8. Zuleika Dobson, by Max Beerbohm, pp. 284-358

XIX-XXIV

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Splendidly arrayed, the Duke makes his way toward the boat race, attracting the attention of the sister and the aunt accompanying an undergraduate named Harold, who is embarrassed by their gawking. Jessie and Aunt Mabel "were destined to remember that Harold had been 'very peculiar' all day." The Duke doffs his plumed hat and says to them, "Neither of you can have been warned by your escort that you were on the way to see him die, of his own accord, in company with many hundreds of other lads, myself included.... Go back, both of you, to the place whence you came."

He continues on his way with the throngs of young men and the women they are escorting. The men, seeing his regalia, felt "that he made them all partakers in his own glory, casting his great mantle over all commorients." The women "calculated not only that the velvet of the Duke's mantle could not have cost less than four guineas a yard, but also that there must be quite twenty-five yards of it." Some of the women "who had heard the rumour that he was in love with that frightfully flashy-looking creature, Zuleika Dobson, were more than ever sure there wasn't a word of truth in it."

Now Zuleika herself appears, accompanied by The MacQuern "and a little bodyguard of other blest acquaintances." She breaks with that entourage to join the Duke, proclaiming them dull: "As soon as I grew used to the thought that they were going to die for me, I simply couldn't stand them. Poor boys! it was as much as I could do not to tell them I wished them dead already."

They reach the barge, where the Duke insists they separate: He is going onto the raft where women aren't allowed, and she must watch from the roof where they stood yesterday. They bid each other goodbye, and Zuleika reminds him, "Don't forget to call my name in a loud voice." He agrees, and she adds:

"I have loved but twice in my life; and none but you have I loved. This, too: if you hadn't forced me to kill my love, I would have died with you. And you know it is true."
"Yes." It was true enough.

As they wait for the boats to appear, there is thunder and "A sudden white vertical streak slid down the sky." It begins to rain. Realizing that his fine regalia was about to be ruined, the Duke decides not to wait for the boats to pass: "'Zuleika!' he cried in a loud voice. Then he took a deep breath, and, burying his face in his mantle, plunged." The other undergraduates in his vicinity follow suit, as some of the older men cheer what they suppose to be attempts to rescue the Duke.

The narrator explains that the gods had misread the Duke's intentions: Not taking seriously his plan to wait until after the race was settled, they assumed that he had signaled his intent to jump when he took his position on the raft, "and not until it seemed that he stood ready to make an end of himself had the signal been given by Zeus for the rain to fall."

So the Duke is still alive, swimming downstream, though losing consciousness, when he surfaces near the Magdalen boat, disrupting its stroke and giving the race to Judas. "And the conquered crew, and the conquering, both now had seen the face of the Duke. A white smiling face, anon it was gone. Dorset was gone down to his last sleep."

The crews join him, as do all the remaining undergraduates, as the storm reaches its peak. A man with a gray beard jumps in to try to rescue some of them, but finally gives up and pulls himself onto the shore: "He whimpered as he sought foot-hold in the slime. It was ill to be down in that abominable sink of death." Except that the suicides don't regard it as abominable: "Any face that rose was smiling."

As "the patient river bore its awful burden towards Iffley," the storm drives away the survivors on the shore.

Yet on one roof one woman still was. A strange, drenched figure, she stood bright-eyed in the dimness; alone, as it was well she should be in her great hour; draining the lees of such homage as had come to no woman in history recorded. 

It is Clarence Batch who brings the news to his mother and Katie: "The Duke, he's drowned himself." Katie faints, and when she recovers she insists that the Duke didn't do it because of Zuleika, pointing out the earrings and proclaiming, "He kissed me.... No other man shall ever do that." Even Clarence's report that he cried out "Zuleika!" as he jumped in the river won't convince her otherwise.

Mrs. Batch begins to consider what has to be done: The Duke's room must be seen to in anticipation of the arrival of his family. Then Clarence remembers to tell them that "hundred and hundreds" of students had follow the Duke's lead, and Mrs. Batch realizes that Mr. Noaks must have been among them. She goes up to his room to confirm it. Meanwhile, Katie, whose task has always been to sweep and then scrub down the doorstep, has gone out and painted it black. "She had expressed her mourning, as best she culd, there where she had been wont to express her love."

