Illusions perdues
Novel, or more properly a huge novel-cycle, by Balzac, first published 1837 (Part I, ‘Les Deux Poètes’), 1839 (Part 2, ‘Un grand homme de province à Paris’), and 1843 (Part 3, ‘Les Souffrances de l'inventeur’), which both invents and exhausts the ‘novel of disillusionment’. Illusions perdues follows the career of Lucien Chardon, who adopts his mother's nobler name to become Lucien de Rubempré, from his youth in the provincial town of Angoulême (in Part I) to Paris, where he achieves brief celebrity as a poet before sinking into the lower reaches of journalism and hack-writing (in Part 2). In Part 3 he returns to Angoulême, defeated and ridiculed, to complicate the dramatic business adventures of his old friend David Séchard. He is saved from suicide at the very end by a mysterious traveller, who whisks him back to Paris (and to the further adventures of Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes).
Lucien is a ‘weak vessel’, a young man of talent, charm, and ambition, lacking that dogged consistency which alone, for Balzac, leads to greatness. David Séchard is his complementary opposite, a ‘genius’ in Balzac's own unconventional terms, whose fictional invention of vegetable-based paper (made in historical fact some years after Balzac's death) is only defeated by the perfidy of local money-lenders and rivals. In Angoulême, Lucien rises from the ‘low town’ of L'Houmeau to the one literary salon of the ‘high town’, where he is lionized by Madame de Bargeton, his elder by 15 years. The description of the complex social structure of the town is a masterpiece of sociography, enlivened by satirical portraits of provincial types.
Part I ends with the elopement to Paris of the provincial muse and her poet-protégé. In the capital the scales fall from Lucien's eyes, and he quickly abandons Madame de Bargeton, who now seems to him to be an ungainly, dry old stick. He comes up against the miserliness of publishers and booksellers, and finds he can earn his living only from journalism, not from his slim set of poems entitled Les Marguerites (the extracts given were written by Gautier). He becomes a member of a literary circle or cénacle around Daniel d'Arthez —who prefers the obscurity of a life devoted to his art—whilst also mixing in the dangerous circles of the theatre, hack journalism, and the fringes of politics; and he is soon caught out and sinks into debt. Balzac gives the first and fundamental analysis of a star system, in which a few writers earn large fees and an inexhaustible supply of hangers-on are manipulated by venal editors and publishers; the second part of Illusions perdues remains the standard Romantic demonstration of the plight of the (real of would-be) artist in an age of commercial culture. The scene where Lucien writes drinking-songs by candle-light to earn a few francs as his lover Coralie dies of consumption in their freezing attic is, for all its period pathos, absolutely convincing.
The business saga of Part 3 is no less a critical analysis of the injustices of early capitalism than the spectacular myths of the poet in Paris; Balzac's explanations of paper-making technology, of patents, bills of exchange, and legal skulduggery are as exciting as the adventures of Dumas's Les Trois Mousquetaires. Despite its three-part structure, its vast range of topics, locations, and characters, Illusions perdues has a fundamental unity provided less by the vacillating character of Lucien de Rubempré than by the consistent, impassioned, and critical vision of the realities of French life in the period.
[David Bellos]
