25. Lost Illusions, by Honoré de Balzac, pp. 589-682

Part Three: An Inventor's Tribulations, The "Fatal Member of the Family", 22. An unexpected triumph; 23. How the triumph had been staged; 24. A rare kind of devotion; 25. The pride of his province?; 26. The snake in the grass; 27. Lucien takes his revenge; 28. The peak of disaster; 29. A last farewell; 30. A chance encounter; 31. The story of a favourite; 32. A history lecture for the ambitious -- by a disciple of Machiavelli; 33. A lecture on ethics -- by a disciple of Mendoza; 34. A Spanish profile; 35. Why criminality and corruption go hand in hand; 36. On the brink of surrender; 37. The effect of a night in gaol; 38. A day too late; 39. The history of a business venture; 40. Conclusion

_____

And so all the plot-knots have been knotted: The Cointets, Petit-Claud and old Séchard have made their plans for seizing David and his process, Lucien has returned and is ready prey for those conniving against David, and David is in deep trouble. Now it remains for the novelist to untie all the knots. He has several choices at this point: He can play the sentimental moralist and mete out justice, dispensing punishment for avarice (the Cointets and old Séchard), vanity (Lucien) and guile (Petit-Claud) and rewards for virtue (Eve and David). Or he can be the cynical realist and demonstrate what we know from the real world: that the vicious aren't always punished or the virtuous rewarded.

But Balzac chooses neither path to his dénouement. The novel, after all, is called Lost Illusions, and the readers should be under no illusion that their hopes for the characters will be fulfilled. Instead, Balzac becomes the cynical moralist (or sentimental realist) and gives us an ending with overtones of Goethe and Voltaire.

So Lucien opens the Angoulême newspaper and finds himself a celebrity: An article acclaims both his volume of poetry, Les Marguerites, but also his novel. He is called "a rival of Petrarch!!!" It also mentions the patronage of the former Madame de Bargeton, now Madame la Comtesse du Châtelet, and even revives the idea of his assuming "the name and title of the illustrious Rubempré family." Eve, of course, sees through this bit of puffery: The newspaper is owned by the Cointets, she points out, and under the circumstances, "here you must be on your guard about the slightest things." Lucien is only momentarily brought back to reality: A letter addressed to him arrives, inviting him to dine with Monsieur le Comte Sixte du Châtelet and Madame la Comtesse du Châtelet. Old Séchard is impressed: "They're talking about you in the town as if you were a somebody." But Eve protests, "You're surely not going to accept this invitation?" She suspects a conspiracy is afoot. Lucien replies that his influence with the Comtesse could save David: He'll tell her about the invention and she'll help get money from the government to fund it. And that night, Lucien is serenaded by the young people of Angoulême, who hurl flowers and laurel wreaths through the windows. He beams in triumph, but his mother and his sister are troubled with doubts.

As well they might be: the whole thing has been staged by Petit-Claud, who is in the midst of his negotiations for the hand of Françoise de La Haye. The Sénonches have, in fact, moved into the house formerly occupied by the Bargetons, and it is there that the solicitor is introduced to the Comtesse du Châtelet, in "the boudoir in which Lucien's misfortunes had begun and in which they were about to reach their consummation." Petit-Claud asks how she wishes Lucien to be received now that he has returned -- with "contempt or adulation." They decide on the latter, and Petit-Claud knows that he has succeeded. So the article, the serenade, and the invitation to dine with the Comte and Comtesse are the result. Petit-Claud also brings a deputation of Lucien's former schoolfellows to see him and to stage a banquet in his honor. And when Petit-Claud reveals to Lucien that he was the one who wrote the fawning newspaper article, he gains his complete trust.

Lucien writes to Lousteau to order fashionable clothes in exchange for forgiving the thousand-franc debt Lousteau owes him. Eve is astonished when she sees Lucien in the clothes that are sent. And at Lucien's instruction Lousteau also places an item in the Paris newspapers about how well-received his return to Angoulême has been. The banquet is a huge success as well, and even David, in his hiding place at Basine Clerget's, hears the music. Petit-Claud walks Lucien home afterward, telling him that tomorrow he will sign a contract of marriage to Mademoiselle de La Haye and that the Comtesse will be there, so that Lucien, who has praised her in a toast at the banquet, should also attend.

At that moment, David appears, even though Eve has written him warning him not to try to contact Lucien or let him know where the hiding-place is. But David has been in hiding too long, so he persuades Basine that he can slip out, see Lucien and his wife and child, and return safely. Petit-Claud watches as David and Lucien go in the house. Cérizet, who has been hiding nearby, has figured out David's hiding place, so he and Petit-Claud set a trap for David. The solicitor, though he has sworn he's a royalist in order to gain the hand of Mademoiselle de La Haye, is in fact a secret member of the Opposition. He now plots to buy the Séchard printing-office to start a Liberal newspaper under Cérizet's editorship. And the next day, Cérizet tells Petit-Claud that he has a plan to get David arrested.

Meanwhile, Lucien has David that his plan is to seduce the Comtesse and "persuade her to ask the Ministry to allot you a subsidy of twenty thousand francs for your researches." He goes to the Sénonches to witness the signing of the marriage contract of Petit-Claud and Mademoiselle de La Haye. He makes a huge impression on the Angoulême aristocracy in his finery, and makes a sensation when he is reunited with Madame du Châtelet. Once again, he uses the bishop as a foil in his encounter with her in the same boudoir. He whispers to her that he loved her, and the bishop "hastily regained the salon, realizing that his dignity might be compromised if he stayed with this pair of former lovers." Everyone else stays away until du Châtelet intervenes. But the Comtesse tells her husband, "I am talking to Monsieur de Rubempré about matters which are important to you. It's a question of rescuing an inventor who is about to fall victim to the basest form of intrigue, and you must come to his help." When du Châtelet tells Lucien, "From tonight your brother-in-law may consider himself out of danger," Cointet and Petit-Claud are shocked. But Petit-Claud assures Cointet that he still has a trick in store.

