17. Lost Illusions, by Honoré de Balzac, pp. 440-462

Part Two: A Great Man in Embryo, 37. Finot's finesses; 38. The fateful week

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Having burned his bridges, Lucien is left with friends only on the right. But even on that side, he attracts suspicion and jealousy, so he "clung to his one desire -- to get his ordinance, realizing that with his name restored he could make a fine marriage." Unfortunately, among his new enemies and former friends, Lousteau is aware of this ambition.

At the theater, Lucien runs into Finot, accompanied by Des Lupeaulx, who praises Lucien's ability to charm Mademoiselle des Touches ("who's already regarded as your future wife in social circles") as well as Mesdames d'Espard, de Bargeton and de Montcornet. But behind Lucien's back, Des Lupeaulx confides to Finot that the Marquise, Madame de Bargeton and Châtelet "have thrown him into the royalist party in order to eliminate him.... I'm in their confidence, and they detest the little fellow to an amazing extent." And Finot confides that his former friends are doing their part to demolish Lucien, who still has a contract with Lousteau and needs every penny he can earn, and that they "are engineering a flop for Coralie: he'll see his mistress hissed off the stage." Lucien doesn't suspect a thing.

And so comes what Balzac refers to as Lucien's "fateful week," his equivalent of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. Coralie is going to work at a new theater, the Gymnase, her old one having gone bankrupt. And to make sure she's well received, he humbles himself and goes to Camusot with the remaining notes from Fendant and Cavalier. In order to protect Coralie from humiliation, Camusot agrees to give Lucien four thousand five hundred francs for the notes, endorsed "for value received in silk stuffs." Lucien then goes to the claqueur Braulard and pays to have them applaud Coralie.

The evening before Coralie's performance, d'Arthez's book is published, and Martainville, the editor of Le Réveil, orders Lucien to write a review denouncing it, largely to get back at another member of the Cénacle, Léon Giraud, whose new journal is becoming a serious rival to theirs. It doesn't matter that d'Arthez in fact shares their royalist opinions: He is simply the most convenient target. Lucien refuses to write the article, but Merlin and Martainville pressure him to do it by threatening to join in the attempt of the Liberal papers to mock Coralie's performance. Lucien has no choice: He reads d'Arthez's book and finds it "one of the finest in modern literature..., but in the end he wrote a mocking article of the kind at which he was so skillful and laid hold of the book as children lay hold of a beautiful bird to pluck its feathers and torture it."

Sickened by what he has written, he takes the article to d'Arthez and confesses what he has been forced to do. D'Arthez is moved by Lucien's dilemma and by his loyalty to Coralie, reads the article, and proposes to rewrite it himself: "I can make your article more honourable both to you and to me. Besides, I alone am thoroughly aware of my shortcomings." But he is also harshly critical of Lucien's moral weakness: "Repentance is a virginity which our souls owe to God: a man who twice repents is therefore a reprehensible sycophant. I'm afraid you only look on penitence as a prelude to absolution."

Coralie, terrified by the prospect of failure, fails. The claqueurs Lucien has hired are ineffective against their opponents, and the reviews are terrible. Coralie falls ill and withdraws from the play, to be replaced by Florine, "who took over her part and made her reputation in it, for she saved the play." Lucien vows to her, "I shall be the Comte de Rubempré. I shall make a fortune and marry you!" But Coralie knows he's only being foolish, which he proves by going out that evening and losing two thousand francs at the gambling tables.

Finot reports to Lucien that his attack on d'Arthez's novel, though revised by the attackee himself, is causing "scandal and uproar": "People are saying that Marat was a saint compared with you. They're getting ready to attack you, and your book won't survive it." (Lucien has been going over the last proofs of his novel before publication.)

