Lost Illusions

  And so, when Eve told the priest: ‘Monsieur, this is my mother,’ and when the Abbé gazed on her face, as chastened as that of an aged nun, framed in hair which had turned completely white, but beautified by the mild and calm expression of pious resignation characteristic of women who walk this vale of tears, as the phrase goes, in submission to God’s will, he fully understood the sort of life these two creatures had been living. He no longer felt pity for Lucien, who had put them on the rack, and he shuddered as he guessed what tortures they had gone through.

  ‘Mother,’ said Eve, wiping her eyes, ‘my poor brother is quite near to us. He’s at Marsac.’

  ‘But why isn’t he here?’ asked Madame Chardon.

  Then the Abbé related everything Lucien had told him about the misery of his journey and his adversities during his last days in Paris. He described the poet’s anguish on learning what effect his imprudent acts had had in the bosom of his family and his apprehensions about the reception they might give him if he came home.

  ‘Has he come to the stage of doubting us?’ said Madame Chardon.

  ‘The unhappy young man has made his way towards you on foot, suffering the most terrible privations, and he is coming back in the right frame of mind for entering on the humblest path in life and making amends.’

  ‘Monsieur l’Abbé,’ said the sister, ‘in spite of all the wrong he has done us, I love my brother as one cherishes the remains of one who is no more; and to love him like this is still to love him more than many sisters love their brothers. He has reduced us to utter poverty, but let him come back and share with us the meagre crust of bread we still have, all in fact that he has left us with. Ah! If he had not gone away, Monsieur, we should not have lost all that we treasured most in life.’

  ‘And he was brought back in the carriage of the woman who snatched him away from us,’ cried Madame Chardon. ‘He went away inside Madame de Bargeton’s barouche, sitting beside her, and came back in the boot!’

  ‘What can I do to help you in the situation you are in?’ asked the worthy priest, hard put to it to know what to say as he left.

  ‘Oh, Monsieur l’Abbé!’ Madame Chardon replied. ‘One can get over money troubles, they say. But only the patient himself can cure this sort of affliction.’

  ‘If you had influence enough to persuade my father-in-law to help his son, you would save a whole family,’ said Madame Séchard.

  ‘He has no faith in you and it looked to me as if he was very exasperated with your husband,’ said the old priest whom the vine-grower’s rambling discourse had brought to consider the Séchard affairs as a wasps’ nest into which he should take care not to step.

  His mission accomplished, the priest went back to dinner with his grand-nephew Postel, who dissipated his old uncle’s modicum of goodwill towards the Séchards by siding, like everybody in Angoulême, with the father against the son.

  ‘There are ways of coping with spendthrifts,’ little Postel said by way of conclusion. ‘But with those who dabble in experiments there’s no escaping ruin.’

  THE ‘FATAL MEMBER OF THE FAMILY’

  21. The prodigal’s return

  THE Abbé Marron’s curiosity was completely satisfied, and that, in all French provinces, is the chief motive behind the excessive interest people take in one another. That evening he informed the poet of everything that was happening in the Séchard household, making out that his journey had been a mission prompted by the purest charity.

  ‘You have put your sister and brother-in-law in debt to the tune of ten or twelve thousand francs,’ he said as he finished. ‘And no one, my dear sir, has such a trifling sum to lend to his neighbours. In the Angoulême region we are not rich. I thought much less money was at stake when you told me about your drafts.’

  Lucien thanked the old man for his kindness and said: ‘The words of forgiveness you bring me from them are what I most treasure.’

  Next day, very early, he left Marsac for Angoulême, where he arrived about nine, a walking-stick in his hand, wearing a short coat somewhat damaged by the journey from Paris and black trousers with faded streaks in them. Moreover his worn-out boots plainly showed that he belonged to the needy brotherhood of pedestrians. And so he did not close his eyes to the effect which the contrast between his departure and his return would have on his fellow-citizens. But, with heart still quivering from the remorse which had gripped him when he listened to the old priest’s report, he accepted this punishment for the moment and resolved to look the persons he knew straight in the face. He even persuaded himself that he was a hero. Such self-deception is a primary reaction in poetic natures like his.