Zuleika is lying face-up on the surface of the water, her hair spread out around her. "Not Ophelia in the brook could have seemed more at peace." She's in a bathtub, of course, not the river, having returned from the scene of the suicides soaked by the rain. She goes downstairs to see her grandfather, expecting to talk about the day's events, but finds him strangely unaffected by them. He asks if the college won the race, and she stammers, "I -- I don't know grand-papa. There was so much happening. It -- I will tell you all about it at dinner."

But he tells her that tonight is the "bump-supper" and he has to preside in the college's dining hall. "Zuleika had forgotten there was to be a bump-supper, and, though she was not very sure what a bump-supper was, she felt it would be a mockery to-night." He tells her that she can look down at the supper from the gallery. "There is apt to be some measure of noise and racket, but all of it good-humoured and -- boys will be boys -- pardonable." When he leaves, "she hardly knew whether to laugh or cry."

In the quad the Warden is joined the Fellows, some of whom have heard the news but are skeptical about its truth. Even "the three or four dons who had been down at the river were now half ready to believe that there must, after all, be some mistake, and that in this world of illusions they had to-night been especially tricked." When the Warden asks "how did our boat acquit itself?" the Fellows decide to leave breaking the news up to the Sub-Warden. "'Well, really, Warden,' he said, 'we -- we hardly know,' and he ended with what can only be described as a giggle. He fell low in the esteem of his fellows."

They enter the Hall, where the three long tables are set and "ranged along either wall, was the usual array of scouts, motionless, with napkins across their arms." But there are no students present. "It became clear to the Warden that some organised prank or protest was afoot. Dignity required that he should take no heed whatsoever." And so the meal proceeds as if the Hall were full, except that in the absence of the Senior Scholar who is supposed to read the grace, it falls to Mr. Pedby, the Junior Fellow, to do so. He is a mathematician, not a Latinist, so his reading of the words is so comical that "the story of Pedby's grace would be told always. Here was a tradition that generations of dons yet unborn would cherish and chuckle over."

As the meal progresses, the food and the wine "helped to quicken in these men of thought the power to grapple with a reality," but when the Sub-Warden makes another effort to tell the Warden what has happened, the Warden has been so perplexed by his earlier behavior that "the Warden's eye met his with a suspicion so cruelly pointed that he again floundered and gave in."

Zuleika looks down on the scene from the gallery.

But there was no spark of triumph now in her eyes; only a deep melancholy; and in her mouth a taste of dust and ashes. She thought of last night, and of all the buoyant life that this Hall had held. Of the Duke she thought, and of the whole vivid and eager throng of his fellows in love. Her will, their will, had been done. But there rose to her lips the old, old question that withers victory -- "To what end?" ... She was utterly alone to-night in the midst of a vast indifference.

The Duke's body lies alongside others pulled from the river. "And bending over him, looking down at him with much love and pity in her eyes, was the shade of Nellie O'Mora, that 'fairest witch,' to whose memory he had to-day atoned."

I pause here to salute Beerbohm as a master ironist. If there are identifiable human characters in his tale, they are Zuleika and the Duke, to whom he here gives something approaching (but perhaps not reaching) a genuine pathos. But he sets Zuleika's state of mind and the Duke's death (not to mention the deaths of the lemming-like undergraduates) against the stuff of farce and parody -- the comic withholding of the truth from the Warden enabled by the ivory-tower detachment from reality of the dons. Does he undercut the pathos by doing so? Or does he, as I rather think, heighten it?

We return to the lodging-house, where Katie is sullenly tidying up the Duke's room. "She had not ceased to mourn the Duke; but it was even more anger than grief that she felt at his dying." The anger is largely directed at Zuleika, whom she tries to imitate by posing in front of the mirror in some of Zuleika's attitudes. But she gives up, realizing that "she hadn't just that something which somehow Miss Dobson had. She put away from her the hasty dream she had had of a whole future generation of undergraduates drowning themselves, every one, in honour of her. She went wearily on with her work."

Then she goes upstairs to see to Noaks's room and discovers him hiding behind the curtain. She's delighted: "here was the one man who had scorned to die for Miss Dobson." Noaks had been planning to run away to Australia in shame at his cowardice, but here is Katie hailing him as a hero, singing "his praises with a so infectious fervour that Noaks did begin to feel he had done a fine thing in not dying." And when she says she loves him, he gives her the iron ring that he wears because it's supposed to ward off rheumatism. He explains that he won't be able to afford to marry her until he's forty, however.

