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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Judges are more fun," said Coralie.

12. Lost Illusions, by Honoré de Balzac, pp. 355-384

Part Two: A Great Man in Embryo, 25. The battle begins; 26. Dauriat pays a call; 27. A study in the art of recantation; 28. Journalistic grandeurs and servitudes

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Furious at having his book of sonnets turned down by Dauriat, Lucien seeks revenge and finds it when Lousteau hands him a copy of Nathan's book and tells him to demolish it with a review. Lucien, who admires the book and likes Nathan, is at first reluctant until Lousteau explains: A second edition of the book is about to be issued by Dauriat. If the review is sufficiently scathing, Dauriat will lose money on the publication. (Nathan will not be financially harmed: He has already received whatever Dauriat has paid him for the rights to the book.)  Lousteau tells him the way to attack the book is "By making every quality a defect," and explains that he should start "by saying it's a fine work." That way he'll disarm the reader who "will regard your criticism as conscientious." Then he should shift the focus of the review to the larger topic of French literary history, and show that Nathan is "an imitator with only a semblance of talent." By setting it against the past, and by "standing out for ideas and style against imagery and verbiage, continuing the Voltairian school and opposing the Anglo-German school," he can "pulverize Nathan whose work, though it contains traits of superior beauty, gives freedom of the city to a literature devoid of ideas."

Lucien sets to the task and in three days produces what Hector Merlin calls "a masterpiece." He also writes another, lighter piece, which demonstrates his versatility. "'Dauriat will be thunderstruck by the article we've just been listening to,' said Lousteau to Lucien. 'You see now, my boy, what a newspaper can do!'" He also tells Lucien that the attack on Châtelet has been successful: "Madame de Bargeton is now definitely known in society as the Cuttle-bone and Châtelet is no longer called anything but Baron Heron." But Nathan has got word of Lucien's  review, and is worried about the harm it might do him.

The next day, Lucien is having lunch with Coralie when Dauriat arrives at her home. Coralie instructs Bérénice to keep him waiting, and when they finally admit the publisher he is ready to pay three thousand francs for Lucien's book as long as Lucien never attacks another of his publications. Lucien replies, "I can't pledge my pen. It belongs to my friends, just as theirs belongs to me." They agree instead that Lucien will give Dauriat fair warning of any future attacks, so he can "forestall them." And Dauriat admits, "Last week I wouldn't have given a fig for your sonnets, but your position today turns them into something rich and rare."

When Dauriat has left, Coralie tells Lucien that this would never have happened if had listened to his "little friends" in the Cénacle and stayed out of journalism. He is a little shocked when she refers to them as "a rare lot of simpletons," but he relishes the income he has received and sends off five hundred francs of it to his mother. And he and Coralie go off to dine with Madame du Val-Noble, where he meets "a whole world of artists and financiers," Rastignac among them, who give him "a wonderful welcome." They then go to the Opera. "Thus Lucien reappeared in triumph in the place where, some months ago, he had had so heavy a fall." He gets some "insolent stares" from some of the men who had mocked him earlier, but when Rastignac pays a visit to Madame d'Espard's box, he sees the Marquise and Madame de Bargeton "eyeing Coralie through their opera-glasses."

Was Lucien arousing some regret in Madame de Bargeton's heart? His mind was preoccupied with this thought: at the sight of the Corinna of Angoulême a desire for vengeance stirred his heart as on the day when, in the Champs-Élysée, she and her cousin had treated him with contempt.

Several days later, Blondet  brings Lucien an invitation to the salon of Madame la Comtesse de Montcornet, at the behest of Châtelet, who wants to make peace with the newspaper. Blondet has also "promised to reconcile Laura and Petrarch, that is to say Madame de Bargeton and Lucien." Lucien is triumphant: "I have them at my feet!" And sets out to write "an article on the Cuttle-Fish and the Heron." As for the visit to Madame de Montcornet's salon, he tells Coralie not to worry: "It's a question, not of love, but of revenge, and I intend it to be complete."