Coralie is "in bed, pale and ill," and Bérénice warns Lucien that she will die if he doesn't find a new part for her. He goes to a soirée at Mademoiselle des Touches, where Madame de Bargeton gives him good news: He is to go tomorrow to the Chancellery, where the King has signed the decree making him Comte de Rubempré. Unfortunately, this is not only a hoax engineered by Madame d'Espard, but an article he has written making fun of the King and the Keeper of the Seals has just appeared in Lousteau's newspaper. So when he arrives at the Chancellery, he is denounced by the Secretary-General and shown the decree which the Lord Chancellor has torn to pieces. Des Lupeaulx, who has accompanied him, tells Lucien, "You've compromised me, Mesdames d'Espard and de Bargeton, and Madame de Montcornet, who had answered for you, must be furious."

Stunned, Lucien is walking past a bookstore when he sees that his novel has been published, "underneath a strange and to him unknown title." He hadn't been told of its publication, "and the newspapers were saying nothing about it." And then Michel Chrestien and Léon Giraud approach him on the street, and Michel spits in his face. Lucien slaps his face and challenges him to a duel.

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.

10. Lost Illusions, by Honoré de Balzac, pp. 328-343

Part Two: A Great Man in Embryo, 20. Last visit to the Cénacle; 21. A variety of journalist; 22. Boots can change one's way of life

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Lucien can't help feeling a little guilty about betraying the ideals of the Cénacle, especially when he reads the masterly job they have done editing his novel:  "From chapter to chapter, the skilful and devoted pen of these great but as yet unknown men had changed dross into rich ore." The work they have done on the book "taught him more about literature and art than his four years of reading, comparison and study had done." So he faces them with dread, knowing, for example, "that, if Daniel had loved Coralie, he would have refused to share her with Camusot."

And sure enough, he is met with dismay when they learn that he's chosen journalism -- they already know it from having read his review in the newspaper. Léon Giraud tries to persuade him by saying that they "are going to bring out a journal in which neither truth nor justice will ever be outraged, in which we shall disseminate doctrines useful to humanity." But Lucien plays the skeptic: "'You won't have a single subscriber,' Lucien interjected with Machiavellian malice." In the end, he realizes "that he had been clasped to the heart of his true friends for the last time."

He returns to his room, where he finds Coralie in tears at the sight of his desolate living situation. The next day, he finds that the deal has gone through and Lousteau is now the editor of the newspaper. Florine congratulates Lucien on his good luck: "How many insignificant young people we see dragging along in Paris for years without getting an article into a paper!" He and Lousteau go to see Félicien Vernou, whom they find in a flat with his fat wife and noisy children, an explanation for Vernou's tendency to "resent other people's success and be discontented with everything while still remaining discontented with himself." And at one point Lucien makes a casual remark which turns Vernou into a "mortal enemy." When he tells Lousteau to drop him off at Coralie's, Lousteau mocks him:

"Ah! we're in love," said Lousteau. "It's a mistake! Do with Coralie what I do with Florine: treat her as a housekeeper, but be as free as a mountain goat!"

"You'd bring the saints to damnation!" said Lucien, laughing. 

"Demons are past being damned," Lousteau replied." 

He finds Camusot at Coralie's, both of them celebrating an extended engagement she has just received at the Gymnase theater. But then Camusot notices Lucien's boots, recognizing them as the ones Coralie claimed were hers. And Coralie announces defiantly that the boots Camusot had seen in her room were Lucien's, and that he had been hiding in her closet. Lucien decides to stand by her, and proclaims his love for Coralie, who tells Camusot that he can take back everything he has given her: "I prefer poverty with him to millions with you." Lucien, who has just seen the Vernou household, is not so sanguine: "A cold shudder ran down Lucien's back at the prospect of having a woman, an actress and a household on his hands." But fortunately Camusot gives in: "'Stay here and keep everything, Coralie,' said the merchant in a weak voice expressive of heart-felt grief." But he predicts that "it won't be long before you are living in penury. Whatever great talents this gentleman may possess, they won't be enough to provide for you."