  As he walked into L’Houmeau his mind was divided between the shame of his home-coming and poetic memories of former times. His heart beat faster as he went by Postel’s door but, very fortunately for him, Léonie Marron was alone in the shop with her child. Vanity was still so strong in him that he was glad to see that his father’s name had been painted out. Since marrying, Postel had had his shop redecorated and had had PHARMACY printed over the door, as is done in Paris. As he climbed the slope of the Porte-Palet Lucien was feeling the effect of his native air; the weight of his misfortunes was lifted from his shoulders and he said to himself with delight: ‘So I’m going to see them once more!’ He reached the Place du Mûrier without meeting a soul: an unforeseen piece of luck for a man who formerly had stalked about triumphantly in his home-town. Marion and Kolb, standing sentry at the door, rushed upstairs shouting: ‘He’s here!’ Lucien once more saw the old printing-press and the old courtyard, found his sister and mother on the stairs, and they flung their arms round him, for an instant forgetting their misfortunes in this embrace. A family almost always comes to terms with misfortune; its members make their bed in it, and hope enables them to put up with the hardness of it. Lucien was a living picture of despair, but it had its poetic side: the sun had tanned his face as he tramped the highroads; deep melancholy was imprinted on his features and cast its shadows on the poet’s forehead. This transformation denoted so much suffering that at the sight of the marks misery had left on his countenance the only possible feeling was pity. The dreams which the Séchard family had cherished at Lucien’s departure gave place to the sad reality of his home-coming. In spite of the joy she felt, Eve’s smile was like that of a saint in the throes of martyrdom. Grief imparts sublimity to the face of a very beautiful young woman. The gravity of Eve’s expression, which had replaced the complete artlessness Lucien had seen written on it when he left for Paris, spoke to him with too much eloquence for him not to feel a pang of sorrow. And so the first effusion of feeling, so impulsive, so natural, was followed by a reaction on both sides: everyone was afraid to speak. However Lucien could not help looking round for the person who was missing from this reunion. At this glance, which Eve well understood, she burst into tears, and Lucien followed suit. As for Madame Chardon, she remained wan and apparently impassive. Eve stood up, went downstairs in order to avoid speaking harshly to her brother, and called out to Marion: ‘My dear, Lucien is fond of strawberries. You must find some…!’

  ‘Oh! I well knew you would want to give Monsieur Lucien a treat. Don’t worry, you shall have a nice little lunch and a good dinner too.’

  ‘Lucien,’ Madame Chardon said to her son. ‘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. You have almost broken the tool in your brother’s hands which was to make his fortune, though he was only thinking of that for the sake of his new family. And that is not all you have broken…’ There was a terrible pause and Lucien’s silence implied the acceptance of this maternal rebuke. ‘You must take to hard work,’ she continued more kindly. ‘I don’t blame you for trying to re-establish the noble family to which I belong; but such an enterprise calls for a great deal of money and pride of feeling; you had neither the one nor the other. You have changed the faith we had in you to distrust. You have destroyed the peace of this pat
ient and hard-working family, which already had a hard enough furrow to plough… To first misdeeds a first forgiveness is due. Don’t commit any more. At present we find ourselves in very difficult circumstances: be prudent, do what your sister tells you. Misfortune is a schoolmaster whose harsh lessons have borne fruit in her: she has lost her gaiety, she’s a mother, she’s carrying the whole household burden out of devotion to our dear David. Finally, thanks to your misdeeds, she has become the only consolation I have left.’

  ‘You might have shown even more severity,’ said Lucien as he embraced his mother. ‘I accept your forgiveness, because I shall never put myself in a position to need it again.’

  Eve returned and, seeing how bowed down her brother was, realized that Madame Chardon had been talking to him. Her goodness of heart brought a smile to her lips. Lucien responded with tears which he quickly restrained. Personal presence acts like a charm and transforms the starkest hostility between lovers or members of a family however strong the motives for discontent may be. Is this because affection marks out tracks in the heart which one loves to take to again? Is it a phenomenon belonging to the science of magnetism? Does reason aver that people must either never meet again or forgive one another? Whether it is reasoning or physical or spiritual causes which produce this effect, it must be a common experience that a beloved person’s glances, gestures and actions revive a lingering tenderness in those he has most offended, grieved or ill-used. The mind may be loath to forget, self-interest may still feel the hurt, but the heart becomes enslaved anew in spite of everything. And so poor Eve, as she listened until lunch-time to her brother’s confidences, could not mask the expression in her eyes when she looked at him, nor her tone of voice when she spoke from her heart. Once she realized the basic facts about literary life in Paris she understood how it had been possible for Lucien to suffer defeat. The poet’s joy as he fondled his sister’s baby, his boyishness, his happiness at seeing his home-town and his own people once more, mingled with the deep chagrin he felt on learning that David was in hiding, the melancholy words which escaped from his lips, his emotion on seeing, when Marion served the strawberries, that in the midst of her distress his sister had remembered his liking for them: all this, and even the mere fact that the prodigal brother had to be housed and looked after, turned this day into a festive occasion. It was as if misery had called a truce. As for old Séchard, he reversed the course of the two women’s feelings by saying: ‘You’re making as much fuss of him as if he were bringing you loads of money.’

  ‘Why, what has my brother done that we should not make a fuss of him?’ cried Madame Séchard, anxious to conceal her brother’s shame.