The trick is Cérizet's: He has seduced one of Basine's laundresses, getting her pregnant, and she reveals David's hiding place. From Petit-Claud, he obtains a letter Lucien has written to him on Eve's writing paper. He knows how to wash the paper to remove what Lucien has written and forges a note to David from Lucien saying that he can come out of hiding. The laundress is to tell Basine that Eve wants to see her, and while she's out, knock on the door of David's hiding place and give him the letter. The plan works, and David is arrested. When Eve and Lucien come across the bailiffs taking David away, she asks why he came out of hiding. It was Lucien's letter, he says. Eve faints, and Lucien, who "could not fathom the misunderstanding due to the forged letter," tells his mother that it's his fault. "Thunderstruck by his mother's maledictory glance, he went upstairs to his room and locked himself in."

In his room, Lucien writes a farewell letter to Eve in which he says, "in many a family there is a fatal being who, for that family, is a sort of blight. That is what I am in this family." He is "so afraid of the future that I don't want to have a future." Resolved to commit suicide, he tells her not to search for him. He remembers a deep pool near the Charente where he plans to fill his pocket with stones and drown himself, but on the way there he comes across a traveler who has disembarked from the stagecoach to Paris, going on foot while the coach makes its way slowly up a long hill. The man, who appears to be a Spanish priest, offers Lucien a cigar which he declines: "No cigar-smoke can blow away my sorrows," he says, and rejects the priest's offer to console him.

"Oh! I'm an out-an-out atheist. I don't believe in God, or in society, or in the possibility of happiness. Take a good look at me, father, for in a few hours' time I shall no longer exist. I shall never see the sun again!" said Lucien, somewhat bombastically, pointing to the heavens. 

The priest then tells Lucien that he needs a secretary, and offers to hire him, so Lucien joins him in the stagecoach and tells him the story of his life. Along the way, they pass the family home of the Rastignacs, which Lucien points out: "The first time he mentioned the name, the Spaniard gave a start." In a footnote, the translator tells us that the priest is actually "the master-criminal Vautrin in disguise" and that Vautrin had been involved with Rastignac in Balzac's Old Goriot.

The priest, aka Abbé Carlos Herrera, aka Vautrin, now reassures Lucien, "If the good Monsieur Séchard has made a discovery, he'll be a rich man. Rich people have never been put in prison for debt." And he proceeds to outline a very Machiavellian view of the world.

"Do you know why I'm giving you this little lecture on history? It's because I believe you to be inordinately ambitious."

"Yes, father, I am." 

"I could see that," the Canon went on. "But at this moment you're saying to yourself: 'This canon from Spain is inventing anecdotes and squeezing the juice out of history in order to prove to me that I've been too virtuous.'" 

Lucien smiled at seeing his thoughts so well divined. ... Caught in the spell of this cynical conversation, Lucien was all the more inclined to cling on to life again because he felt as if he had been snatched by a powerful arm from a suicide's watery grave.

Herrera-Vautrin's counsel is "secretiveness." And he tells Lucien, "Obey me as a wife obeys her husband, as a child obeys his mother, and I guarantee that in less than three years' time you'll be the Marquis de Rubempré, you'll marry into one of the noblest families in the Faubourg Saint-Germain and one day you'll have a seat on the bench of Peers." And if Lucien makes "this pact with me," he says, he will send fifteen thousand francs on the coach to Bordeaux to Lucien's sister. Lucien's skepticism about this offer vanishes when the "priest" shows him the money he is carrying with him on the stagecoach.

And so Lucien-Faust makes a deal with Vautrin-Mephistopheles.

Back in Angoulême, Petit-Claud is proposing another deal: a partnership between David and the Cointets. And Eve sees no choice but to accept it, for as the solicitor tells her, "If you try to safeguard your invention, your life will go on as it is now: nothing but legal wrangles." Of course, Boniface Cointet has every intention of screwing the Séchards on the deal. But the sordidness of the prison has already worn David down when Eve comes to see him there with the proposal. She is followed by Petit-Claud who, when he asks why David left his hiding place, hands him Cérizet's forged letter from Lucien. The solicitor pockets it "as if through absent-mindedness," thereby disposing of the evidence.

The money Herrera-Vautrin sends to Eve, however, arrives too late. The contract has been signed, on terms far more favorable to the Cointets than to David. And finally, the Cointets are able to buy David out of any share in the profits from the invention. "I'll accept any settlement that will leave us in peace," he says. So David and Eve retire to Marsac, where Eve has used part of the money Lucien sent to buy a tract of land next to old Séchard's. Kolb has learned the winery business from the old man, and when Séchard dies in 1829, David and Eve inherit "about two hundred thousand francs in real property." Boniface Cointet becomes a multimillionaire and a Peer of France. Petit-Claud becomes Attorney-General.

David Séchard has a loving wife, two sons and a daughter. He has had the good taste never to talk about his experiments. Eve has had the good sense to make him renounce the disastrous vocation of inventor.... He cultivates literature as a relaxation while living the happy, leisurely life of a landowner developing his estate. 

In other words, like Candide, he cultivates his garden. And as for Lucien-Faust, his story continues elsewhere in the Comédie humaine.