Then he notices that she's wearing Zuleika's earrings. When she says the Duke gave them to her, he is miffed and insists that they should be turned over to the executors of the Duke's estate. But on second thought he realizes their value. "Why flinch from her unsought dowry?" But, he warns her, they will still have to wait, and that he still has to study to get his degree, so she leaves him with his books and goes up to her room in the attic. She looks out of the window and sees, below her, Noaks's head, also looking out of the window.

Noaks hears a voice in the street and sees Zuleika approaching. She has been walking around Oxford, hoping to find an undergraduate who hasn't sacrificed himself for her. "Let me hear from your own lips that you love me," she pleads. But Noaks lies and says that the reason he is alive is that he sprained his ankle on the way to the river. Furious, Katie flings down his ring and tells Zuleika the truth about Noaks's cowardice.

Zuleika tells Katie, "We have both been deceived in this man, and are, in some sort, sisters." But Katie rejects the idea of sisterhood with the likes of Zuleika. She points out the earrings that the Duke gave her and tells her that he kissed her goodbye, a fact confirmed by her mother, who is standing at the street door. Noaks once again pleads his love for Zuleika.

"You!" flashed Zuleika. "As for you, little Sir Lily Liver, leaning out there, and, I frankly tell you, looking like nothing so much as a gargoyle hewn by a drunken stone-mason for the adornment of a Methodist Chapel in one of the vilest suburbs of Leeds or Wigan, I do but felicitate the river-god and his nymphs that their water was saved to-day by your cowardice from the contamination of your plunge." 

A crowd that includes some of Mrs. Batch's friends and Clarence joins in the denunciation of Noaks, who climbs out onto the window-ledge and jumps. And so, "the last of the undergraduates lay dead; and fleet-footed Zuleika, with her fingers still pressed to her ears, had taken full toll now."

Chastened, Zuleika decides that her only recourse is to become a nun. She tells Mélisande to start packing and goes to tell her grandfather, whom she's surprised to find still unaware of what has happened today.

"The reason why there were no undergraduates in your Hall to-night is that they were all dead."
"Dead?" he gasped. "Dead? It is disgraceful that I was not told. What did they die of?"
"Of me." 

When she explains the full extent of the suicides, and that as a consequence she has decided to become a nun, he observes, "That ... is rather a revulsion than a vocation." She asks what he would have done if "all the young ladies of that period had drowned themselves for love of you?" And he observes that he was "greatly admired.... In those days it was the fashion for young ladies to embroider slippers for such men in holy orders as best pleased their fancy. I received hundreds -- thousands -- of such slippers." But he married the one woman who never embroidered a pair for him. He concluded that she didn't love him, and that "interested me greatly. It fired me."

Zuleika realizes that "it's a case of sheer heredity." But the Warden scoffs, "You and I, my dear, may in some respects be very queer people, but in the matter of the affections we are ordinary enough." He had hoarded the slippers -- "Thousands of slippers, did I say? Tens of thousands." -- and made a bonfire of them when he became engaged and "danced round it all night." Recognizing their kinship, Zuleika says to him, "I do believe you're a little proud of me." And he replies, "Heaven forgive me, I believe I am." She tells him she's going away, but not to a convent, and he invites her to come stay with him again. "'Not in term-time, though,' he added. 'No,' she echoed. 'not in term-time.'"

So she goes back to her room and tells Mélisande to go to the train station and order a special train tomorrow at 10 for Cambridge.

4. Lost Illusions, by Honoré de Balzac, pp. 118-148

Part One: The Two Poets, 4. Catastrophic sequels to provincial love

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Lucien and Madame de Bargeton are the talk of the town, but notoriety has only emboldened both of them. Madame de Bargeton has begun to use the familiar tu with him, and she is not at all disturbed, as Lucien feared she might be, at the prospect of David's marriage to his sister: "What does your family matter to me, since you are so much above it?" She invites him to stay for dinner and then for the soirée that follows, and thereby causes further gossip:

The next day there was no house in Angoulême in which the degree of intimacy between Monsieur Chardon, alias de Rubempré, and Madame de Bargeton was not a matter for discussion. At most they had exchanged a kiss or two, and society was already accusing them of the most guilty relations. Madame de Bargeton was paying the penalty for her pre-eminence. 

