18. Lost Illusions, by Honoré de Balzac, pp. 463-476

Part Two: A Great Man in Embryo, 39. Skulduggery; 40. Farewells

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Coralie takes a minor role in a play and succeeds, which leads the theater manager, who has learned about the plot against Coralie, to offer her a role in a new play by Camille Maupin (Mademoiselle des Touches' nom de plume). But Lucien is seriously wounded in his duel with Michel Chrestien, and recuperation takes four months. Meanwhile, Fendant and Cavalier go broke, and Lucien's book is relegated to the second-hand bookshops where it receives no notice and few sales. Even the one favorable review of the book, by Martainville, does more harm than good, by turning the leftist papers more firmly against Lucien. The bankruptcy of Fendant and Cavalier also makes the notes held by Camusot worthless, so he files suit against Lucien. This time Coralie saves Lucien, but by making some deal with Camusot that she remains silent about.

Coralie is having a great success in Camille Maupin's play, but just as Lucien is finally recovering from his wound, she falls ill, and her role is taken over by Florine. Lucien is not yet well enough to work so he spends his time alternating with Bérénice in nursing Coraline. The household falls into dire poverty, although they have a kind physician in Bianchon -- the Cénacle having become reconciled with Lucien after learning that he had shown d'Arthez his review and that d'Arthez had collaborated in rewriting it before it was published.

Lucien is forced to go to Lousteau to ask for the thousand francs he is owed, but Lousteau is not much better off -- he is being sued for debt. Finally, Lucien resorts to forgery: he drafts three notes with a facsimile of David Séchard's signature for a thousand francs, and endorses them. A paper-merchant accepts them, so Lucien pays off his debts and Coralie's and gives the remaining three hundred francs to Bérénice, telling her not to let him have them, no matter how much he begs, because he's afraid he'll go lose them at gambling. Lucien returns to writing, but meets with no success. A publisher tells him he's lost his gift. And he's sued because of the forged bills, forcing him to go to Camusot for aid. Camusot directs him to a barrister named Desroches, who is a friend of Bixiou, Blondet and Des Lupeaulx.

Coralie dies, and Lucien has no money to bury her. He writes to Mademoiselle des Touches "one of those appalling letters in which men once elegant, but now reduced to beggary, throw their self-respect to the winds." And he goes to Barbet who agrees to pay him two hundred francs if he'll write some drinking songs for a collection of ribald verses he's putting together. He returns to the flat, where Bérénice is sewing a shroud for Coralie's body, and tells her "to go to the undertaker's and order a funeral costing no more than two hundred francs, inclusive of a service at the mean little church of Bonne-Nouvelle." And he sits down beside Coralie's body and writes ten songs "to be sung at smoking-parties." D'Arthez and Bianchon arrive just as he is finishing and are touched by

The sight of this beautiful corpse smiling on eternity, her lover paying for her funeral with indecent rhymes, Barbet paying for her coffin, the four tapers round an actress whose basque skirt and red stockings with green clocks had once put a whole auditorium into a flutter of excitement, and, at the door, the priest who had brought her back to God returning to the church to say mass for one who had loved so much!

Then Mademoiselle des Touches arrives and gives Lucien two thousand francs. And she joins the others at Coralie's funeral mass, after which the men go with the body to Père-Lachaise cemetery, where

Camusot, weeping hot tears, solemnly swore to Lucien that he would buy the burial plot in perpetuity and erect a tombstone with the inscription: CORALIE, and underneath this: Died August 1822, aged nineteen. 

The money from Mademoiselle des Touches settles all of Lucien's debts, but although he has decided to return to Angoulême, he has nothing left to pay for the journey. He contemplates suicide, but when he asks Bérénice for Coralie's scarf, she realizes that he intends to hang himself. She tells him to go for a walk and return at midnight, "But stay in the boulevards and keep away from the riverside." During the walk, he resolves not to give up until he has gone home and tried to make amends to David and his family. But when he sees Bérénice on the street, dressed in her best clothes, talking to a man, he realizes that she is prostituting herself to make money. She gives him twenty francs and quickly disappears.

Be it said in his favour, this money burned his fingers and he wanted to return it. But he was forced to keep it as the last stigma with which life in Paris was branding him.

16. Lost Illusions, by Honoré de Balzac, pp. 425-440

Part Two: A Great Man in Embryo, 35. The Money-brokers; 36. A change of front

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For the novel, Fendant and Cavalier have given Lucien promissory notes for five thousand francs due in three installments: at six, nine and twelve months. But when he and Lousteau go to Barbet, the bookseller, to see if they can sell the IOUs to him for the ready cash, Barbet says he can give Lucien only three thousand francs: "Those gentlemen will go bankrupt within three months." And he warns them that nobody else will give them a better deal -- if they'll buy them at all. He says they can try Chaboisseau, but if he turns them down and they come back to him, "I shall only give you two thousand five hundred francs."

Chaboisseau turns them down flat. But Lucien persuades him to take one of the notes, valued at five hundred francs, in exchange for a book he sees. They come away with the book and four hundred twenty francs. But when Lucien asks why he won't take the rest of the notes at a discount, Chaboisseau says, "I'm not discounting. I'm taking payment for a sale."