24. Lost Illusions, by Honoré de Balzac, pp. 573-588

Part Three: An Inventor's Tribulations, The History of a Lawsuit, 19. A bride for Petit-Claud; 20. The Curé has his say; The "Fatal Member of the Family", 21. The prodigal's return

_____

Boniface Cointet and Petit-Claud, never the most solid of allies, now begin to intrigue against one another. Cointet: "If you can manage either to put David in prison or to get him into our power by means of a deed of partnership, you shall marry Mademoiselle de La Haye." Petit-Claud: "Introduce me tomorrow to Madame de Sénonches, make a positive arrangement for me, in short fulfill your promise, or I'll pay Séchard's debt, sell my practice and become his partner." Cointet has already been working behind the scenes to persuade Francis du Hautoy, the girl's father, that Petit-Claud will be a good match for his illegitimate daughter, whose small fortune is no great attractor, so he's willing to accede to the solicitor's demand.

Madame de Sénonches has bought Madame de Bargeton's old house and is now determined to rule Angoulême society. Cointet brings Petit-Claud to meet her and her "beautiful ward," who is in fact, "a shrewish, sour-faced, skinny little person with an ungraceful figure and insispid blond hair," and "exceedingly unmarriageable despite her aristocratic little airs." On seeing her, Petit-Claud gets cold feet, and, sensing that Madame de Sénonches is none too impressed with Petit-Claud, Cointet takes du Hautoy aside and tries to negotiate. The current public attorney, Milhaud, with whom Eve met earlier, is in line for a promotion. Du Hautoy, with the cooperation of the former Madame de Bargeton, now the Comtesse du Châtelet, Cointet suggests, can see to it that Petit-Claud takes over as public attorney as the first step in the solicitor's rise to higher and higher office. Du Hautoy is satisfied with the plan and agrees to the match. And though Petit-Claud is still depressed by "how ugly she is!", Cointet persuades him that "She has an air of distinction" and that thanks to a start as public attorney, "in ten years' time you'll be Keeper of the Seals." So Petit-Claud sets out to persuade old Séchard to help rein David into a partnership with the Cointets.

The Curé from Marsac, where Lucien is now resting, arrives in Angoulême to give Eve the news about her brother. Meanwhile, old Séchard, Cointet and Petit-Claud are meeting to determine David's fate and they interrupt the priest as he arrives. The curé tells them that Lucien is in Marsac, "half-dead with fatigue and misery." Cointet and Petit-Claud excuse themselves because they have to get ready for dinner with Madame de Sénonches, and when they get out of earshot Petit-Claud says, "We'll use Lucien as a decoy" to catch David. But the solicitor is startled when Cointet says, "The great thing would be to take out the patent in our own name!"

Madame Chardon has aged rapidly under the weight of her children's difficulties, but she "regarded [Lucien] as a reprobate since learning about the forged drafts." The priest, seeing the effect of Lucien has had on both mother and sister, "no longer felt pity for Lucien, who had put them on the rack." When she hears the story of Lucien's return, Madame Chardon notes the irony: "He went away inside Madame de Bargeton's barouche, sitting beside her, and came back in the boot!"

The priest returns to Marsac to tell Lucien of the situation: "You have put your sister and brother-in-law in debt to the tune of ten or twelve thousand francs." But as he hikes back to Angoulême, Lucien's egotism takes hold again: "He even persuaded himself that he was a hero." He is happy to see that his father's name is no longer on the pharmacist's shop -- no longer a reminder of his bourgeois origins. But when he arrives, his mother says, "You have much to atone for here. You left us so that you might become the pride of the family, and you have plunged us into penury." He has also created difficulties that prevent his brother-in-law from completing the invention that would make his fortune. But she forgives him, which is mostly what Lucien hears in the rebuke. As for Eve, "The opinion d'Arthez had expressed about him, one which Eve had adopted, could be divined in her gestures, looks and tone of voice. Lucien was an object of pity." But mother and sister are also "sufficiently afraid of his light-headedness not to tell him where David was hiding." And they are right:

From the second day onwards, as he tried to fathom why his mother and sister had so little confidence in him, the poet was seized with a thought, not of aversion, but of petulance. He applied the standards of Parisian life to this chaste provincial life and forgot that the patient mediocrity  reigning in this household, so sublime in its resignation, was the work of his hands. "They are bourgeois, they can't understand me," he told himself. 

23. Lost Illusions, by Honoré de Balzac, pp. 548-572

Part Three: An Inventor's Tribulations, The History of a Lawsuit, 15. Climax; 16. Imprisonment for debt in the provinces; 17. An obdurate father; 18. The pack pauses before the kill

_____

Lucien writes Eve to tell about Coralie's death and its effect on him: "I have lost many illusions here, and I shall lose many more as I go about begging for the little money I need in order to bury an angel's body in consecrated ground!" And he tells her in a postscript that "a worthy merchant of the name of Camusot" had come to his rescue.

But their reflections on Lucien's plight are interrupted by Marion's announcement that Doublon and his men are there to repossess everything. Petit-Claud arrives to reassure them that this won't happen, but also to inform them that they will owe legal fees even if they succeed in blocking Doublon, which Eve regards as a "remedy worse than the disease."

Old Séchard arrives too, and Petit-Claud informs him that he owes him "seven hundred francs for having intervened in this case," which enrages the old man. But when Petit-Claud asks him, "In an hour or two they'll try to get your son in prison. Will you let him be taken there?" Séchard, who has been playing with his grandson Lucien, "decided that they were staking on his paternal benevolence, and he was afraid of being exploited." He balks at helping his son: "David's such a scholar that he'll surely manage to pay his debts."