Meanwhile, both Lucien and David have begun banking on expectations: David on the money he will come into on the death of his father, since he has spent lavishly building a second floor onto the house, in preparation for his marriage and the seclusion that Lucien will need to become a great writer, and Lucien "was staking his happiness on the demise of Monsieur de Bargeton." He also assures himself that the thirty francs a month his mother and sister give him will be repaid "when the historical novel at which he had been working for two years -- The Archer of Charles the Ninth, and a volume of verse entitled The Marguerites -- would spread his renown through the world of literature." David, though not without misgivings, joins "in this conspiracy of self-sacrifice."

But Lucien is being spied upon by du Châtelet, who "wanted Madame de Bargeton to declare herself so openly for Lucien as to become what one calls a 'lost woman.'" The problem is, nothing that Lucien and Madame de Bargeton do goes "beyond the bounds of strict propriety." Even so, the gossip doesn't quiet down: "Provincial people are by nature malicious and love to balk nascent passion." Du Châtelet even keeps gossip about the supposed affair stirred up by saying he doesn't believe it's taking place: He claims "that Madame de Bargeton was playing with Lucien, that she was too proud and of too high a rank to condescend to a chemist's son." Stanislas de Chandour, who is married to Amélie, Madame de Bargeton's chief social rival, argues the other side vehemently. The conflict grows so heated that, after de Châtelet tells Stanislas that Madame de Bargeton never closes the door to her boudoir when Lucien is in it, Stanislas decides to spy on them.

But then Lucien and Madame de Bargeton have a quarrel.

Intent on playing the role of Ducinea in Lucien's life for seven or eight years, Madame de Bargeton wished, like so many provincial women, that possession should be paid for by a kind of serfdom, a period of constancy which would enable her to gauge her lover's worth.

Lucien, understandably, is unhappy at this: "'You have never loved me,' he cried."

At this moment, Stanslas arrived unheard, saw Lucien with bowed figure, his eyes for of tears and his head on Louise's lap. Satisfied with this sufficiently compromising tableau, Stanislas backed out towards du Châtelet, who was standing outside the drawing-room door. Madame de Bargeton quickly rushed forward, but failed to reach the two spies who, aware that they were intruding, had beat a hasty retreat.

And soon "everyone knew that Lucien had been discovered on his knees before Naïs." Not everyone agrees that they are lovers, but even they are scandalized by the age difference: "This little versifier is twenty-two at the most, and, between ourselves, Naïs is certainly forty."

Du Châtelet takes it on himself to go to see her and to warn her of the damage done to her reputation. But oddly, she seems happy: "She was sick to death of provincial life. At Châtelet's first word, her thoughts had flown to Paris." And after du Châtelet leaves, she calls in her husband, tells him what has happened, and suggests that he challenge Stanislas de Chandour to a duel. Monsieur de Bargeton goes straight to the du Chandours and does so. Stanislas is terrified, but forces himself to go through with it.

The next morning, Lucien's mother comes in with the news: "This morning, at five o'clock, Monsieur de Bargeton nearly killed Monsieur de Chandour on the duelling ground.... Monsieur de Bargeton, who behaved as if he were out for a stroll, fired twice and lodged a bullet in Monsieur de Chandour's neck.... The hospital surgeon has just now declared that Monsieur de Chandour's neck will never be straight again for the rest of his days." She advises Lucien not to show himself in public for fear that de Chandour's friends might challenge him to a duel. But a letter arrives from Madame de Bargeton asking him "to come and listen to your Beatrice, whose life is completely changed by this event and who has many things to say to you."

Meanwhile, the work has finished on the room that David and Eve will share after their wedding, which is scheduled for the day after tomorrow. It has, of course, cost more than expected, and David has also splurged on the wedding. Lucien's mother and sister have also spent money furnishing David's house.
This little rivalry in love and generosity was to bring the couple into tight circumstances from the very beginning of their marriage, surrounded though they were with all the appearances of middle-class ease which might pass as luxury in so backward a town as Angoulême then was.

Lucien slips away from his family to see Madame de Bargeton, who announces that she is going to Paris and her husband will stay with her father while she's away. She plans to use some influence to find a political position in Paris for Monsieur de Bargeton. "This morning's duel," she explains, "obliges me to shut up my house for some time, for some people will side with the Chandours against us." She wants Lucien to go on ahead of her and wait for her arrival: "I will pick you up in my carriage between Mansle and Ruffec, and we shall soon be in Paris.... Paris, the capital of the intellectual world, is the stage on which you will find success!" She wants him to fit his writing to the political climate: "Therefore you must be both a religious and a royalist poet."