They go to yet another money-broker, named Samanon, where they meet an opium-addicted artist who is getting his clothes out of hock -- temporarily: The artist explains that Samanon "lets you have them back for occasions when you have to dress up." Samanon will give Lucien only fifteen hundred francs for the remaining notes, and then only after getting some books from Fendant as collateral. "'Your credit's no good,' he said to Lucien. 'You're living with Coralie and your furniture is under distraint.'" Lucien refuses the deal, and on the street the artist explains, "When Samanon goes to see a bookseller, a paper-merchant or a printer, you may know they're on the rocks."

Lousteau, assessing the situation, sees only one possibility: to give the notes to Coralie and have her take them to Camusot in exchange for cash. The idea is repugnant to Lucien, but after he and Lousteau squander the four hundred francs they received from Chaboisseau on drinking and gambling, he gives the money to Coralie. Meanwhile, she has moved out of her old apartments into a smaller and cheaper flat. The theater where she worked has declared bankruptcy and she has sold all but the bare minimum of furniture.

Nevertheless, Lucien remains optimistic: He will make money by joining the royalist newspapers. But three of his friends from the Cénacle -- d'Arthez, Giraud and Chrestien -- come to see him to dissuade him from making such a blatant political switch:  "You have been attacking the Romantics, the right wing and the Government; you cannot now start defending the Government, the right wing and the Romantics." Giraud warns him, "Not only are you making your own life unclean:  one day you'll find that you've joined the losing side." What they don't understand is that Lucien plans to make his fortune "out of his beauty and his wit, with the name and title of Comte de Rubempré to support them."

So Lucien joins the staff of Le Réveil, and makes enemies of his former friends in journalism, becoming the subject of attacks in the columns of their papers. He also makes an enemy of Lousteau because Lucien's new friend, Raoul Nathan, has stolen Florine away from him, and is complicit in a deal with Finot that causes Lousteau to lose three thousand francs.

And so the destruction of Lucien, the intruder, the little scoundrel who wanted to make one meal of all and sundry, was unanimously resolved and deeply meditated.

15. Lost Illusions, by Honoré de Balzac, pp. 409-424

Part Two: A Great Man in Embryo, 32. The "viveurs"; 33. A fifth variety of publisher; 34. Blackmail

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Lucien falls in with "a society of young people, rich or poor, all of them idle, known as viveurs." They are reckless and spendthrift, wild, frenzied, with no thought for what tomorrow may bring. The prince of viveurs is Rastignac, who, Balzac tells us, finally wound up distinguishing himself in "a serious career." But for the moment he is a very bad influence on Lucien, though the chief bad influence is Blondet. Lucien "gave up hope of literary fame, believing it easier to come by success in politics." Coralie is hardly a stabilizing influence: "Lover and mistress piled up debts with alarming rapidity."

Like all poets, the great man in embryo showed a momentary concern for their disastrous situation, promised to work, forgot his promise and drowned his passing cares in debauchery.

He is also intriguing with Hector Merlin, who has been promised the editorship of the new conservative publication Le Réveil, against his old liberal friends.

Gradually, as horses, carriage, furniture, and the like are seized in lieu of payment for their debts, and more and more items go to the pawnshop, Lucien feels the need to do something. Only the tailor, the milliner and the dressmaker are still willing to supply them, and then only because "they trembled at the thought of displeasing a journalist capable of bringing their establishments into disrepute." So Lousteau suggests finding a publisher for The Archer of Charles the Ninth. He and Merlin dine with some publishers to talk up Lucien's book, and tell them has a stack of other manuscripts he can supply in addition to that one:

"You can guess, Lucien, that our publishers had eyes like saucers.... By the way, have you any saucers left?"
"They are under distraint," said Coralie.
"Point taken."

Lucien is "feeling quite gleeful at the thought of getting the most he could out of Lousteau before turning his back on the Liberals, whom he was planning to attack the more effectively for having studied them closely," but Lousteau is also getting a commission from the publishing firm of Fendant and Cavalier for bringing Lucien to them.

The publishers are interested in getting "the next Walter Scott," as in fact are all the Parisian publishers. Balzac satirizes this lack of imagination among publishers through them:

One of the major stupidities of Parisian commerce is that it hopes to achieve success by sticking to the same lines of enterprise as have paid off before, whereas success goes by contraries. In Paris, more than anywhere, success kills success.

Plus ça change.... How many publishers today are looking for the next John Grisham or Dan Brown? How many TV producers are working on the next "Lost" or "Glee"? How many summer movies are sequels or remakes of old TV shows? And like publishers today, Fendant and Cavalier are concerned with marketing: They want to change the title, The Archer of Charles the Ninth, because they don't think it will sell: "Cavalier would have to give a course of lectures on French history in order to sell a single copy in the provinces." But in the end, Lucien signs the contract, "provided the title suits me."

Meanwhile, Lousteau is having his own troubles with debts, his own mistress having been cut off by Matifat. He is talking about blackmail -- "an invention of the English press," which he explains to Lucien thus: "You embark on some sticky operation which a series of articles can bring to failure: a blackmailer is detailed to propose that you buy them off." It's not that different from the usual quid pro quo arrangements between reviewers and publishers or theater owners, except that a middleman is involved. And he tells Lucien that "Des Lupeaulx, whom you know, is perpetually busy carrying out negotiations of that sort with journalists." Lousteau is trying his own form of blackmail on Matifat, using the love letters Matifat wrote to Florine.

This piece of confidence sobered Lucien. His first thought was that he had exceedingly dangerous friends. Then he reflected that he must not fall out with them, for he might stand in need of their terrible power in case Madame d'Espard, Madame de Bargeton and Châtelet broke faith with him.