Petit-Claud, who is playing all sides for whatever he can get out of them, says,

"Listen to the truth: it's you who got David in his present predicament by selling; him your printing-works for three times its real value and you've ruined him by making him pay this exorbitant price.... You're making a pretence of prodigious love for you grandson in order to disguise the bankruptcy of your feelings for your son and daughter-in-law.... You fondle that little one so that you may appear to love someone in your family and not be taxed with hardheartedness." 

But the truth only gets Séchard's back up, which is in fact what Petit-Claud hopes will happen. Cointet has promised him that when David goes to prison, he'll be introduced to Madame de Sénonches and her ward.

Eve realizes at this point that Petit-Claud can't be trusted, and even the more naive David wonders how Petit-Claud knows so much about his father, not realizing the solicitor is involved with the Cointets and Métivier. When Petit-Claud leaves, he urges David to go see the Cointets and go into partnership with them on his invention. This is the first Séchard has heard of an invention, and Petit-Claud tells him it's a process for making paper more cheaply.

"One more trick for catching me," old Séchard cried. "You're all as thick as thieves. If David has made an invention like that he doesn't need me. He'll be a millionaire! Good-bye, my friends. Nothing doing." And the old man clattered downstairs. 

Balzac explains the obstacles that still remain in David's getting a patent: He needs not only a patent for the invention, but also a "patent of improvement" -- otherwise a competitor can come along and make a slight change in the invention and claim it for his own.

Eve, trying to figure out what Petit-Claud is up to, goes to see Milhaud, the deputy public attorney. (David's mother has just helped to deliver Milhaud's son.) He informs her that the lawyers "are battening on you!" but that there is little they can do other than pay what they owe. The situation, in short, is hopeless. But Kolb manages to overhear what Doublon, the Cointets and Cérizet are up to with regard to sending David to prison: "We'll leave him for a few days until he fells secure," Doublon says, "then we'll pounce on him some day before sunrise or sunset." And he tells them that he has men watching David's house. This is exactly what Kolb needs to know, so he hires a horse and goes back to the house, where he tells them what's afoot.

Eve realizes that the Cointets are behind the lawsuit, because they want to steal David's invention. And when Kolb proposes that they find a place for David to hide, she suggests that he go to Basine Clerget's. Kolb will go out with David, and when the bailiff's men see them he and David will get on the horse and ride away too fast for them to catch up. Meanwhile, Eve goes to see Postel to draw off suspicion and then sneaks over to Basine's to arrange a hiding place for David. When she gets home, Marion tells her, "They've gone."

When Kolb and David get to Marsac on the horse, David decides to go see his father again. Kolb scolds the old man, but David tells him "fathers are always in the right" and sends him off to stable the horse. David proposes to his father that he share in the profits from his invention in return for paying off the debt. Séchard can give him a shed in which to work "in which no one can see me." The old man protests,

"So you don't trust the man who brought you into the world."
"It's not that. I don't trust the man who robbed me of the means of living in it."
"You're right! Everyone for himself!" said the old man. "Very well, I'll put you in my store-room." 

And he agrees that if David can show him the product the next day, he'll give him "twenty-five thousand francs -- on condition that I get the same amount back every year." David says it's a deal.

Séchard gives David a little room in which he distills wine into brandy, which is exactly what David needs. But at two in the morning, Kolb catches Séchard peeking into the room through a hole he has made. He is sent away, and in the morning David brings him thirty sheets of paper he has made. The old man can find no fault with them, but he still wants further tests. And when David admits that there's still a problem with the process that makes the paper too expensive, Séchard withholds the money until that's solved. Unable to come to an agreement with him, David returns with Kolb to Angoulême, where David slips unseen into the room at Basine Clerget's house.

Séchard moves into an attic room at David's house and tries to wheedle Eve into disclosing the secret of David's invention. And he goes to see the Cointets, who tell him that if David's process works, they'll "go in fifty-fifty with him for his invention." Marion catches him trying to break into the shed where David has been conducting his experiments, and he bribes her with twelve francs not to tell Eve. She tells Eve anyway, because there's nothing of significance left in the shed.

David solves the remaining problem with the invention and writes a letter to Eve on the paper he has produced, enclosing some samples. She shows them to Séchard and says, "Give your son the price you get for your vintage and let him make his fortune. He'll repay you ten times over. He has reached success!" Séchard takes the samples to the Cointets, who admit that David has succeeded and say they'll pay off his debts if he'll go into partnership with them. The Cointets know that David will need capital to industrialize the process and to obtain the patents needed. But Séchard doesn't trust either them or his son:

"If I pay David's debts he'll be free, and once he's free he needn't take me on as a partner. He knows very well I swindled him in our first partnership, and won't feel like starting a second one. So it's in my interest to keep him in prison and down on his luck."

Similarly, the Cointets know that once David is out of debt they have no hold over him either. The only solution is to keep him in debt and in hiding. 

22. Lost Illusions, by Honoré de Balzac, pp. 522-548

Part Three: An Inventor's Tribulations, The History of a Lawsuit, 10. A free public lecture on dishonoured bills for those unable to meet them; 11. Lucien under distraint; 12. "Your house is on fire"; 13. A contrast in loyalties; 14. Keeping the fire going

_____

After Eve learns that her brother has forged David's signature to the bills, Balzac gives us a "lecture" on the financial system in which the Séchards have found themselves entangled, on the premise that "there is nothing about which people are more ignorant than what they ought to know: the workings of the law!" Unfortunately for a reader like me who is ignorant of finance, and especially of the financial system of France in the 1820s, the explanation is fairly hard-going. But the upshot is simple: David is screwed. Not only is he responsible for the debts Lucien has laid on him, but he also has incurred the distrust of the public, who even express "approval and admiration for the severity which old Séchard was showing to his son."