Meanwhile, Nathan has been hurt by the article -- for which Lucien has been paid an unprecedented hundred francs -- and Lousteau is worried that he might take revenge on Lucien: "Nathan's a journalist, he has friends, he could play a nasty trick on you at your first publication." He proposes that Lucien write another article praising Nathan. And when Lucien expresses astonishment that, after having attacked Nathan, they now want him to completely reverse his opinion, "Emile Blondet, Hector Merlin, Etienne Lousteau and Félicien Vernou all cut him short with a burst of laughter." And Blondet tells him, "My dear boy, in literature, every idea has its front and reverse side, and no one can presume to state which side is which." And as Lousteau had done for the first article, Blondet outlines the second, in which Lucien will argue that we are in an age of progress, which Nathan's book demonstrates: "Demolish your previous argument by showing that we're in advance on the eighteenth century."

The first article didn't have Lucien's name on it. It was signed with a C. The second will be signed with an L. And then, Blondet proposes, Lucien will write a third article signed with his own name, critiquing the articles by C and L and proclaiming that "Nathan's work is the finest the period has produced. That's as good as saying nothing at all -- they say it about every book. Your week will have earned you four hundred francs as well as the pleasure of having told the truth somewhere or other. People of sense will agree with C or L or Rubempré, perhaps with all three!" And Coralie likens what Lucien is doing to acting: "Do as I do: make faces at them for their money, and let's live happily."

So Lucien takes to the project, goes to sign the contract with Dauriat "ceding all rights in the manuscript -- without seeing the drawbacks of this," and writes "the terrible article against Châtelet and Madame de Bargeton which he had promised Blondet."

The fact of commanding notice in Paris, having realized its immensity and the difficult of making an impression there, put Lucien in a state of elation which went to his head. 

Two days later, he arrives at the Ambigu theater to review a play and discovers there are no tickets for him. He complains to the stage-manager who says the tickets had been sent to the newspaper and there's nothing he can do for him, but the leading lady recognizes him as "Coralie's lover" and Lucien finds himself sharing a box with the Duc de Rhétoré, whom he had met earlier at Florine's, and the dancer Tullia. The duke tells him that he has "brought two people to despair," meaning Châtelet and Madame de Bargeton, but "when the duke maliciously called him Chardon, he gave himself away by attempting to establish his right to bear the name of Rubempré." The duke advises him to become a royalist and get "a royal ordinance restoring the title and name of your maternal ancestors." He also invites Lucien to dinner.

Lucien did not suspect that a little conspiracy was being woven against him by those who were at that moment suffering from the newspaper attacks, or that Monsieur de Rhétoré had a finger in the pie.... During Florine's supper, the duke had sized up Lucien's character: now he had captured him by playing on his vanity and was practising his diplomatic ability on him.

Lucien writes a scathing review of the play, which appears in the same paper as the article about Madame de Bargeton and Châtelet, but the review has been edited so that "while his witty analysis of it remained intact, a favourable verdict emerged from it." He is furious, but Lousteau explains that the paper has a subscription deal with the theater: "We have to show a great deal of indulgence." When he protests that the theater didn't have a ticket for him, Lousteau promises to show the manager the original article and explain that he had toned it down. Lucien will get plenty of tickets from now on, including someone to whom he can scalp the extras. Lucien is mollified, but still somewhat scandalized at the chicanery involved.

11. Lost Illusions, by Honoré de Balzac, pp. 343-355

Part Two: A Great Man in Embryo, 23. The arcana of journalism; 24. Re-enter Dauriat

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Lucien signs a contract with the newspaper that is drafted by Finot and back-dated so that when Lousteau takes over the newspaper he can't change or back out of it. Giroudeau, who had previously blocked Lucien's efforts to get beyond the front door, is astonished: "You've never made such terms with anyone else," he tells Finot. But when he learns Lucien's name and realizes that he is the author of the much talked-about review, he proclaims, "You've got a gold-mine there." Finot tells Lucien, "You owe your position to Blondet and Vignon who see a future before you. And so don't blot your copy-book. Above all, don't trust your friends."

