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.

7. Lost Illusions, by Honoré de Balzac, pp. 244-266

Part Two: A Great Man in Embryo, 9. Good advice; 10. A third variety of publisher; 11. The Wooden Galleries

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Lousteau sums up Lucien's position simply: "You have the stuff of three poets in you; but, if you reckon to live on what your poetry brings in, you have time to die half a dozen deaths before you make your name." In short, he needs contacts in the publishing world, and he needs to know how it works: "In literature, as in the theatre, much happens behind the scenes." And he urges Lucien to get out while he still can: "Don't throw honour away, as I do, in order to live." He explains that he was penniless even after his first play was presented, and that he now lives primarily not on writing but on selling the tickets that theater owners give him in exchange for favorable reviews and the books that publishers send him for review. Actresses also pay for reviews, even unfavorable ones, because they know that it's better to be criticized than to be ignored. His mistress is an actress, though he once "dreamt of splendid love affairs with the most distinguished women in high society." And he has no scruples left: He will write a negative review of a book he admires if the editor tells him to because the publisher wouldn't send an extra copy of it.

Lucien still refuses to believe that he will end up like Lousteau, who tells him "I feel sorry for you. I see in you what I used to be, and I'm sure that in a year or two you'll be as I am now." So Lousteau agrees to act as a kind of mentor: "I'll introduce you this evening to one of the kings of the book trade and a few journalists."

Excited by the prospect of an immediate wrestle between mankind and himself, the inexperienced young man had no idea how real was the spiritual degradation which the journalist had denounced. He did not know he had to choose between two different paths, two systems for which the Cénacle and journalism respectively stood: the one way being long, honourable and certain, the other beset with reefs, dangerous, full of many runnels in which his conscience was bound to get bedraggled.... At the moment he could see no difference between d'Arthez's noble friendship and Lousteau's easy-going comradeship.

So he dresses himself up in his finest and, looking like "a Greek god," goes to Lousteau's "dirty and dreary" quarters. "What a difference there was between this cynical disorderliness and the decent poverty in which d'Arthez lived!" comments Balzac, continuing to lay the moralizing on a little bit too thickly. While Lucien is there, a bookseller named Barbet comes to inspect some review copies Lousteau is selling him. On most of them, the pages are still uncut, which causes Lucien to ask how Lousteau will write reviews of them if he hasn't read them and is now selling them. Barbet looks at him in astonishment and says, "It's plain to see that this gentleman hasn't the misfortune to be a man of letters." After the complex deal is finished -- it involves using "bills" (IOUs) in lieu of cash -- Lousteau explains how reviewing works:

Take Travels in Egypt: I opened the book and read a bit here and there without cutting the pages, and I discovered eleven mistakes in the French. I shall write a column to the effect that even if the author can interpret the duck-lingo carved on the Egyptian pebbles they call obelisks, he doesn't know his own language -- and I shall prove it to him. I shall say that instead of talking about natural history and antiquities he ought only to have concerned himself with the future of Egypt, the progress of civilization, the means of winning Egypt over to France which, after conquering it and then losing it again, could still establish a moral ascendancy over it. Then a few pages of patriotic twaddle, the whole interlarded with tirades on Marseilles, the Levant and our trading interests.

And if the author had done that, Lousteau explains, he would have criticized him for not paying "attention to Art" and giving the reader a picturesque travel book instead. He reveals that his mistress, Florine, reads the novels she gets and that he writes an article based on her opinions, except "When she's been bored by what she calls 'literary verbiage' I take the book into serious consideration." Lucien, "still imbued with the doctrines of the Cénacle," is startled by all this cynicism and asks "what about criticism, the sacred task of criticism?" Lousteau is beyond any such notions.

He shows Lucien a trick: He has marked a line between the string, wrapped around Lucien's manuscript of his poems, and the paper. It will reveal whether Dauriat actually removes the string and reads the manuscript. And they go off to "the Wooden Galleries, where the supposedly up-to-date publishers then reigned in all their glory." Balzac devotes a chapter to depicting the shambling, filthy, fleamarket-like, prostitute-filled galleries.