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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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

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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."

1. Lost Illusions, by Honoré de Balzac, pp. 3-32

Part One: The Two Poets, 1. A provincial printing-office

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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.