Once Lucien arrives in Paris he finds himself up against the more cultured aristocracy that has access to Court, represented by Madame d’Espard and her satellites – Balzac so often gives the list of them that there is no need to repeat it here. They treat him even more cruelly than the Saintots and Chandours of Angoulême. But they are well-dressed, elegant, full of savoir-faire, serenely satisfied with themselves and supposed to be devastatingly witty (Balzac’s demonstrations of this wit may not be found altogether convincing). And so, in the second part of Lost Illusions, we become aware of further ambivalence in Balzac’s attitude: he both admires and despises his beau monde. The denizens of the aristocratic Faubourg Saint-Germain are chillingly correct and supercilious, but they are so much more venomous and destructive because their action, once they embark on it, is far more effective than that of the gentry of Angoulême. They combine to dupe, ridicule and eliminate the poor, ‘angelically’ handsome young man – weak, vain and self-centred – who has hoped to attain to the social rank to which his mother’s birth half entitled him.
(3) Once Lucien has been cast aside by Madame de Bargeton, he has to choose between two means of proving his worth: settling down to a long period of poverty and hard work, the course advocated and adopted by the austere d’Arthez, or taking to journalism and forcing himself upon the world of letters by the unscrupulousness which, according to Balzac, alone makes rapid success possible for an ambitious journalist. He decides on this second course but is too vulnerable to pull it off. This third theme can therefore also be regarded as the major theme of A Great Man in Embryo: Balzac’s denunciation of journalism as one of the most pernicious knaveries of his time.
The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed the rapid rise to power of the periodical press. Journalism had been active – though dangerous to those engaged in it – during the Revolutionary period. Napoleon had kept the press under his thumb, as Giroudeau points out on page 235. The ‘freedom’ of the press was one of the most controversial issues both under the Restoration and the July Monarchy. Under Louis XVIII and Charles X the struggle between those who, like the Liberals and Bonapartists, wanted to keep the Revolutionary principles and gains intact, and the Conservatives of various hues, especially the ‘Ultras’, who wanted to put the political clock back, was an affair of major importance; likewise, under Louis-Philippe, the conflict between the spirit of stagnation and the parties in favour of ‘movement’. Balzac’s contention is that the majority of journalists under these three monarchs, instead of recognizing that they were called to a serious, even sacred mission, turned the Press into an instrument for self-advancement, prostituted principles to intrigue and used journalism merely as a means of acquiring money, position and power. He is reluctant to admit that there were great, responsible press organs, like Le Journal des Débats, Le Conservateur, Le Constitutionnel and, from 1824, Le Globe, which stood firm on principle; he is above all aware of the vogue which the petits journaux enjoyed after the fall of Napoleon, and of the role they played as political privateers.
The petits journaux were so-called because they were produced in smaller format than the important dailies or weeklies, which were more or less grave, staid and ponderous. They proliferated in Paris once the fall of the Empire had given a relative, though still precarious liberty to the Press – precarious because it was constantly threatened by the increasingly reactionary governments of the time. The politicians of the Right found it difficult to keep the newspapers under control even by such means as stamp-duty, caution-money, fines, suspensions and suppressions, the object of these being mainly to put obstacles in the way of would-be founders of hostile periodicals. The ‘little papers’, short-lived as they often proved to be, were much given to journalistic sharp-shooting. They preferred satire, personal attack, sarcasm and scandal-mongering to serious argument or the affirmation of ideals. They were mostly Opposition journals and were a constant thorn in the flesh of the Government. Balzac’s aim was to expose their addiction to ‘graft’, intrigue, blackmail and the misuse of the feuilleton, namely the bottom portion of the first page or other pages generally reserved for critical articles and frequently devoted to the malicious task of slashing literary reputations. Andoche Finot – the prototype of such later newspaper magnates as Émile de Girardin and Armand Dutacq, pioneers in 1836 in the founding of cheap dailies which relied on advertisement and serialized novels as a chief source of income – acquires a large share in a big daily and hands on to the equally unprincipled Lousteau the editorship of the ‘little paper’ he already owns. Balzac probably had Le Figaro chiefly in mind, a periodical which was constantly going bankrupt or being suppressed but kept popping up again under different editors. Hector Merlin’s royalist Drapeau Blanc, edited by Martainville, really existed, having been founded in 1819; so did Le Réveil. Other examples of ‘little papers’ before 1830 were Le Nain Jaune (Bonapartist), Le Diable Boiteux and Le Corsaire (both Liberal), Le Voleur, La Mode, La Silhouette, and, under Louis-Philippe, not only the phoenix-like Figaro, but also La Caricature, Le Charivari (ancestor of our English Punch), and once more Le Corsaire: a few among many. Louis-Philippe and his Cabinets were easy prey for these stinging gad-flies whose unremitting satire and innuendo remind 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, whose failure 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 rogu
es 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, the Baron de Nucingen – readers of Balzac will know that, according to his ingenious 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 of melodrama, 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, he and his protectress soon find that there is no foundation for their mutual admiration. Etienne Lousteau, in Chapter Nine of Part II, disabuses Lucien about the likelihood of real talent making good in the literary world. Lucien’s experience with publishers and editors emphasizes this truth. He has to face the brutal fact that, wherever he goes, only money and intrigue count. In Part III we are shown how Eve, David and Madame Chardon shed their illusions about their grand homme de province. Yet Lucien, after all the disasters which have overtaken him, is slow in shedding his illusions about himself. He still has a good opinion of himself as he returns, ragged and dejected, to the family homestead: ‘I am heroic!’ And, after further disasters, ‘Carlos Herrera’ comes along to restore his diminished morale. Gustave Flaubert, in 1869, was to renew the subject of ‘lost illusions’ in his Sentimental Education. The two novels are well worth comparing.