Enraptured by the fantasy of succeeding in Paris and by the notion that "as a result of the journey during which circumstances would make them man and wife, Madame de Bargeton would belong entirely to him," he is ready to say yes to the plan until he remembers: "Good heavens! My sister is getting married the day after tomorrow!" Madame de Bargeton is indignant that he should let such a thing come between them: "'This morning I sent my husband off to fight a duel on your ! Go away, Monsieur, leave me! I have been mistaken in you.' She fell back in a swoon onto her sofa." He gives in.

On the way back, he rationalizes that his mother can move into the room David had prepared for him, and he calculates that he can borrow some money from Postel, who bought his father's apothecary shop, and continue to receive the money his mother and sister have been giving him. But when he tells them of the plan, they reveal how much they have spent on the wedding, and Eve is heartbroken that he won't attend it. She also calculates that he'll need at least two thousand francs, much more money than he has anticipated, just to have a wardrobe suitable for Paris. Madame Chardon goes to see Postel and returns to tell Lucien that he's only willing to lend a thousand and that he would want David to co-sign. David has just arrived, and is upset that Lucien won't be at the wedding. He has also just bought jewelry for Eve to wear at it. But he gives in and agrees not only to sign the note but to see to it that Lucien gets the other thousand he needs. They go to sign the note, and when they return they find mother and daughter "on their knees in prayer."

"If ever you forgot this scene," whispered David to Lucien, "You would be the most despicable of men."

He hires a horse and trap and drives Lucien to the place where Madame de Bargeton's carriage picks him up.

The printer climbed back into his shabby trap, and his heart was heavy as he drove away, for he had horrible presentiments of the fate in store for Lucien in Paris.

2. Lost Illusions, by Honoré de Balzac, pp. 32-73

Part One: The Two Poets, 2. Madame de Bargeton

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The town of Angoulême sits on the top of a rocky promontory with the suburb of L'Houmeau at its foot. The suburb is "busy and prosperous," while "the administration, the Bishop's palace, the courts of justice and the  aristocracy" are in the upper town: "two social zones, everywhere and constantly hostile to each other." David's print shop and the pharmacy that Lucien's father once owned are in the lower town. "It follows that to introduce a man from L'Houmeau, the son of a chemist, in to Madame de Bargeton's circle constituted itself a minor revolution." But "Madame de Bargeton was enamoured of art and letters, an extravagance of taste, a mania which Angoulême openly deplored."

She had been born Marie-Louise-Anaïs de Nègrepelisse, the daughter of a country gentleman who "belonged to the younger branch of one of the most ancient families in southern France." Monsieur de Bargeton was also from an old family whose fortunes and titles had been lost; he had inherited Bargeton House in Angoulême "and had nothing more than the income from his land, which amounted to about ten thousand francs a year." Anaïs de Nègrepelisse, known as Naïs, had been educated by the Abbé Niollant, who hid out during the Revolution in her father's home and repaid his protector by educating his daughter. "The Abbé imbued his pupil with his own spirit of enquiry and readiness to pass judgement; and it did not occur to him that qualities essential in a man can become defects in a woman destined to the humble occupation of a wife and mother." He also gave her a taste for art and literature.

Naïs had weighed up the idea of marriage: the prospect did not entice her. She objected to submitting her intelligence and her person to any of the men of poor calibre and negative personality who had some her way. She wanted to command and was expected to obey. 

Her father chose for Monsieur de Bargeton, 22 years her senior, because he was "sufficiently devoid of wit and will for Naïs to be free to be behave as she pleased, and unmercenary enough to marry her without a dowry." Her plan was for them to move to Paris as soon as she came into her inheritance, but her father "was to keep her waiting so long that his son-in-law predeceased him," forcing her to "remain in Angoulême, where Naïs's brilliant mental qualities and the wealth of sensibility lying dormant in her heart were destined never to fructify, but rather, in course of time, to invite ridicule."

The story of the first eighteen years of Madame de Bargeton's married life can briefly be told. For some time she lived on her own substance or on distant hopes. Then, once she recognized that the life in Paris to which she aspired was barred to her through themediocrity of her fortune, she began scrutinizing the people about her, and her sense of isolation made her shudder.

