by not paying court to him, so he decided to find out if the worthy man had some pet subject on which he could draw him out.

  ‘You don’t often leave town, Monsieur?’ he asked, returning towards Monsieur de Bargeton.

  ‘Not often.’

  Silence reigned once more. Like a wary cat, Monsieur de Bargeton was watching the slightest movements of this young man who was disturbing his repose. Each one was afraid of the other.

  ‘Can he be suspicious about my attentions to Louise?’ Lucien wondered. ‘He seems definitely unfriendly.’

  Just then, luckily for Lucien, who was finding it hard to sustain the uneasy glances Monsieur de Bargeton was casting at him as he paced to and fro, the old servant, wearing a livery, announced Monsieur du Châtelet. The baron came in, completely at ease, saluted his friend Bargeton, and gave Lucien the slight nod which was then in fashion, but Lucien thought it impertinent coming from a revenue official. Sixte du Châtelet was wearing a dazzlingly-white pair of trousers with straps under the feet to keep the crease. He had elegant shoes and stockings of Scotch thread. From his white waistcoat dangled the black ribbon of his monocle, and his black coat was commendable for its Parisian style and cut. He was just the sort of fop that past history would have led one to expect, but age had already endowed him with a rotund little belly which he found quite difficult to keep within the bounds of elegance. His hair and his side-whiskers, which the tribulations of his travels had turned white, were dyed, and that gave him a hard appearance. His complexion, once quite delicate, had taken on the coppery hue of people back from the Indies; but his general appearance, however ridiculous his undiminished pretensions might make it, still revealed something of the affable private secretary to an Imperial Highness.

  He adjusted his monocle and scanned his rival from head to foot, his nankeen trousers, his boots, his waistcoat and his blue coat, made in Angoulême. Then he coldly returned the monocle to his waistcoat pocket as if to say: ‘Nothing to worry about.’ Lucien, already abashed by the finance official’s elegance, told himself he would have his revenge when the gathering saw him with his face radiant with poetry; nonetheless the keenness of his mortification increased the inner discomfort which Monsieur de Bargeton’s apparent unfriendliness had caused him. The baron seemed to be bringing all the weight of his wealth to bear down on Lucien in order the better to humiliate him in his poverty. Monsieur de Bargeton, who had hoped to be spared further conversational effort, felt some consternation at the silence maintained by the two rivals as they looked each other up and down; but, whenever he found himself at his wit’s end, there was one question which he kept in reserve – it was like a straw to a drowning man – and he judged that the moment had come to let fly with it, which he did, putting on an air of importance.

  ‘Well, well, Monsieur,’ he said to du Châtelet, ‘What news is there? What are people talking about?’

  ‘Why,’ the Director of Taxes spitefully replied. ‘Monsieur Chardon, he’s the news. Apply to him. Are you not bringing us some pretty poem?’ asked the sprightly baron, smoothing the lock
of hair on one side of his temple which he felt had become disarranged.

  ‘In order to know if I have succeeded, I ought to have consulted you,’ said Lucien. ‘You practised poetry long before I did.’

  ‘Oh, merely a few pleasant ditties which I threw off by request, some occasional songs, some drawing-room ballads which were nothing without the music, and the grand Epistle I wrote for a sister of Buonaparte (what ingratitude to use this form of Napoleon’s name!). They will give me no claim on posterity.’

  At this instant Madame de Bargeton appeared in all the splendour of her carefully-studied toilette. She was wearing a Jewish turban embellished with an oriental brooch. A gauze scarf, with the gleaming cameos of a necklace visible underneath it, was gracefully draped around her neck. Her short sleaved dress of coloured muslin enabled her to display several rows of bangles arranged about her beautiful white arms. Lucien was charmed by this theatrical attire. Monsieur du Châtelet gallantly greeted this queenly person with nauseating compliments which drew a pleased smile from her, so happy she was to be praised in front of Lucien. She exchanged but one glance with her dear poet, and the politeness of her reply to the Director of Taxes was a virtual snub since it excluded him from the circle of her close acquaintances.