Lost Illusions by Honore de Balzac

Balzac wrote 92 novels. This is the first I’ve read.

In The Music Man, Meredith Wilson’s musical about life in small town River City, Iowa, set in 1912, Balzac is a laugh line. Prior to reading this book that’s about all I knew about him. in The Music Man, Marion is the town librarian, trying to raise the cultural intelligence of the residents. She’s opposed by the prudish mayor’s wife and her friends who sing the song, “Pick a Little, Talk a Little” where they accuse Marion of stocking the library with dirty books: “Chaucer! Rabelais! Balzac!” Even without reading any of the three you get the joke. His name alone sounds a little smutty.

I came to Lost Illusions because in the last book I read, Chasing Lost Time, a biography of the original English translator of Proust, I learned that Scott Moncrieff (the translator) believed Balzac was really the only novelist worth reading, and that Lost Illusions was the greatest novel every written. How could I resist that recommendation! I borrowed a copy from the library, a Modern Library edition translated by Kathleen Raine.

The novel, written serially between 1837 and 1843, takes place in France in the year 1821. It’s divided into three parts. “Two Poets” takes place in the small country town of Angouleme and introduces the main characters. The titular poets are two young friends named David Sechard and Lucien Chardon. David is in love with Lucien’s sister, Eve. At the end of the first part, David and Eve marry. David’s father owns a printing business. At the beginning of the novel, David returns from Paris where he has gone to school and his father turns his business over to his son, but cheats him as he does so setting him up for failure. Meanwhile Lucien, the son of a chemist (like a pharmacist, today), is courting a married noble-woman named Madame Bargeton. (Adulterous affairs probably counts as a “dirty book” to the ladies of River City, Iowa.) She invites Lucien into her social circle, despite his low status, because she admires his poetry and his good looks. All the characters throughout the novel, men and women, comment on Lucien’s beauty. At the end of this first part, Lucien’s affair with Madame Bargeton is discovered. There’s a duel. The two lovers decamp to Paris. David and Eve, believing in Lucien’s genius, scrape together all their money to send him off.

In Part Two, “A Provincial Celebrity in Paris”, Lucien discovers that Paris and Parisian society are far more expensive than he imagined. His country clothes and country manners won’t cut it. Madame Bargeton expects him to pay his own way. The money he was given to last a year is nearly spent in a few weeks. Madame Bargeton has a cousin who helps her entrance into Paris society but Lucien embarrasses her and she drops him. There’s a scene at the opera (Salieri’s Les Danaides – but nobody pays attention to the stage). This part of the novel, then, tracks Lucien’s efforts to make his own way in Paris. Two paths are available to him. He could follow a literary career. He has already written a book of sonnets and a novel in the style of Walter Scott. He meets a circle of friends led by an author named D’Arthez who encourage him to take his work seriously and nurture his artistic gift, understanding that the path of talent is difficult and the rewards, if they come, will be many years down the road. The other path, represented by a different friend named Lousteau, is journalism. Lousteau can set Lucien up with one of the local papers writing society articles and theater and book reviews. Lucien chooses the more straightforward path. Soon he’s writing articles to order, ignoring his principles, or even his true opinions, in order to write what the publisher needs him to write based on what will sell papers, or sell advertising space to booksellers and theater owners.

Balzac delights in exposing the endless corruption of the publishing world and the theater world. He takes great pains to explain how money is made from bad books, how theatrical success is manufactured by papered houses and paid claques. The liberal leaning papers write against the royalists and vice versa. A wealthy investor arranges for articles to be written that increase their business, or flatter their mistress. Favorable reviews are provided for theaters or actresses (or their supporters) who pay for them. Negative articles are wielded against political enemies, or with the purpose of ruining a rival so that the rival will come begging and ready to make a bargain. All the players are willing to do what is necessary, stab a friend in the back, write an article that speaks forcefully against their actual views, and then write a new article saying just the opposite. Lucien is quickly seen to be as unprincipled as the rest.

All the same, Lucien is, for a time, successful. He begins an affair with an actress, Coralie, who sincerely loves him. The first of his articles is praised as an excellent piece of writing. He’s able to live well, and buy new clothes. His success, of course, makes him a target. Arrogantly, he uses his position to attack Madame Bargeton and her friends who denied him entrance to society. They respond by pretending it was a misunderstanding, but after stringing him along a little, they betray him again. Lucien loses jobs, and loses money. He and Coralie fall into debt. Lucien repeatedly makes a little money then gambles it away. A publisher takes advantage of him. It’s impossible for a poor man with no influence to get ahead. There’s another duel. Coralie dies. Finally, Lucien forges three checks against his brother-in-law David’s account, which neither will be able to pay back when due. Lucien flees the city and makes his way back to Angouleme.