When Camusot leaves, they take stock of their potential income, and although Lucien realizes it can't possibly be enough for the style of life Coralie has become accustomed to, he gives in:

He would have preferred to leave Coralie her freedom rather than to be pitch-forked into the obligations which such a union entails, but she was looking so beautiful, so shapely, so alluring that he was captivated by the picturesque aspects of this Bohemian life, and threw down the gauntlet to Fortune.

6. Lost Illusions, by Honoré de Balzac, pp. 192-243

Part Two: A Great Man in Embryo, 2. Flicoteaux; 3. Two varieties of publishers; 4. First friendship; 5. The "Cénacle"; 6. The flowers of poverty; 7. A newspaper seen from outside; 8. The sonnets

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Lucien discovers the student restaurant and hangout known as Flicoteaux -- "an eating-house, nothing less and nothing more," but also a place where "friendships have been formed between divers students who later have become famous, as this story will confirm." Cannily, he picks as a regular table one near the cash-desk, so he can get to know the people who run the restaurant and befriend them in the hope of their extending credit to him when he comes to need it. It's a table for two, and he frequently finds himself sitting with "a thin, pale young man" with a "handsome but ravaged face." Eventually he learns his name is Etienne Lousteau, another young man from the provinces who sustains himself by reviewing books and plays for a "little newspaper." Etienne eats at Flicoteaux only when he is broke.

He spends his mornings in the library researching his novel, his afternoons in his rooms rewriting it and correcting the errors he has made, and after dinner in a reading room going through recent periodicals "to keep up with the intellectual movement." This causes him to rewrite his book of sonnets completely. He sometimes goes to the theater, waiting in line for cheap seats, but still his money keeps dwindling and he considers looking for a journalism job. Lousteau, however, has stopped coming to Flicoteaux, so he has no contact in that business.

Finally, he decides to find a publisher for his manuscripts. The first one he visits is really a bookseller that only rarely publishes their own books, so they send him to Doguereau, who buys manuscripts. He is shocked by the commercial nature of book publishing: "that to these publishers books were like cotton bonnets to haberdashers, a commodity to be bought cheap and sold dear." Doguereau agrees to read The Archer of Charles the Ninth, which Lucien describes to him as "an historical work in the manner of Walter Scott which presents the conflict between Catholics and Protestants as a combat between two systems of government, involving a serious threat to the monarchy. I have taken sides with the Catholics." Doguereau almost decides not to read the novel after he hears that Lucien is also a poet ("Rhymesters come to grief when they write prose") but Lucien points out that Walter Scott also wrote verse.

Balzac observes that Lucien had failed to recognize in Doguereau "a publisher of the old school, a man belonging to the age when publishers liked to keep even a Voltaire or a Montesquieu under lock and key, starving in an attic." So, having read and been impressed by the novel, Doguereau goes to Lucien's room, planning at first to pay him a thousand francs for the manuscript and put him under contract for other novels. But when he sees the building where Lucien lives and realizes how hard up the writer must be for money, he decides to lower it to eight hundred, and then to six hundred when he finds the room is on the fourth floor. When he sees the bare little room, he tells Lucien, "I will buy it for four hundred francs" on the agreement that he write two novels a year for six years. Lucien balks, and when Doguereau tries harder tactics, warning him that he won't even get anyone else to read his manuscript, criticizes its grammar, and telling him that if he brings it back to him after trying other publishers his price will be only a hundred crowns, Lucien throws the manuscript on the floor and exclaims, "Monsieur, I would rather burn it!"

One day, on his way to the library, he meets a young man he has seen there who tells him it's closed. He is also a regular at Flicoteaux's but they have never spoken. The man tells Lucien that he looks downcast, and Lucien tells him of his troubles with the publisher and that he has only a hundred and twenty francs left. The man replies that the story is a familiar one -- his own, in fact -- and that there are "a thousand or more young people" like them. They walk together in the Luxembourg Gardens, and Lucien learns his name, Daniel d'Arthez, who Balzac tells us is "today one of the most illustrious writers of our time." D'Arthez tells Lucien, "You bear the stamp of genius on your brow," but that unless he he has "the will-power and the seraphic patience needed," he should "give up this very day." He agrees to critique Lucien's manuscript, and pawns his watch to buy firewood for his room.

