Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics) Read Free Page B

system of ‘reappearing characters’, they are liable to meet the same persons time and time again in different novels – so that the Rubempré estates can be repurchased and the foundations laid for Lucien’s ennoblement and success in political life. This project also fails. Lucien finds himself in prison under the accusation of murder and hangs himself in his cell.
    All this takes place in the long sequel to
Lost Illusions
entitled
Splendour and Misery of Courtesans (A Harlot High and Low
in the Penguin Classics translation) which brings Lucien to his appointed end. This conclusion to his sorry career had obviously been in Balzac’s mind since the beginning. There is a hint of it in Part I (page 60): ‘Lucien, who did not know that his course lay between the infamy of a convict-prison and the palms awarded to genius, was soaring over the Mount Sinai of the Prophets without seeing that below him were the Dead Sea and the horrible winding-sheet of Gomorrha.’ In 1838 he had published a fragment of
Splendour.
Once more Lucien was to prove feeble and ineffectual – mere putty in the hands of ‘Carlos Herrera’. Who is this mysterious person? No Spaniard, but a character who had made his first appearance in
Old Goriot
in 1834; the master-criminal Vautrin, Jacques Collin, ‘Trompe-la-Mort’ – ‘Cheat-Death’: a man who has declared war on society and who, thanks to his homosexual tendencies, likes to take young men in hand and make a career for them (hence no doubt the allusion to Gomorrha in the above quotation). In
Old Goriot
he had failed to capture Eugène de Rastignac – Eugène found other ways of getting on – but Lucien becomes an easy prey. Vautrin is a fascinating figure, partly modelled on the notorious police-spy Vidocq of Napoleonic and Restoration times. He is also the prime mover in a drama –
Vautrin –
which Balzac produced in 1840. After Lucien’s suicide, broken-hearted, he gives up his war on society and becomes its protector in the role of superintendent of police!
    It goes without saying that
Splendour and Misery of Courtesans,
with such a plot as its basis, contains a strong element ofmelodrama, and this is foreshadowed in the last few chapters of
An Inventor’s Tribulations.
But
Lost Illusions
is a genuine ‘study of manners’, even though it has a pronouncedly satirical bias. And, conversely, a sentimental one. It is a strange blend of cynical pessimism and Romantic emotionalism. Also a notable feature in Balzac’s novels in general is his duality of attitude. There is the Balzac who participates and sympathizes, not only with his virtuous characters, rare enough in this novel (Eve, David, Madame Séchard, Marion, Kolb, Bérénice, Martainville), but also with his reprehensible ones – his treatment of Madame de Bargeton, Lucien and even Lousteau show this. Nor can he withold some admiration from rogues like Finot, the Cointets and Petit-Claud. There is also the Balzac who satirizes, admonishes and condemns. This ambiguity of attitude passes over into his style. At one moment he is crisp, pungent and objectively sardonic; at another moment inflated and pretentiously ‘poetic’. Many of his more ambitiously stylistic passages, with his addiction to swollen metaphor and hyperbolic statement, invite criticism and are difficult to translate. As regards the present translation, it may be noted that in the first edition of the
Human Comedy
(1842 onwards) he had suppressed his original chapter divisions. Here they are restored. His paragraphs are sometimes inordinately long and transition is lacking from one order of ideas to another. I have therefore taken certain liberties in redividing them. Nor have I found it advisable to adhere slavishly to his system of punctuation.
    Lost Illusions:
this is of course the
leitmotiv
of the whole book. In Part I, Lucien quickly discovers that poetic ability gives no passport to social success with the Angoulême élite. On their arrival in Paris,