Then finally, Monsieur Sixte du Châtelet entered her life when he was appointed Director of Indirect Taxes in Angoulême. "He was well-built and good-looking, a good dancer, expert in all games, with a moderate talent for amateur theatricals and drawing-room ballad.... Totally insensitive to poetry, he would boldly as leave to take ten minutes' stroll in order to produce some impromptu poem, some quatrain as dull as ditch-water, with more rhyme than reason in it." During the Napoleonic wars, he had been in the Empress's service, and was sent to Egypt as a diplomat, where he was captured and "wandered about for two years from desert to desert and from tribe to tribe as a captive of the Arabs who successively sold him to one another without drawing the slightest advantage from his talents."

The part Monsieur du Châtelet had played in her Imperial Highness's service, his reputation as a ladies'man, the singular events and sufferings attendant upon his travels in Egypt, all served to excite curiosity in the women of Angoulême. Having studied polite manners in the Upper Town, Monsieur le Baron Sixte du Châtelet adapted his conduct to them. He played the invalid and took on the role of a blasé and disillusioned man.

In Naïs he "glimpsed the possibility of her becoming a widow with great expectations, in short of making a marriage alliance with the Nègrepelisse family." He courted her by indulging her literary interest: "He brought her all the latest books and read the newly-published poetry to her. They went into raptures together over the works of the young poets. Her raptures were genuine, but he was bored." So when the headmaster of the lycée Lucien had attended showed him "some admirable lines from Lucien's pen," he went to Naïs with the news that "A budding genius had been born in L'Houmeau!"

She excitedly summoned Lucien, whose sister, Eve, "was able to draw a few gold coins from her savings-box in order to buy Lucien an elegant pair of shoes from the best shoe-maker in Angoulême and a new suit from the most fashionable tailor." He impressed Madame de Bargeton with his "exceptionally good looks, his shy demeanour and his voice. The poet was already poetry incarnate." And she struck him as "made for love but not in love, and delicate in spite of the strength in her." For his part, Monsieur du Châtelet "sensed a rival in this handsome young man."

He puffed himself out by relating -- and exaggerating -- the perils he had encountered on his travels; but if this made its mark on the imagination of Lucien the poet, it certainly did not frighten Lucien the lover.

Lucien becomes a regular at Madame de Bargeton's, where the condescension of the others in her circle "stirred his bile and confirmed him in a resentful republicanism which many patricians-to-be adopt at their first contact with high society." She becomes his patron, making him "her reader, her secretary."

And so Lucien, at first intimidated by this woman's high rank, experienced all the lively fear, hope and despair which, like so many hammer-strokes, dealing pain and pleasure alternately, beat down of first love and drive it so deep into the heart.

When he ventures to call her "Naïs," she scolds him for "using the name by which everybody called her" and "offered her beautiful angel the only one of her names which no one had used, and consented to be 'Louise' for him alone." She decides to "teach him Italian and German and perfect his manners."

But the gossips start talking. "Some people felt that 'society' was about to be turned upside-down." And when du Châtelet discovers that Lucien's mother is the midwife known as "Madame Charlotte," he decides to take his rival down. But she reminds him that Madame Chardon is the last member of the Rubempré family -- in the first chapter we Lucien's father had saved her from the guillotine by claiming she was pregnant with his child -- and that she was a penniless widow who has to support herself. "Madame de Bargeton's cool common sense silenced the lamentations of the nobility." And although Madame de Chandour sets up her own rival salon on Wednesdays, "Madame de Bargeton held her salon every evening," so her visitors get in the habit of it. She also gets even with du Châtelet by calling him "'Monsieur Châtelet,' thereby petrifying him by showing him that she knew his assumption of the 'particle' to be illegal." And one member of her circle says, "Before the Revolution, the greatest noblemen admitted nobodies, people like this little poet from L'Houmeau, to their houses.... But they did not admit tax-collectors, and after all, that is what Châtelet is." Du Châtelet is "cold-shouldered by everybody," so he "made up to Lucien and claimed to be his friend," even throwing a dinner in his honor. Meanwhile, he was "watching for an opportunity to exterminate Lucien."

Madame de Bargeton decides to invite the "flower of the aristocracy" to an event at which Lucien will be the centerpiece, reciting one of his poems. ''She advised him boldly to repudiate his own father by assuming the noble name of Rubempré and to take no notice of any outcry provoked by this change of patronymic." Through a family connection, she endeavors to get the sanction of the king to the name change. She "reawakened in him the fever for social distinction which David's cool reasoning had calmed, and proved to him that high society was the only stage on which he could play his part." Lucien kisses her hand "with the frenzy of a poet, a young man, a lover," and she allows him to "press his trembling lips on her brow."