Eve is faced with a choice of sides: her husband or her brother. And she chooses her husband, especially after David receives this note from Métivier, the chief creditor in the case:

Your brother-in-law, Monsieur Chardon, is a man of bad faith and has registered his furniture under the name of the actress with whom he is living. You ought, Monsieur, to have loally informed me of these circumstances to spare me from taking futile legal proceedings, for you did not answer my letter of May tenth. Do not therefore take it in evil part if I ask you immediately to reimburse me for the three bills of exchange and all my expenses.

Until this moment, Eve has thought that Lucien "had atoned for his crime by paying off the forged bills." She sends David off to see Petit-Claud, who is not only his solicitor but also attended school with David. Ignorant of Petit-Claud's deal with Boniface Cointet, David trusts the advice the solicitor gives him. He is still banking on the success of the paper-making process he is inventing, though Petit-Claud advises that commercializing the invention, including taking out a patent, "will take time and money." He doesn't succeed in worming the secret of the process out of David, however. Petit-Claud gets David to sign over power of attorney to him, and to send Eve to do likewise. And he learns from David that the person he trusts most is his "watch-dog," Kolb. He ends with this warning to David: "your house is on fire."

As David walks home from Petit-Claud's, he chews on a stalk of nettle that he has been working with in his research and discovers that the ball of chewed pulp in his mouth has the adhesive properties he needs for paper-making. This lifts his spirits, but Eve is not so sanguine. She is determined to go back to work -- her mother can look after the baby, whom they have named -- of course -- Lucien. She has heard that the forewoman at the laundry where she worked has retired and that a woman she knows from her days there, Basine Clerget, has taken over for her. Eve decides to go to work for her. She also writes Métivier asking him to list the printing-office for sale again, telling him they will pay the debt out of what they get for it. Métivier is away, however, and his clerk tells he he can do nothing in his absence. But he will renew the bills if David's father will agree to endorse them.

So Eve set out on her own to see old Séchard, who remains obdurate and bad-mouths David: "You'd like to know what David is? I'll tell you. He's a good-for-nothing, a scholar!... I'm no scholar. I never had a foreman's job at the Didots, a first-rate printing-firm. But I've never had a summons!" And when he learns that David is being sued, he says, "That's what comes of being able to sign your name!" But he agrees to go see his lawyer, Cachan, to see what can be done.

Eve returns and tells David of the situation, and while they are talking Marion and Kolb come to see them. They have saved up eleven hundred francs and are willing to invest it in David's invention. David sends Kolb with a thousand francs to Cachan, but warns him not to divulge anything about the invention and not to let anyone see him when he's gathering the herbs that David is testing for the paper. When they leave, he says to Eve, "It would be worth getting rich if only to be able to reward such kind souls."

More legal maneuvering takes place: Eve is recognized as David's creditor for ten thousand francs, the amount of her dowry, and "In discharge of this debt he made over to her the stock-in-trade of the printing-office and the household furniture." And when old Séchard goes to see the solicitor Cachan about recovering the rent David owes him, he is sent to Petit-Claud. As a result of these (to me) somewhat arcane maneuvers, the court "ceded the ownership of only movable furniture to Madame Séchard, rejected the claims of Séchard senior and flatly ordered him to pay four hundred and thirty-four francs and sixty-five centimes in costs." Balzac sums up:

David now owed Métivier, by formal judgment and valid writs of execution -- quite legally in fact -- the lump sum of five thousand two hundred francs and twenty-five centimes exclusive of interest. He owed Petit-Claud twelve hundred francs plus his fees, the figure for which ... was left to his generosity. Madame Séchard owed Petit-Claud about three  hundred and fifty francs, and fees into the bargain. Old Séchard's debt came to four hundred and thirty-four francs and sixty-five centimes, and Petit-Claud also demanded three hundred francs from him in fees. The whole thus amounted to some ten thousand francs.

All from the bill Lucien forged for three thousand francs.

21. Lost Illusions, by Honoré de Balzac, pp. 507-522

Part Three: An Inventor's Tribulations, The History of a Lawsuit, 7. The first thunderbolt; 8. A glance at paper-making; 9. Provincial solicitors

_____

Eve has her baby, but David receives a letter from Lucien informing him about the forged bills and urging him, "Burn this letter and say nothing about it to my sister and mother." Given his wife's delicate condition, David thinks it best to follow Lucien's advice. He tells Eve that Lucien is in "frightful difficulties" and that he has sent "drafts for a thousand francs each, to be redeemed in one, two and three months."

Then Rastignac comes to stay for a few days with his family and spreads gossip about Lucien which, when Eve hears it, causes her to go speak with him. Rastignac tells her about Lucien's "liaison with Coralie, the duel with Michel Chrestien resulting from his treachery towards d'Arthez, in short all the details of Lucien's career." She is shocked, but she doesn't fully trust Rastignac's version of things, so she writes to d'Arthez. In his reply, he confirms the general outline of what Rastignac has told her, but also tells her about Lucien's visit to him with the first draft of the scathing review of his book, and that Lucien "was ashamed of what he was doing." He also tells her:

Your Lucien has poetry in him but is no real poet. He's a dreamer, not a thinker; he makes a great to-do but is not creative. Forgive me for saying so, but he's an effeminate little person who loves to show off -- and that is what is wrong with most Frenchmen. And so Lucien will always sacrifice his best friend in order to make a parade of wit.... If the vicissitudes of life -- his life is at present very wretched and at the mercy of chance -- should bring this dreamer back to you, use all your influence to keep him in the bosom of his family, for until he has acquired some stability of character Paris will always be a danger to him.