D'Arthez listens for seven hours as Lucien reads, then gives him a serious critique, which includes some Balzacian analysis of the flaws in Scott, particularly as a model, and of British prudery: "Walter Scott lacks passion; it is a closed book to him; or perhaps he found it was ruled out by the hypocritical morals of his native land. Woman for him is duty incarnate... His women all proceed from Clarissa Harlowe." Lucien thanks him by taking him to dinner, spending another twelve francs. D'Arthez, he learns, is a student of philosophy who ekes out a living by writing "poorly-paid  articles for biographical and encyclopaedic dictionaries or dictionaries of natural science." And Lucien goes home to rewrite his novel along the lines suggested by him.

In the following days, Lucien "attached himself like a chronic malady to d'Arthez" and becomes acquainted with his circle of friends, a "cénacle" of which d'Arthez is the unofficial leader: Horace Bianchon, a surgeon; Léon Giraud, a philosopher; Joseph Bridau, a painter; Fulgence Ridal, a writer of comic verse and plays; and Michel Chrestien, a political thinker "who dreamed of a European federation" and who died in the June Rebellion of 1832. Too bad the edition I'm reading lacks annotation to clue us in to the originals of some of these men. Balzac paints an admiring, idealized portrait of the group, who, when Lucien spends his last sou, chip in to give him two hundred francs. He writes to Daniel, Eve, and his mother, who report that things are dire for them financially too, but send him three hundred francs, with which he is able to repay the cénacle. They are offended: "Here we don't lend money to one another, we give it," Bridau says. They urge him not to lose his poetic ideals, but to "put your trust in hard work."

Lucien, however, is ready to scrap his ideals and find work as a journalist, to the horror of the others: "That would be the end of the fine, gentle Lucien we love and know," d'Arthez says. Chrestien regards journalism as "treachery and infamy." When Lucien says he could just do it for a while to get back on his feet and then return to literature, Giraud says that's what Machiavelli would do, "but not Lucien de Rubempré." But Lucien is determined to play the Machiavel, and sets out to explore the possibilities of journalism. He goes to the offices of one of the "petits journaux" and encounters some Dickensian grub street characters, including a reviewer whose voice is "a cross between the miaowing of a cat and the asthmatic choke of a hyena." He learns that opinions in the newspaper are bought and sold. And he learns from the guardian of the newspaper offices, an old veteran of the Napoleonic campaigns named Girodeau, that the editor is Andoche Finot, who lives in the rue Feydeau. But after staking out Finot's lodgings without getting near him, he decides to hunt down Etienne Lousteau at Flicoteaux's.

Lucien has been dining side-by-side with d'Arthez at Flicoteaux's.

At present, d'Arthez was correcting the manuscript of The Archer of Charles the Ninth; he recast certain chapters, wrote the finest pages to be found in it and composed the splendid preface which perhaps overshadows the work but which brought so much illumination to writers of the new school. 

But when Lousteau appears at the restaurant, Lucien changes tables to eat with him, as "d'Arthez looked at Lucien with one of those benign glances in which reproach is wrapped in forgiveness." And when he leaves the restaurant with Lousteau, "he pretended not to see his brother of the Cénacle."

Lousteau explains to Lucien some of the rules of the literary world, one of which is that it's currentlhy divided into two camps, the romantics and the classicists, and that the royalists are romantics and the liberals classicists. Lousteau belongs to the romantics. Lucien reads him his sonnets, but is disturbed because Lousteau listens with no expression until he explains that "In Paris to listen without saying a word is high praise." Balzac explains:

Had he had more experience of literary life, he would have known that, with writers, silence and curtness in such circumstances betoken the jealousy aroused by a fine work, just as their admiration denotes the pleasrue they feel on listening to a mediocre work which confirms them in their self-esteem.