Lucien, who did not know that his course lay between the infamy of a convict-prison and the palms awarded to genius, was soaring over the Mount Sinai of the Prophets without seeing that below him were the Dead Sea and the horrible winding-sheet of Gomorrha. 

Still, he feels compelled to share his good fortune with David, and he writes a letter to Madame de Bargeton urging her to invite David to the party, otherwise he'll feel compelled not to appear. Lucien "had not stopped to consider that it was impossible for David, in the twinkling of an eye, to leap over the gulf which it had taken him five months to cross" or that it might bring social "disaster" to her. David had none of the "elegance of manner, distinction of features and tone of voice" that Lucien possessed. And after he sends the letter, he begins to regret it. "Of such stuff was Lucien made: he veered as easily from bad to good as from good to bad."

In fact, David is, without knowing it, in a position to inherit a good deal of money from his father, whose investment in the Marsac vineyard had proved highly lucrative. He is still shyly in love with Lucien's sister, Eve, and "although the great love he bore her only expressed itself in trifling ways, Eve was well aware of it."

Madame de Bargeton's reply to his letter arrives, and it is diplomatically crafted, invoking the prejudice of "those who belong to the aristocracy of ignorance" and their inability to "recognize that intelligence confers nobility." So she says she would like to have a look at David before she decides to invite him. "Lucien did not know with what art a 'Yes' is used in polite society to prepare for a 'No,' or a 'No' as a preliminary to 'Yes.'" But when he tells David that she wants to see him, David declines: "My way of life is settled, Lucien. I am David Séchard, a printer of Angoulême.... I should be laughed at by bourgeois and nobility alike." He urges Lucien to "go forward alone and lay your hands on the prizes!"

And then David also advises Lucien that "his poem on Saint John of Pathmos was perhaps too biblical to be read in a circle with little acquaintance with apocalyptic poetry, and urges him to read from a volume of poems by André Chénier that they had recently admired. "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." And Eve suggests to David that they have a stroll along the Charente and talk about Lucien.

1. Lost Illusions, by Honoré de Balzac, pp. 3-32

Part One: The Two Poets, 1. A provincial printing-office

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We begin, as the chapter heading indicates, in the print shop in Angoulême run by Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard, which is outfitted with "antiquated equipment." Séchard, who is illiterate, worked as a pressman in the print shop and bought it from the owner's widow; he has weathered revolution, wartime and restoration. He sent his only son, David, "to the town lycée, not so much in order to have him educated as to prepare the way for a successor," and then to Paris to learn "more advanced typography," with the understanding that he would also "amass a fair sum of money in the capital." 

Another print shop opened up in the town at about the time David returned from Paris. The aging Séchard had begun to drink more and more, and he decided to retire, and to sell the business to David. "If in the beginning he had thought of David as being an only child, he late had only looked on him as an obvious purchaser whose interests were opposed to his own: he wanted to sell dear, whereas David would want to buy cheap; therefore his son was an enemy to be vanquished." So Séchard tries a hard sell on David, overvaluing his mostly dilapidated equipment and stock. (A note: Balzac uses a Latin phrase, pede titubante, in this scene, for which I haven't been able to find an exact translation -- the Penguin edition's translator, Herbert J. Hunt, leaves it in Latin. I think it means that Séchard is staggering drunkenly, because the word "titubation" refers to a medical condition in which one staggers or reels. Pede, I think, is an inflected form of pes, or foot. Confirmation or contradiction of this translation would be welcome.) David is well aware from his experience in Paris that the shop is hopelessly antiquated, but Séchard argues "that provincial people were strongly rooted in their habits, and that any attempt to provide them with better products would be wasted."

David is "one of those shy and sensitive people who shrink from argument," and his father gets the upper hand in the deal:

Until such time as David Séchard had paid off the thirty thousand francs, profits were to be equally divided; once he had repaid this sum to his father, he would become the one and only owner of the printing-office. David ... decided he would be able to make good and accepted the terms. His father, accustomed to the niggling cautiousness of the peasant class, and knowing nothing of the wider scope of Parisian calculations, was astonished at so prompt a conclusion.