Part three is in Angouleme again, “The Sufferings of an Inventor”. After a few introductory pages describing Lucien’s return to Angouleme, there’s a 100 page flashback that shows what happened to David and Eve and the printing business during the year Lucien was in Paris. David has been working on an invention of a cheaper means of manufacturing paper using vegetable matter rather than linen to feed the growing hunger for printed materials. If his invention is a success he will revolutionize the printing business and make a fortune. While he has been working on his discovery, Eve has been managing the business. But business is not going well. A rival printing business run by the ruthless Cointet brothers schemes against them, including engaging an employee of David and Eve’s as a spy. When Lucien’s forged checks come to light, it turns out that the Cointet brothers have also been operating as bankers and that, in essence, the borrowed money must now be paid from David, to the Cointet brothers. David and Eve are gullible innocents victimized by the legal and financial maneuvers of everyone involved. By the time Lucien arrives in Angouleme, David has been forced into hiding, and then taken for a night to debtor’s prison. Lucien believes he can save the day by once more beguiling Madame Bargeton, who has returned to Angouleme with her new husband. But he is humiliated once again, and feeling guilt-ridden by what he has done to his friend and sister, he writes a suicide note and leaves town intending on drowning himself.

And then there’s a strange Deux ex machina. Outside of town a carriage stops and Lucien is befriended by a brand new character, a Spanish Canon of the church and a diplomat, who is fabulously wealthy, and also somehow interested in Lucien. He likes the romance of Lucien’s story. And he remarks as everyone does on Lucien’s good looks. The Canon offers to pay David’s debt if Lucien will agree to come to Paris with him and be his private secretary. Meanwhile David and Eve had made their own humble salvation: they sell the printing business and the patent for David’s invention to the Cointet brothers. The letter from Lucien with the Canon’s check comes just as they are completing the sale. Within a year, the Cointet brothers became millionaires. David and Eve move to a small farm adjoining David’s father’s vineyards, which he has been working since selling the printing business. To find our what happens to Lucien, Balzac has us read another novel. The final line of Lost Illusions is: “As for Lucien, his return to Paris belongs to the Scenes de la vie Parisienne.”

The “illusions” which are lost are the wholesome ideas that anyone truly cares about art, the anyone is honest, or generous, that the good will be rewarded, that there’s any reason not to cheat a friend if there’s profit in it. Talk about a dirty book! Balzac’s view of society is endlessly cynical. Everyone is corrupt and scheming. Lucien is betrayed or taken advantage of again and again by nearly everyone he meets in Paris. David and Eve are similarly treated in Angouleme. But Lucien is also himself so unprincipled and motivated by greed and beguiled by the shallowness of society; and David and Eve are so terribly naive, that it’s hard to feel sorry for them. The effect is not tragedy, but merely tedium. Seven hundred pages of cruel cats torturing a doomed mouse. I’m not heartless, I was glad at the end that the heroes end happily: David and Eve with their simple farm, and Lucien with a rich protector in Paris, but none of them earned it, and the schemers and cheaters all do equally well, or better.

Balzac very much intrudes as an authorial voice in his own novel. There are long sections where he explains to the reader the paper-making process, or how the banking system works. I didn’t find it interesting. He also introduces many, many characters to the reader, some of which he describes as though they were historical figures but actually many of them are his own characters whose stories are told in others of his ninety-two novels. It turns out the Spanish diplomat who appears unexpectedly in the final pages to rescue Lucien was a character from Balzac’s novel Le Pere Goriot. Like Marvel comic characters re-appearing in dozens of movies, the ninety-two novels collectively called The Human Comedy, are their own literary universe.

I think I see why Scott Mocrieff liked this novel so much. It’s like Remembrance of Things Past in that both feature a young man from the country who leverages his literary talent to ascend into the upper class social world of Paris, only to be disappointed in finding there the same human smallness, ignorance, jealousies and obsessions he sees everywhere else. Balzac’s version of the story, though, is even closer to Scott Moncrieff’s personal experience. Scott Moncrieff was also hailed for his literary gifts as a young man, and traveled on them from the Scottish countryside, to London, to Pisa and Rome. But his talent wasn’t sufficient, so along the way he made the choice to work as a journalist instead, writing reviews of other poets. Balzac’s view of journalism as the lesser field, filled with writers who couldn’t make it as artists must have felt to Scott Moncrieff more like the tragedy that Balzac meant it to be for his character Lucien.

Scott Moncrieff’s judgment that Lost Illusions is the greatest novel of all time made me wonder what novel I would place in that position. Proust is certainly a contender. Although there are many that I think are great, and greater than this one, if I had to name one I may as well go ahead and give the prize to The Brothers Karamzov.