The news is so stunning that it causes Eve's breast milk to stop flowing and forces her to hire a wet nurse. David tries to reassure her that things will work out all right, but even in the midst of doing so he almost reveals the latest of Lucien's misdeeds: the forgery. And when Eve continues to worry about how they are going to meet the obligations forced on them by the attempt to help Lucien, David tries to console her by showing her the paper he has made in his experiments, saying that he plans "to be in paper-manufacture what Jacquard was in the weaving industry." 

But Cérizet and Boniface Cointet are spying on David -- Cérizet has even made a hole in the roof of the shed where David works in order to peek in on him. Cointet has a better plan -- when the renewal of the lease comes due, Cérizet will propose to become a master-printer and offer her half the value of the license and stock in the print-shop. The Cointet firm also dabbles in banking, and has just received Lucien's forged notes. Cointet then meets with a young solicitor named Pierre Petit-Claud, a tailor's son who is ambitious to rise in status and hopes to do so by marrying rich. Cointet knows just the mate for him: the illegitimate daughter of François du Hautoy and Madame de Sénonches. The latter now poses as her godmother. Cointet tells Petit-Claud, "I can get the girl for you. If you marry Françoise de La Haye, you'll add a large part of the aristocracy of Angoulême to your clientele" She's also worth thirty thousand francs.

Petit-Claud is interested, and all he has to do, Cointet tells him, is become David Séchard's solicitor, representing him in the legal proceedings to come when he's asked to pay up on the forged bills: "The poor devil has three thousand francs to pay us in bills: he won't be able to pay them, and you'll defend him against legal proceedings in such a way as to load him with enormous costs." Of course, Petit-Claud is to say that he has never met Cointet. The object, Cointet tells him, is not to ruin David "entirely. But we've got to hold him in prison for a time."

20. Lost Illusions, by Honoré de Balzac, pp. 496-507

Part Three: An Inventor's Tribulations, The History of a Lawsuit, 5. A Judas in the making; 6. The two Cointets

_____

Unfortunately, the Shepherd's Almanac, into which Eve has invested her profits, is running behind schedule because Cérizet has been working so slowly on it. Cérizet, who "had brought his Paris street-arab ways with him to Angoulême," is actually working part-time for the Cointets, the other printers in the town. Moreover, he is handing them information not only about the Séchards' business but also about David's invention. The Cointets decide to do a Shepherd's Almanac of their own.

Eve is suspicious of Cérizet -- she even notices that he is paying a lot of attention to what David is doing in his workshop -- but she has no leverage over him: He makes more for his proofreading at the Cointets than he does setting type for her. When David learns that the Cointets are also producing an almanac and that Eve's is behind schedule, he helps set the type to get back up to speed. The venture is a failure: Eve is forced to sell it for less than she planned because of the competition from the Cointets. She runs an advertisement in the Publishers' Journal in Paris offering the print-shop for sale, not because she really plans to sell it but to scare the Cointets, who don't want a more aggressive printer moving in on their territory.

The Cointet brothers, Boniface and Jean, decide to come to terms with Eve, who confronts them with her awareness that Cérizet has been spying on their behalf. During the negotiations, despite Eve's efforts to warn him off, David naively reveals that the research he has been doing is aimed at "the manufacture of paper at fifty per cent below the present cost-price." The brothers, who know that David may be a bad businessman but is a highly intelligent man with a real scientific bent, want to get in on the project, particularly Boniface, who runs a paper-mill. They propose to hire the Séchards' plant to do some of their work. "After two hours of haggling Eve obtained two thousand francs for the half-year, a thousand of them to be paid in advance." But Eve is startled when the Cointets inform her that the employee who will be working for them in her plant is the traitor, Cérizet. David later says to Eve, though laughing when he says it, "Our enemies are inside the citadel!"

The brothers gloat, and Boniface predicts:

"The poor creatures will get into the habit of drawing the rent from their printing-press. They'll reckon on it and pile up debts. In six months' time we'll refuse to renew the lease, and then we shall see what this genius is made of. We'll offer to extricate him by going into partnership with him for the exploitation of his invention."

19. Lost Illusions, by Honoré de Balzac, pp. 479-496

Part Three: An Inventor's Tribulations, Introduction, 1. The doleful confession of a "child of the age"; 2. Back-kick from a donkey; The History of a Lawsuit, 3. The problem at issue; 4. A plucky wife

_____

Lucien leaves Paris, taking a bus as far as Longjumeau, where he sets out on foot, then hitches a ride to Tours, then on foot again to Poitiers and beyond. Along the road, he sees a barouche slowly climbing a slope. Unseen, he manages to scramble onto the back of the carriage between two pieces of luggage. He falls asleep and finds himself in the town of Mansle, where he had waited for Madame de Bargeton and his ride to Paris a year and half earlier. And, in a real stretch of a coincidence, it turns out that the carriage on which he has stowed away is that of "the new Prefect of the Charente -- the Comte Sixte du Châtelet -- and his wife, Louise de Nègrepelisse." The former Madame de Bargeton invites him to ride with them, but "Lucien coldly saluted the couple with a look which was both humble and menacing" and departs on foot.

Down to his last three francs and suffering from a fever, he begs lodging for a week from a miller named Courtois and his wife. He identifies himself as "Lucien de Rubempré, ... the son of Monsieur Chardon, who owned the chemist's shop in L'Houmeau before Postel. My sister married David Séchard, the printer in the Place du Mûrier in Angoulême." The miller recognizes David as "the son of the old fox who's running a vineyard at Marsac.... They say he's making his son sell up, and he owns more than two hundred thousand francs' worth of land, without counting what he keeps in his crock."