When David asks for money to help pay the wages of the shop's workers, however, his father refuses. He assumes that David has saved money from what he earned in Paris, and when David protests, "I had to live, and I had to buy books," he retorts, "People who buy books can't be much good at printing them." David starts to challenge his father, but "The noble-hearted young man decided to shoulder the burden." He is left with only a young woman named Marion to help with the business by doing odd jobs. Séchard retires to a vineyard he has bought "at Marsac, a little village some ten miles away from Angoulême."

David makes a major  mistake in running the business: "He maintained in political and religious matters a neutrality which was most injurious to his interests. He was living in a period when provincial tradespeople had to line up with a party in order to get customers." His rivals, the Cointet brothers, are on the monarchist side, and they steal away customers of the same political views by telling them that David's "father had sided with the Terrorists, ... was a drunkard, a Bonapartist, an old miser who sooner or later would surely leave piles of gold to his heir." The Cointets, "considerably enriched by the sale of prayer books and works of piety," offer to buy the advertising journal that Séchard printed in order to get a monopoly on official notices that had to be published. Séchard leaves his vineyard for a time and offers to sell the print-shop to the Cointets for sixty thousand francs; he settles for selling the advertising journal for twenty-two thousand, with the proviso that David would never "print any periodical whatsoever, under a penalty of thirty thousand francs' damages." In short, he sells David out, giving his interest in the business over to his son but keeping the rent on the house in which the shop is located.

David has reunited with a friend from the lycée, Lucien Chardon, the son of a pharmacist in Angoulême who had been working on a cure for gout. The father's death had  left the family in dire straits because his expectation of financial reward for the cure had led him to spare "no expense for the education of his son and daughter, so that budgeting for the family constantly ate away the income from his chemist's shop." His widow sold the chemist's shop, but the amount she received was barely enough for herself, let alone her family. She "became a nurse for women in labour, and her gentle manners gained her the preference over all others in the rich households." Lucien's sister, Eve, took a job supervising women in a laundry, and she and her mother supported Lucien, in whom they believed "as fervently as Mahomet's wife believed in her husband: there were no bounds to the sacrifices they made for his future." David hired Lucien as a proofreader, "and paid him a wage of forty francs a month, which saved him from despair."

Both David and Lucien were poets, with the difference that "Although he had been destined for the highest speculations of natural science, Lucien had an ardent thirst for literary glory, while David, whose meditative genius predisposed him to poetry, felt drawn towards the exact sciences." David also fell in love with Lucien's sister, Eve. David and Lucien were incompetent at running the printing shop, and when their rival, the Cointet brothers, realized that, they stopped competing with them: The Cointets realized it was better to have an incompetent rival muddling along than to let David be bought out by someone who really knew how to run the business.

David was sturdy and robustly built, with "the ardent melancholy of a mind capable of scanning the horizon from end to end and taking cognizance of all its undulations, one which readily found disillusion in imagined joys after subjecting them to the hard, clear light of analysis." Lucien had an almost feminine beauty and "the depravity of outlook characteristic of diplomats, who believe that any means however shameful they may be, are justified by success."

Although the printer seemed to enjoy the robust health of a peasant, he was a man of melancholic, even sickly genius and was lacking in self-confidence; whereas Lucien, possessing more initiative but less stability of mind, displayed an audacity which tallied ill with his languid, almost frail though femininely graceful physique. 

One day a stranger enters the print-shop and asks for an estimate on printing a memoir. David declines without even looking at the copy, saying that they didn't print "such sizable manuscripts" and suggesting he go to the Cointets. Lucien, however, looks at it and suggests the man leave it overnight so they can come up with the estimate. The man asks if he isn't Lucien Chardon, and says that he's happy to meet "a young poet of such brilliant promise. I come from Madame de Bargeton." He learns that the manuscript is a treatise on the cultivation of silkworms that the man wants published.

When the man leaves, David confronts Lucien with the fact that his friend is in love with Madame de Bargeton. Lucien admits it. He also reveals that he is scheduled to be reading his poems at her house tonight, but that he has told her that he won't do so unless David is also invited. He's awaiting her decision. David is moved by his friend's action.

This ambitious young man, who had just gained admission to the Bargeton mansion by making his poetic reputation a bridge between town and suburb, was as anxious about his patroness's decision as can be a court favourite apprehensive of disgrace when he has tried to extend his power. These words must seem obscure to those who have not yet observed the manners peculiar to cities divided into an upper and a lower town.