Lost Illusions
“Lost Illusions” is the third book on the List by Honoré de
Balsac, a writer I am getting familiar with now. While his books are never
happy, this is the most pessimistic book so far. There is a bitterness here
that can only be personal.
In the provincial town of Angoulême, two young friends, David
and Lucien are striking out in life. David, son of a printer, has inherited his
miser of a father’s old printing house, but is more interested in inventing a
new process for making paper manufacturing cheaper and so the business slides.
He gets married to Lucien’s sister Eve, who tries but has trouble keeping the
printing business afloat. While David is a virtuous person, whose only “fault”
is his persistence in his research, Lucien is a flagrant type. He has aspirations
of being a poet and has already a manuscript for a collection of poetry and a
novel. This gets him invited to the salons of the local nobility and Madame de
Bargeton starts flirting with him. This develops into an elopement, taking them
to Paris.
In Paris Madame de Bargeton easily slides into the world of
the fashionable, while Lucien is seen as an embarrassment. Left to dry, Lucien,
after having squandered away the money generously donated by David, Eve and
their mother, submits to an existence in poverty. His attempt at being a poet
flounders amid the brutal reality of Paris, but gains him virtuous friends. A
new world opens up for him when he encounters the journalist Lousteau and
Lucien becomes a journalist himself. This is a world of absolute corruption,
where articles are written for or against people on a whim or for political or
economical gains. One day you support a person/play/book/party, the next you
are against. Lucien with his talents and flossy moral is excellent at this job,
but in the process, he loses his good friends in favour of less reliable friends
in journalism. With his new-found power to make or break people he now gains
access to also the nobility and even has aspirations to regain his maternal
name of de Rubempré. This makes his interesting again to Madame de Bargeton,
but Lucien prefers his actress girlfriend and the snuffed Bargeton as well as jealous
journalist colleagues set in motion an avalanche of events to ruin and crush
Lucien. It even gets so far that Lucien defrauds his friend David, sending him
to the brink of ruin and into the arms of people who wants to steal his
invention.
Lucien is obviously a flawed character. While he feels
sincere remorse for the trouble he causes and seems to have some scruples on taking
on questionable jobs, neither last very long. He is arrogant and ambitious
enough to think he will get away with it, and it does not help that his good
looks often clears the way for him. He gets plenty of admonitions on the right
way of doing things, but always ends up taking the easy and fast way. During
his time in Paris, his only virtuous act that he sees through is to stick to
his girlfriend and even that brings him in trouble. Balzac half blames the weak
character of Lucien and half the Paris society. Balzac had plenty of experience
to match Lucien’s and the bitterness against to double crossings and cutthroat
business of both the printing business and journalism in Paris is evident.
Balzac will frequently insert a harangue against various elements of this world
seemingly out of context with the story he is trying to tell, simply to vent
his frustrations.
Lucien gets crushed, not so much because he deserves it as
because this is what happens to naive talents in Paris. There is always somebody
who wants to take advantage of you and if you step on somebody, their vanity
knows no mercy. Lucien experiences this, but never seems to learn from it.
Back in Angoulême, it is the same story, but with finance
and the legal system as the villains. The Cointet brothers of the rival
printing house and the double-faced lawyer Petit-Claud are every bit as
remorseless as the journalists and printers of Paris.
So, what is the morale of Balzac? What is the solution? His
rather depressing conclusion is that either you become a monster yourself or
you leave the game entirely and live as simple a life as possible. Anybody who sticks
their nose out are asking for it.
Rather depressive, really. It took me a while to get through
“Lost Illusions” as it kept knocking the wind out of me. If you care even a bit
for the characters, you will feel distressed on every other page. At least with
Lucien, I learned to write him off as a lost cause, but my heart bled for David
and Eve. There is no doubt this is a well written book, it even has its moments
of wry humour, and it is celebrated as one of Balzac’s best novels. Personally,
I preferred “Old Man Goriot”, and I do not feel inclined to repeat the
misery-feast parts of this novel, which is, honestly, the majority of it.