Lucien faints at the news that David is in financial difficulties, and the miller goes to fetch the doctor and the parish priest of Marsac, who know of Lucien's involvement with Madame de Bargeton as well as her marriage to Châtelet. The doctor tells Lucien that David is "probably in prison" because his father had refused to help him pay some debts -- those incurred by the notes Lucien had forged. Lucien confesses to the priest, telling him not only of the forgery but of his experiences in Paris. The priest agrees to go to Angoulême and find out what has happened to Lucien's mother and sister. In L'Houmeau, the priest learns from Postel, who bought the chemist's shop after Lucien's father died, and who wanted to marry Eve, that she's "living in appalling poverty." Postel, who signed the judgment against David that sent him to prison, tells the priest that Lucien can have his old room back. The priest sets off for Angoulême.

Balzac then flashes back to the story of David's troubles as he tries to develop a new process for making paper in response to the increased demand for it in the post-Restoration era of political discussion.

And so, curiously enough, while Lucien was getting caught in the cogwheels of the vast journalistic machine and running the risk of it tearing his honour and intelligence to shreds, David Séchard, in his distant printing office, was sureying the expansion of the periodical press in its material consequences. 

He had overextended himself in the wedding plans and in helping Lucien get to Paris, and he owed Postel a thousand francs, so the hope of making a breakthrough discovery was urgent.

David assures Eve, of course, that "all our tribulations will come to an end" once his invention succeeds. She is pregnant, but she decides to help out in the print shop while David works on his project. There are only three employees left: Cérizet, an apprentice David brought with him when he came home from Paris; Marion, who has been with the firm since old Séchard ran it; and Kolb, an Alsatian who had been stationed with the army in Angoulême. Marion and Kolb had fallen in love, even though she "was big and fat and thirty-six" and he "was five feet seven inches in height, well-built, and as strong as a fortress."

No one, however, has been keeping track of the accounts, so Eve asks to look at the books and discovers "that during the first six months of his wedded life David had failed to cover his rent, the interest on capital based on the value of his stock and his printer's license, Marion's wages, ink and finally the profits a printer should make." So Eve takes inventory and sets Kolb, Marion, and Cérizet to cleaning things up. She decides to use the paper on hand to print up broadsheets of "the illustrated folk-tales which peasants paste up on the walls of their cottages.... They cost her thirty francs to produce and brought in three hundred francs at a penny apiece." This success inspires her to use the profits to print a "Shepherd's Almanac" with a potential of two thousand francs' profit.

While this bustling activity was in its beginnings there came the heart-rending letters in which Lucien told his mother, sister and brother-in-law of his failure and financial difficulties in Paris. It is therefor easy to see that, in sending three hundred francs to the spoilt child, Eve, Madame Chardon and David had offered the poet their life's blood.

And as Eve's pregnancy advanced, there was good reason to wonder what would happen to them and their print shop.

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

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

_____

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.

3. Lost Illusions, by Honoré de Balzac, pp. 73-118

Part One: The Two Poets, 3. A social evening and a riverside stroll

_____

Lucien arrives early -- in fact, first -- at Madame de Bargeton's and is forced to make small talk with her husband, who is not up to the task of ransacking "the immense void within him in order to find something to say." Their awkward conversation proceeds by fits and starts, and Lucien becomes afraid that Monsieur Bargeton's silence is the result of suspicions about his relations with Madame de Bargeton. Finally, du Châtelet arrives, elegantly dressed, and surveys Lucien's clothing to conclude that he has nothing to worry about from this rival. "Lucien, already abashed by the finance official's elegance, told himself he would have his revenge when the gathering saw him with his face radiant with poetry." Finally, Madame de Bargeton enters.

Monsieur du Châtelet gallantly greeted this queenly person with nauseating compliments which drew a pleased smile form her, so happy she was to be praised in front of Lucien. She exchanged but one glance with her dear poet, and the politeness of her reply to the Director of Taxes was a virtual snub since it excluded him from the circle of her close acquaintances. 

A procession of guests enters, each of whom gets a detailed and satiric treatment reminiscent of Dickens or Daumier. "This gathering of odd people, with their strange assortment of dress and make-up, filled Lucien with awe, and his heart beat fast at finding himself the center of attention." He is introduced as "Monsieur de Rubempré" by Madame de Bargeton, but only her husband, the Bishop and a few others continue to call him that; "the greater part of this redoubtable gathering" continues to call him "Monsieur Chardon." He is "unaware that with the exception of Madame de Bargeton poetry was a closed book to the minds of everyone present."

He begins, as David had suggested, by reading from the volume by André Chénier. "Although André Chénier's poems had been published in 1819, no one in Angoulême had heard of him as yet." And as he reads he notices "the reflex action of wide yawns and the consequent exposure of teeth which seemed to be mocking him." Everyone in the audience is bored except for "two or three young people, and the Bishop," and Laure de Rastignac, the daughter of the Baron de Rastignac. Among the rest, some wonder why he read from a printed copy, and one of them explains that he works at a printing office. Finally du Châtelet explains that the poems aren't Lucien's but Chénier's, and the "assembly, with the exception of the Bishop, Madame de Rastignac and her two daughters, who had been impressed by the poetry, believed that it had been hoaxed and took offence at such deceit." Lucien continues to read from the book, however, until Madame de Bargeton is pressured to ask him to recite some of his own verse.

