13. Lost Illusions, by Honoré de Balzac, pp. 384-396

Part Two: A Great Man in Embryo, 29. The playwrights' banker; 30. A journalist's christening party

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Lucien and Lousteau go to see the claque leader Braulard, who turns out to be a gentleman (Lucien is shocked that Lousteau calls him "monsieur") of substance with a "fine-looking house" and an income of twenty thousand francs, although

To Lucien he looked like a working-class man grown rich: a coarse face, two very astute eyes, the hands of a professional claqueur, a complexion over which orgies had flowed like rain on the roof-tops, pepper-and-salt hair and a somewhat choked voice.

When he recognizes Lucien, Braulard thinks they have come about the claque for Coralie and tells him not to worry, but Lousteau informs him that it's really about his handling of the extra tickets Lucien is given for the theaters where he reviews. Braulard is happy to make a deal for scalping them, and in the conversation reveals some of the tricks he uses both as scalper and as claqueur for Coralie: "Listen: for her I'll have men posted in the gallery who'll make little hums of approval in order to start applause. That's a manoeuvre which gives an actress a send-off." As they leave Braulard's, they encounter "the evil-smelling squad of claqueurs and ticket-touts" waiting for him to give them their assignments.

"It's hard," answered Lucien as they returned to his rooms, "to keep one's illusions about anything in Paris. Everything is taxed, everything is sold, everything is manufactured, even success." 

Well, he should know. For he throws a large party celebrating his own manufactured success to which he not only invites the large company of journalists and publishers he has lately acquired, but also the sharers of his and Lousteau's mistresses, Matifat and Camusot, and "his friends of the Cénacle." Only three of the last show up: Michel Chrestien, Fulgence Ridal and Joseph Bridau. D'Arthez is "finishing his book" and Giraud is "attending to the publication of the first number of his Review. The Cénacle had sent along its three artisgts as being less likely than the rest to feel out of place in festivities of this kind."

Balzac gives us warning, however, that the extravagance of this celebration -- "an assembly of thirty persons: Coralie's dining-room could hold no more" -- may prove perilous because of "the foundation, slight as it was, on which the material well-being of the actress and her poet was based. Without committing himself, Camusot had instructed the furnishers to give Coralie credit for at least three months. Horses and servants and everything else were to be available as if by magic to these two children eager for enjoyment and enjoying everything blissfully."

Raoul Nathan is there, and he thanks Lucien effusively for the second article about his book, which causes Lucien to assume "a superior air as he looked at his three friends from the Cénacle." He is unconscious of the fact that they are judging him on his ability to write two articles that contradict each other, and when he tells them that he's in a position to give d'Arthez's book a laudatory review when it appears, Michel asks, "But have you a free hand?" Lucien answers, "with a poor pretense at modesty," "As free as one can have when one is indispensable." 

Then Dauriat reads the third article by Lucien on Nathan's book, to wild acclaim for the author.

"Gentlemen," said Lousteau. "We are the witnesses of a grave, inconceivable, unprecedented and truly surprising event. Don't you wonder at the rapidity with which our friend has changed from a provincial into a journalist?"

Lucien is crowned with artificial flowers by the drunken group. "At this juncture Lucien observed the saddened faces of Michel Chrestian, Joseph Bridau and Fulgence Ridal who took up their hats and left amid jeering hurrahs." Lucien tries to defend his former friends to his new ones, but they are hearing none of it.

Finot goes on to propose publishing a canard: an article "that will "accuse the Government of having certain intentions, and thus unleash public opinion against it." Vignon cynically observes, "It will always cause me the deepest astonishment to see a government giving up the guidance of ideas to scoundrels like us." (There were Matt Drudges and Rush Limbaughs two hundred years ago.)

As the dawn appears, Lucien and Coralie talk about the saddened members of the Cénacle:

"Your friends from the rue des Quatre-Vents were as gloomy as condemned criminals," said Coralie to her lover. 

"No," the poet answered. "It's they who were the judges."

"Judges are more fun," said Coralie.

9. Lost Illusions, by Honoré de Balzac, pp. 294-328

Part Two: A Great Man in Embryo, 16. Coralie; 17. How a news-sheet is edited; 18. The supper; 19. An actress's apartments

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Coralie, smitten with Lucien, looks out at him from behind the curtain, as Camusot and his father-in-law, Cardot, who is keeping another actress, return to their box. As for Lucien, "the demon of lust whispered shocking thoughts in his ear." He quickly forgets any scruples he may have had about Lousteau's bedding Matifat's mistress. Lousteau, witnessing what's going on, eggs Lucien on: Coralie, Lousteau tells him, is 18, and her mother sold her to a man named de Marsay three years ago. She loathed de Marsay, and puts up with Camusot "because he doesn't pester her. So you are her first love." He also warns Lucien that the play will be a failure if he doesn't return Coralie's affections because, distracted by Lucien, she's blowing her lines.