H. J. H.
Chronology
1799 20 May: Born at Tours, and put out to nurse until the age of four. His father is a civil servant, of peasant stock; his mother from a family of wealthy Parisian drapers.
Napoleon Bonaparte overthrows the Directory and becomes First Consul of France.
Hölderlin, Hyperion.
1804 First Empire: Napoleon becomes Emperor of France, and starts conquering Europe.
Schiller, William Tell.
1805 Nelson defeats the French and Spanish fleet in the naval battle of Trafalgar. Napoleon defeats Austro-Russian troops at Austerlitz and then the Prussians at Jena.
Chateaubriand, René.
1807 Sent to the Oratorian college in Vendôme, where he boards for the next five years. Birth of his half-brother Henry. (Already has two younger sisters: Laure, Laurence.)
1812 Napoleon is defeated in his catastrophic Moscow campaign against Tsar Alexander I.
Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.
1814 Family move to Paris, where Balzac continues his education.
Allied troops enter Paris. Napoleon abdicates, and becomes King of Elba. First restoration: Accession of Louis XVIII to the French throne.
Austen, Mansfield Park. Goya, The Second and Third of May 1808.
1815 Napoleon returns in triumph to Paris and rules for 100 days before defeat at Waterloo. Second restoration: Louis XVIII is reinstated on the French throne.
1816–19 Begins his legal training, attending lectures at the Sorbonne; articled to a solicitor, Maître Guillonet-Merville, then a notary, Maître Passez.
1819 Determined to make a career from writing, moves into a garret in Rue Lesdiguières.
Scott, Ivanhoe. Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa.
1820 Finishes a verse drama, Cromwell, which is judged to be a failure by family and friends.
Shelley, Prometheus Unbound. Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn.
1821 Publishes novels of Gothic inspiration, many produced collaboratively, under the pseudonyms Lord R’hoone, and Horace de St Aubin. Writes poems and plays.
Constable, Landscape: Noon (The Hay Wain).
1822 Becomes the lover of Laure de Berny, mother of nine and twenty-two years his senior.
1824 ‘Horace de St Aubin’ is slated in the Feuilleton littéraire. Balzac contemplates suicide.
Lous XVIII dies and is succeeded by Charles X.
Beethoven, Ninth Symphony.
1825 Launches a publishing and printing venture, producing editions of Molière and La Fontaine. Meets Victor Hugo.
Grillparzer, King Ottokar’s Rise and Fall.
1828 Printing business collapses, leaving hi
m in debt. His literary purpose strengthens.
Schubert, Schwanengesang (Swansong).
1829 Frequents the salons, introduced by the Duchesse d’Abrantès. His father dies. The Chouans, the first novel he signs with his own name.
1830 Publishes numerous short stories including ‘Gobseck’, ‘The Vendetta’ and ‘Sarrasine’.
July Revolution. Charles X abdicates. July Monarchy. Louis-Philippe becomes king.
Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People. Berlioz, Symphonie fantastique.
1831 Adopts a lifestyle beyond his means. The Wild Ass’s Skin establishes his reputation. Begins to systematically and publicly use the particle ‘de’ before his surname.
Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris. Pushkin, Boris Godunov.
1832 Travels widely. Begins corresponding with Eveline de Hanska, a Polish countess. Joins the neo-legitimist (ultraconservative) party and publishes political essays. Rumoured to be going mad. Louis Lambert, Colonel Chabert.