"He gazed at Madame de Bargeton with a somewhat fatuous air and announced the title: TO HER!" She is "visibly embarrassed," and the reaction after he reads the poem, revealing his infatuation, is one of polite hostility: "the ladies, enraged at having no poet at their service to call them angels, rose from their seats with boredom written on their faces and murmured in icy tones: Very good; lovely; perfect." One of them indignantly tells du Châtelet: "Letting a man call her an archangel! As if she were any better than us! And making us mix with such riff-raff: the son of a chemist and a sick-nurse, his sister a laundry-maid and himself a printer's assistant!" So "they set out to humiliate Lucien with their ironic and snobbish witticisms."

One of them, Francis du Hautoy, manages to implicate the Bishop, an admirer of Lucien's, in his plot to humiliate Lucien. He suggests to the Bishop that Lucien's poem was written about his mother. When he is praised by the Bishop, Lucien thanks him, "little knowing that the worthy prelate was about to become his executioner." Madame de Bargeton's triumphant look when the Bishop praises her protégé "struck home like so many javelins into the hearts of her rivals and redoubled their fury." So Lucien sets himself up for the kill, when he says, "Ideas gestate a long time in the womb of thought."

"You will have a painful delivery," interrupted Monsieur du Hautoy.
"Your excellent mother will be able to help you," said the Bishop.
This apparent witticism, so skilfully engineered, was the avenging shaft they had all been awaiting, and their eyes lit up with a gleam of delight. A smile of aristocratic satisfaction passed over everybody's face, and its effect was increased by Monsieur de Bargeton who, in his idiocy, gave vent to a belated laugh.
"My Lord, your wit is too subtle for us at this moment. These ladies do not understand you," said Madame de Bargeton. This single word froze all laughter and made them turn their eyes on her with astonishment. 

Madame de Bargeton urges Lucien to recite his poem "Saint John at Pathmos" to demonstrate that "A poet who draws all his inspiration from the Bible finds his true mother in the Church." But he is unable to recapture the attention of the group, some of which are now playing whist while others gather around the most aristocratic members of the assemblage, the Rastignacs and the Pimentels, to find out what they think of the poetry.

Madame de Bargeton withdraws to her boudoir, followed by Lucien, the Bishop ("whose Vicar-General had explained to him the deep irony contained in his untintended epigram and who wanted to make up for it") and Laure de Rastignac, who expresses "her simple faith in Lucien's genius." But they are in the minority:

The poet had been stripped of all his radiance; the landed proprietors saw no use in him at all; the social climbers feared him as a powerful menace to their ignorance; the women, jealous of Madame de Bargeton -- the Beatrice of this new Dante, according to the Vicar-General -- threw glances of cold disdain at him. 

So Lucien leaves, but not discouraged: His "fury at seeing his ambitious repulsed was giving him new strength." 

Meanwhile, David and Eve had been taking their walk along the river. Balzac is, unfortunately, no better at crafting a sentimental love scene than Dickens was, and some of the dialogue he gives the two lovers is exceedingly stilted, as when David proclaims, "People who love find infinite pleasure discovering the poetry which fills their soul in the undulations of a landscape, the transparency of the atmosphere and the scents which rise from the earth. Nature speaks for them."

Eve has initiated the walk on the pretext of talking about Lucien, which they do. David is concerned about the relationship with Madame de Bargeton because he knows that Lucien "loves to shine" and he fears, rightly, that "society will intensify his desires, which no amount of money will be able to satisfy" -- in short, that he will fall into "the kind of debauchery to which poets are prone," once Madame de Bargeton has cultivated "his taste for luxury." Eve is determined to support him, no matter what, but David warns her that "the amount your work brings in will never be proportionate to his needs." Eve is offended by his discouraging words, but he uses the need to support Lucien as a reason to propose marriage to her: They'll support him together. "Lucien could live on my second floor while I built him a flat above the penthouse at the end of the courtyard, unless my father were willing to build a second storey." That way, Lucien would have the privacy and independence he needs to write.

David admits that he's poor, and that "my father has taken pleasure in ruining me," but he tells Eve that she has "a genius for thrift" and that with her help, he can fulfill a project he's been working on. And he tells her that he has an idea for a cheaper way of making paper, based on her father's own idea of using "certain fibrous plants" instead of the cotton and linen rags currently used to make it. At this moment, Lucien returns from Madame de Bargeton, evidently downcast. He tells them what happened, and reveals his plan to marry Madame de Bargeton once her husband dies. They decide it's a good time to tell Lucien that they are planning to marry, but the effect on him is not what they think: He worries that "If Madame de Bargeton consents to become Madame de Rubempré, she will never want David Séchard as a brother-in-law!" But when they disclose their schemes to provide a place for Lucien to live, he brightens. David "prophesied such happiness for the family and such independence for his brother-in-law that Lucien fell under the spell of David's voice and Eve's caresses" and "forgot the painful crown of thorns which Society had crammed down on his head."

David goes to see his father to talk about his engagement to Eve and to see if he would be willing to add a second story to the house. When he arrives, his father is excitedly describing how successful his grape harvest has been and how much money he will make from it, but when David mentions his coming marriage, his father does an about-face: "Get married, all right. But as for giving you anything. I haven't a penny." He's upset at David's marring "a girl from L'Houmeu, you, a well-set-up business man" and demands the rent David owes him: "Sure enough, if you marry this girl from L'Houmeau, I'll square accounts with you. I'll sue you for my rent, for I can see no good coming from this." So David tells him he'll build the second story himself, and his father accuses him of holding out on the rent money. "David returned home in a sad mood:  he realized that if misfortune came he could not count on help from his father."

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

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

_____

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

_____

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.