Lucien, dazzled by the prospect of a fling with Coralie, tells Lousteau "more things are happening to me in one evening than ever did in the first eighteen years of my life." And he tells about his affair with Madame de Bargeton and how Châtelet helped break it up. Lousteau decides that he'll write some nasty gossip about Châtelet for the paper and that Lucien should review the play. The paper's short on copy and needs it. Lucien agrees.

Du Bruel comes to ask Lucien to tell Coralie he'll go to her place with her after supper. He agrees, and Coralie "from that moment acted with wonderful verve." At the curtain call, Coralie is wildly acclaimed and when Camusot throws a bouquet of flowers at her, she picks it up and holds it out toward Lucien.

Florine's apartment is beautifully furnished, which explains to Lucien why Lousteau can put up with the disorder of his own quarters. While they're gathering there, a dancer from the opera, Tullia, rushes in to tell Finot that the opera has agreed to provide a hundred subscriptions and the boxes he wants, which puts him in a bind because he had been planning to run a scathing piece on the company if it didn't meet his demands. So Lucien and Lousteau get to work and knock out their copy to replace it. Lucien's is a clever paean to the play, especially to Coralie and, to a slightly lesser degree, to Florine. Balzac tells us that the review "started a revolution in journalism by the revelation it gave of a new and original style." Meanwhile, Lousteau's attack on Châtelet compares him to a heron trying to swallow a cuttle-bone, i.e., Madame de Bargeton. The effect it had in the Faubourg Saint-Germain "was one of the thousand and one causes for further severity of the laws passed against the Press." Finot announces, after Lucien reads his piece to the others, that he's now a member of the staff of the newspaper.

At supper, Coralie instructs Florine to get Camusot so drunk that he'll have to spend the night in Florine's flat. And Lucien congratulates himself on having made friends with Lousteau, "without suspecting that Lousteau already feared him as a dangerous rival." And Claude Vignon, a guest at the supper, delivers a scathing attack on the press and its power:

Napoleon gave the explanation of this phenomenon -- moral or immoral, whichever you like -- in a superb aphorism...:  In corporate crimes no one is implicated. A newspaper can behave in the most atrocious manner and no one on the staff considers that his own hands are soiled.... We shall see the newspapers, which originally were run by men of honour, fall subsequently into the hands of the greatest mediocrities possession the patience and india-rubber faint-heartedness lacking in men of fine genius, or into the  hands of grocers with money enough to buy the products of the pen.... But we shall all write for them, like the people who work at a quicksilver mine knowing that they'll die of it. 

And he prophesies pointedly about Lucien that newspaper work will "dry up his brains, corrupt his soul" and "let him die of hunger if he's thirsty, and of thirst if he's hungry." To which Balzac comments, "Thus it happened, by the blessing of chance, that no information was lacking to Lucien about the precipice over which he was to fall." D'Arthez had warned him of the same thing, and even Lousteau had depicted "literature and journalism in their true light." But Lucien is intoxicated by the wit of the company and heedless of any warnings: "he felt a terrible itch to dominate this world of potentates and believed he had the power to overcome them."

With Florine's help, Camusot drinks himself literally under the table, and Lucien and Coralie escape together. But he has drunk too much himself and after being "disgustingly sick" in the stairwell of Coralie's house, is put to bed by Coralie and her housekeeper, Bérénice.  When he wakes about noon the next day, she gets in bed with him. He goes back to sleep about five o'clock in the afternoon, but is awakened by the arrival of Camusot. In a scene out of a French farce, he hides behind a curtain but leaves his boots behind. Coralie pretends that they are boots she's been trying on for a trouser role, and Camusot falls for it. When they go off to dinner, Bérénice releases Lucien from his hiding place.

Lucien admires Coralie's beautifully appointed apartment, and Bérénice brings him food. Then he naps until Coralie comes back from the theater and spends another night with her. The next day they go out in a carriage Camusot has bought for Coralie:

In one of the lanes of the Bois de Boulogne their coupé encountered the barouche of Mesdames d'Espard and de Bargeton who gazed at Lucien with astonishment: he darted at them the contemptuous glance of a poet who foresees the fame in store for him and intends to exploit his power. 

It is "one of the sweetest moments in his life, and perhaps decided his destiny." The desire for revenge makes him forsake the disciplined life prescribed by the Cénacle. At dinner with many of the same people who had been at the post-theater supper, Lucien displays a new self-confidence: "he sparkled with wit and became the Lucien de Rubempré who for a few months was to be a shining light in the literary and artistic world." But he also begins to make an enemy of Hector Merlin, "the most dangerous of all the journalists present at the dinner." And at the gaming table he loses all of his money, though Coralie replaces it.