Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics) Read Free Page A

one of the present-day
Canard Enchaîné.
    It is an amusing thought that, in the late twenties and early thirties, Balzac had himself been a contributor to these disreputable rags and sometimes had a hand in the running of them; for instance he had helped Philipon to found
La Caricature.
Throughout his career he contributed many novels in serial form to the more important newspapers, notably those founded by Girardin and Dutacq –
La Presse
and
Le Siècle.
But by the time he was writing
Λ Great Man in Embryo
he had left the
petits journaux
far behind him. He himself tried his luck as a newspaper-proprietor and editor: he bought
La Chronique de Paris
in 1836 and founded
La Revue Parisienne
in 1840. Both of these ventures failed. We can well imagine therefore what a large amount of bile was accumulating inside him. On the whole, reviews of his works appearing in periodicals had been hostile if not harsh. He suffered much from the disparagement of editors and critics such as Sainte-Beuve and Jules Janin respectively. He was always quarrelling with Émile de Girardin. And so he took his revenge. He had already made a preliminary attack on the periodical press in
The Skin.
And he followed up his attack of 1839 with his
Monograph of the Paris Press
(1842).
    This information relative to Balzac’s attack on the Press constitutes a bare minimum if we compare it to the discoveries made by researchers on the models used – both newspapers and personalities – but it should suffice to explain the importance he himself assigned to this third aspect of his novel. All this is centred round the person of Lucien Chardon, whosefailure to prove his mettle as ‘a great man’ is due to his inexperience, feebleness of character and naivety, just as his failure to achieve legal status as ‘Monsieur de Rubempré’ is due to his self-conceit and readiness to be gulled by his ex-patroness Madame de Bargeton and her formidable cousin the Marquise d’Espard. The third part of
Lost Illusions
takes him back to Angoulême. David’s failure as a printer (Balzac draws generously on his experience of 1826 for his knowledge of typography, its processes and difficulties) is now aggravated by his failure as the inventor of a cheap method of paper-manufacture. He has insuperable obstacles to cope with: the well-laid schemes of his competitors the brothers Cointet, supported by the Machiavellian wiles of the rascally solicitor Petit-Claud, the short-sighted meanness of his drunken father, the insolvency into which Lucien’s forgery of bills of exchange plunges him and the renewed fatuousness of Lucien in supposing that he can reconquer Madame de Bargeton (now Madame la Comtesse du Châtelet) and obtain governmental subsidies which will enable David to complete his researches.
    So
Lost Illusions
ends as it had begun, as a ‘Scene of Provincial Life’.
An Inventor’s Tribulations
shows in the main the same disparaging attitude to life in the provinces as
The Two Poets
had done. Angoulême, like Paris, is full of rogues and sharks; but the domestic harmony, unselfishness and integrity of the Séchard couple, naive and gullible as they are, does give a more pleasant colouring to the total picture and makes for some serenity of outlook at the end. After landing David in prison for debt, Lucien is reduced to such despondency that suicide seems to be the only way out. But at the last moment Balzac brings a
deus ex machina
into operation: the mysterious Spanish ecclesiastic and diplomat ‘Carlos Herrera’ who, after long harangues, takes Lucien under his wing and leads him back to Paris where he intends to make his fortune in a really effectual way. The scheme he adopts is to use another woman of easy virtue, Esther Van Gobseck, another Coralie (Balzac always kept a soft spot in his heart for such women), as a decoy for extorting money from an elderly, infatuated banker, theBaron de Nucingen – readers of Balzac will know that, according to his ingenious