  Nevertheless, once the first tender demonstrations were over, they were brought back to a sense of reality. Lucien soon noticed the difference between the affection Eve was now showing him and that she had once bestowed upon him. David was held in deep honour, whereas Lucien was loved in spite of everything, as a mistress is loved no matter what disasters she has caused. Respect, a necessary foundation for our feelings, is a solid stuff providing them with the kind of confident certainty on which they thrive: this was lacking between Madame Chardon and her son, also between brother and sister. Lucien felt deprived of that entire trust they would have placed in him if he had not fallen into dishonour. 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. As for being the pride and glory of his family and the hero of the domestic hearth, all such fine hopes had vanished for ever. They were sufficiently afraid of his light-headedness not to tell him where David was hiding. Eve, impervious to Lucien’s caresses – prompted by curiosity, for he wanted to see his brother-in-law – was no longer the Eve of L’Houmeau for whom, in the past, one glance from Lucien had been an irresistible command. Lucien talked of making amends for his wrong-doing and boasted that he would be able to rescue David. Eve replied: ‘Keep out of it; our adversaries are the most perfidious and cunning people you could find.’ Lucien shook his head as if to say: ‘I have joined battle with Parisians…’ His sister countered this with a look which signified: ‘Yes, and lost!’

  ‘They no longer love me,’ thought Lucien. ‘I see that in family as in social life one must be successful.’

  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, and thus drew apart from his sister and mother and Séchard, whom he could no longer deceive as regards his character or his future prospects.

  Eve and Madame Chardon, whose sense of divination had been awakened by so many shocks and misfortunes, detected Lucien’s most secret thoughts, felt that he was misjudging them and saw that he was becoming estranged. ‘How Paris has changed him!’ they said to each other. They were at last reaping the harvest of the selfishness which they themselves had cultivated in him. On both sides this touch of leaven was bound to ferment and it did ferment, but chiefly in Lucien, who knew how much he was to blame. As for Eve, she was certainly the kind of sister to say to an erring brother: ‘Forgive me for the wrongs you have done…’ But when a spiritual union has been as perfect as it had been between Eve and Lucien in early life, any blow dealt at so beautiful and ideal a sentiment is mortal. Whereas criminals make peace with one another after some play with their daggers, people who love each other fall out irretrievably for a look or a word. The secret behind estrangements which often seem inexplicable can be found in the memory of a well-nigh perfect union of hearts. One can live on with mistrust in one’s heart when the past affords no picture of pure and unclouded affection; but for two beings who in the past have been perfectly at one, life becomes intolerable as soon as looks and speech have to be kept in careful control. That is why great poets kill off their Pauls and their Virginias as they emerge from adolescence. Could you imagine Paul and Virginia having a quarrel?

  Let us note, to the credit of Eve and Lucien, that material interests, although they had suffered such grievous damage, played no part in quickening a sense of injury. With the blameless sister, as with the blameworthy poet, personal feeling was alone involved. And so it was likely that the slightest misunderstanding, the most trivial disagreement, a new blunder on Lucien’s part, might tear them asunder or give rise to one of those quarrels which create an irreparable breach in family life. Reconciliation over money disputes is possible: when feelings are hurt there is no remedy.

  22. An unexpected triumph

  THE next morning Lucien received an issue of the Angoulême newspaper and turned pale with pleasure when he saw that he was the subject of a leading article, one of those Premiers-Angoulême imitated from the Paris press by an estimable news-sheet which, like a provincial Academy or a properly brought-up young lady, as Voltaire puts it, never got itself talked about.

  Let Franche-Comté take pride in having given birth to Victor Hugo, Charles Nodier and Cuvier; Britanny for having produced Chateaubriand and Lamennais; Normandy for its Casimir Delavigne; Touraine because it can lay claim to the author of Eloa. Today the province of Angoulême, where already, under Louis XIII, the illustrious Guez, better known as de Balzac, had been one of our fellow-countrymen, need not envy any of those provinces, nor yet Limousin, which nurtured Depuytren, nor yet Auvergne, the home of Montlosier, nor Bordeaux, which has been lucky enough to engender so many great men. We too have a poet I The author of those fine sonnets entitled Les Marguerites has made his name not only as a poet but also as a prose-writer, since we are indebted to him for a splendid novel: The Archer of Charles the Ninth I One day our nephews will be proud of their fellow-countryman Lucien Chardon, a rival of Petrarch!!!’ [In the provincial journals of tho
se times, exclamation marks were like the hurrahs! which greet the speeches made at meetings in England.]

  Despite the brilliant success our young poet has met with in Paris, he has remembered that the Hôtel de Bargeton was the cradle of his triumphs, that the aristocracy of Angoulême had been the first to applaud his poetry, that the consort of Monsieur le Comte du Châtelet, our Prefect, had encouraged the first steps he took in the cult of the Muses. He has returned to our midst!… The whole of L’Houmeau was stirred yesterday when our Lucien de Rubempré arrived there. The news of his return has everywhere aroused the liveliest excitement. It is certain that the city of Angoulême will not lag behind L’Houmeau in doing honour to a man who, in the fields both of journalism and literature, has gloriously represented his native town in Paris. As both a religious and a royalist poet Lucien has stood up to partisan fury; and now, it is said, he has come home to rest from the fatigue of a struggle which would exhaust even athletes of stronger build than men of poetry and reverie.