And so Lucien is admitted to the back rooms on the fifth floor of the building, where he sees Lousteau, Vernou, Merlin, and two other contributors he doesn't know yet. Lousteau tells him that they're planning more attacks on Châtelet who, after the first one appeared, had arrived at the offices demanding "satisfaction." Giroudeau handled him by saying the article had been written by Philippe Bridau, who was prepared to duel with him. Châtelet backed down. Vernou says, "We are busy drawing up an apology to the baron for tomorrow's number: every sentence in it is a dagger-thrust."

They proceed to plan out the editorial direction of the paper under its new editor, Lousteau. Among other things, they decide that if Dauriat doesn't accept Lucien's sonnets for publication, they'll mount an attack on his best writer, Nathan:  "We all like Nathan, but we're going to attack him," says Lousteau. They divvy up the theaters among themselves, and then plan other attacks, including some invented stories known as "canards." When Lucien is puzzled by the term, Merlin explains that a canard "is a story which looks as if it were true but which is invented to ginger up 'News in Brief' when it's a bit colourless." He attributes the use of canards to Benjamin Franklin, who fooled the Encyclopaedists with some made-up stories.

Riding in the carriage later with Coralie, Lucien praises his fellow contributors as "very decent fellows" and bathes in visions of success: "Here I am, a journalist sure of being able to earn six hundred francs a month if I work like a Trojan; also I shall get my two books accepted and write others, for my friends are going to organize a success for me!" Coralie advises him not to be too nice: "Be hard on people -- that's the way to get on." And once again they meet Madame d'Espard and Madame de Bargeton, this time accompanied by Châtelet, in the Bois de Boulogne. "Madame de Bargeton gave Lucien a seductive glance which could well be taken for a salutation."

Camusot is still smitten with Coralie, and proposes to buy her six thousand francs in Government stock if she would continue to be his mistress, and assures her he would ignore her relationship with Lucien. She turns him down, so "Camusot decided to wait for indigence to give him back the woman whom indigence had delivered over to him once before."

Lucien and Lousteau go to see Dauriat about his book, which Dauriat praises, but declines to publish. Instead, he wants Lucien to write articles for him: "you'll get more money from me in the next six months for the articles I shall ask from you than you would for your unsaleable poetry."

"But what about my reputation as a writer?" cried Lucien.

Dauriat and Lousteau burst out laughing. 

"God save us!" said Lousteau. "The man still has his illusions." 

When Lucien takes the manuscript from Dauriat, he checks the pen-mark under the string and sees that it is still aligned: Dauriat hasn't read his manuscript. When he asks Dauriat which sonnet he particularly liked, Dauriat lies to him. "The poet made an abrupt exit into the Galleries in order not to explode: he was furious."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8. Lost Illusions, by Honoré de Balzac, pp. 266-293

Part Two: A Great Man in Embryo, 12. A publisher's bookshop in the Wooden Galleries; 13. A fourth variety of publisher; 14. Behind the scenes; 15. A use for druggists

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Lousteau shows Lucien into Dauriat's shop in the Wooden Galleries, where he points out his editor, Finot, and "a talented young man, Félicien Vernou, a little rascal who's as nasty as an unmentionable disease." Lucien listens avidly to the quid pro quo transactions taking place there. They are joined by Emile Blondet, a journalist just making a name for himself, and Raoul Nathan, who has just published a novel "which had sold quickly and met with brilliant success."

Lucien is shocked to see Nathan kowtowing to the publisher and that he also defers to Blondet. Lucien "had admired Nathan's book, revered him as a god, and was stupefied at such a show of servility in front of this critic whose name and significance were unknown to him." He itches to tell Nathan, "You've written a fine book and the critic has merely written an article." He is won over by the power of "Money! That was the answer to every riddle," and begins to resent his friends of the Cénacle for advising him not to make his way into the more immediately lucrative world of journalism.

Dauriat waxes eloquent on the subject of the economics of publishing:

"I don't publish books for fun. I don't risk two thousand francs just to get two thousand francs back. I'm a speculator in literature.... I'm not here to be a springboard for future reputations, but to make money for myself and provide some for the celebrities.... Maybe I'm not quite a Maecenas, but literature owes me some gratitude: I've already more than doubled the price which manuscripts fetch.

And what he doesn't want is poetry, unless it's by one of four established poets: Béranger, Casimir Delavigne, Lamartine and Victor Hugo. As for Canalis, the socialite poet, "he's been made a poet by the reviews he's had!" -- which, as we've seen, implies that reviewers have been paid to praise him.

Lucien "felt a violent urge to leap at the publisher's throat." But with a little prodding from Lousteau, Dauriat agrees to read Lucien's manuscript. When they leave the shop, Lousteau says that it's "an excellent meeting-place, and gives one a chance to chat with the best minds of our time." But all Lucien can think of is "the insolence of the man!" And when he says "D'Arthez was right," Lousteau scoffs: "I know nothing more dangerous than those lone spirits who think, as that fellow does, they can bring the world to their feet." And in fact, Lucien has begun to "waver between the system of resigned poverty preached by the Cénacle and the militant doctrine put forward by Lousteau."

They reach the theater, the Panorama-Dramatique, where Lousteau's mistress, Florine, is about to perform in "a kind of comic melodrama by a young author, du Bruel." And Lucien's experiences at the theater are a mirror of the ones he has had during his brief association with high society. As a critic, Lousteau has an entree to the theater not unlike that of Madame d'Espard. He takes Lucien backstage to Florine's dressing room, where he also meets Nathan again and is properly introduced. Vernou is there as well, along with Finot and an actress in the play named Florville. In addition to Lousteau, Florine is also the mistress of a wealthy druggist named Matifat, whose jealousy is aroused by Lucien's beauty. Lucien is puzzled by the fact that Florine is being shared by Lousteau and Matifat, but Lousteau tells him, "you still know nothing about life in Paris.... It's as if you loved a married woman, that's all."

Lousteau and Lucien take their seats in the theater manager's box, along with Matifat and a silk-merchant named Camusot, whose mistress is another actress in the play, Coralie. Lucien learns a bit more about the way money solves problems in this milieu: The theater manager's rival has hired a claque to hiss the performance, but the manager has hired them too, with instructions to hiss in the wrong places and then to get thrown out by some others who have been bribed with tickets and a promise to meet Coralie and Florine. Lucien

could not help contrasting the clappings and hissings in the riotous pit with the scenes of calm and pure poetry he had enjoyed in David's printing-office and the vision they shared of the wonders of Art, the noble triumphs of genius and the shining wings of glory.

Then he witnesses some more dealings in which Finot plans to start another newspaper, and wants Lousteau to persuade Matifat (through Florine) to invest in it. He promises Lousteau the editorship at a salary of two hundred fifty francs a month. Rumor has it that the government is going to muzzle the press and only existing papers will continue to publish. "But in a year's time this newspaper will be worth two hundred thousand francs to sell to the Government if, as people make out, it has sense enough to buy up the periodicals." Finot also tells the manager about how he's putting the screws on the Opera-House to buy a hundred subscriptions and provide four boxes a month -- in exchange for favorable coverage.

Meanwhile, the manager has noticed that Coralie has become smitten with the good-looking Lucien and is blowing her lines in the play, so he tells him to hide in the corner of the box. Lousteau suggests that he tell her that Lucien is coming to supper afterward and she can "do what she likes with him then." Lucien continues to be shocked at Lousteau's ethics, including his use of Florine to extort investment money from Matifat. Where is his conscience? he asks. Lousteau replies: "Conscience, my dear, is a kind of stick that everyone picks up to thrash his neighbour with, but one he never uses against himself." And he tells Lucien if the deal goes through and he becomes editor, Lucien has a job covering the boulevard theaters from him at three francs a column, which at the rate of thirty a month is an income of ninety francs, plus free tickets he can sell on the side: "I can see you earning two hundred francs a month.... My dear fellow, there are men of talent, like that poor devil d'Arthez who dines at Flicoteaux's every day, who don't earn three hundred francs in ten years." Moreover, when he makes a name for himself he can sell his novel for up to four thousand francs.

The experience of going behind the scenes, not only of the theater but also of the publishing world, has its effect on Lucien: "it was as dazzling as a firework display after the profound darkness of his own laborious, inglorious, monotonous existence."

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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