Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“LOST ILLUSIONS” by Honore de Balzac (Illusions Perdues first published in three separate parts in 1837, 1839 and 1843. Many English translations, one of the best being by Kathleen Raine)

About two months ago I wrote a piece on Honore de Balzac’s Cesar Birotteau, which I personally regard as Balzac’s most boring and unreadable novel. I did this to show that even writers of genius can have their off-days; but also to show that this can be said by somebody who is a great fan of Balzac. To prove the point, I listed seven very good novels and stories by Balzac which I had previously discussed on this blog. And there I was going to leave it, because I suspected some readers might be getting all Balzac-ed out. But then something came up which made me plunge back into Balzacville. So here I am writing about Lost Illusions - not, I think, one of Balzac’s best novels but certainly much better than his worst. It is also one of his longest, running to over 700 tightly-printed pages in the edition I have. But there is a reason for this. It was first presented to the French reading public as three separate novels, published respectively in 1837, 1839 and 1843. The three parts are connected, involving the same main character, but the third part focuses as much on another character. Like so many of Balzac’s novels, it was written in the 1830s and 1840s when the bourgeois liberal King Louis-Philippe was on the throne; but it is set in the 1820s – specifically from 1821 to 1823 – when the very reactionary Bourbons had been restored to the throne after the fall and exile of Napoleon.

All Balzac’s longer novels involve a plethora of characters and it would be difficult to deal with them all; so I will synopsise Lost Illusions in a brutally simplified way.

Part One Les Deux Poetes (The Two Poets) is concerned with the discontents of a young man, Lucien Chardon, who comes from a lower-middle-class family in a small provincial town. Lucien’s mother originally came from a minor aristocratic family and had the aristocratic name de Rubempre before she was married. To boost his status, young Lucien Chardon takes to calling himself Lucien de Rubempre and tries to insinuate himself into such aristocratic circles as there are in an out-of-the-way place. Aged 20, he fancies himself as a poet after he has written some sonnets. He cultivates the aristocratic Madame Louise de Bargeton, who sees herself as the hostess of a literary salon. She is considerably older that he (36 to be precise) and he imagines he is in love with her. He hopes that her connections will help to get published both his poetry and a novel he has written. There is much rivalry in the small, catty, provincial aristocratic society, and much detail about familial feuds; and in one case, a duel. Louise de Bargeton is flattered by the thought that Lucien will be “her” poet. So they set off together to Paris, he hoping to conquer the literary world and she wanting to win fame as his mentor. [And if you’re wondering why this first novel is called The Two Poets, it’s because there is a parallel plot I’ve left out. A young man called David Sechard is also a poet and he woos and marries Lucien’s sister Eve. Lucien’s self-interest is signalled by the fact that, in departing for Paris, he misses his sister’s wedding…. And if I examined every sub-plot in Balzac’s novel, this synopsis would run to many pages.]

Part Two Un Grand Homme de Province a Paris (A Provincial Celebrity in Paris) almost a once begins the process of Lucien de Rubempre’s disillusionment. Madame de Bargeton quickly understands that there are far more interesting young men in Paris than Lucien and promptly dumps him. Lucien now sees her as a faded provincial rose and anyway he felt very out of his depth in the aristocratic Restoration high society of Saint-Germain. Short on funds, he now begins to socialise with the more raffish people on the Left Bank. He tries to sell his novel and his book of sonnets to publishers, but he soon discovers that he is a small fish in a big pond and publishers strike very hard bargains with young, unknown authors. But now, for the first time, he comes under the wing of genuine, earnest Latin Quarter intellectuals who, headed by a man called Daniel d’Arthez, eschew flashy, journalistic success, and teach him that a real artist requires patience and a life of frugal dedication. Daniel d’Arthez even helps Lucien to recast and improve his novel. But Lucien is impatient. He wants success and applause NOW. He is launched into journalism by Etienne Lousteaux, who tells him he too was once a hopeful provincial with a tragedy in his pocket. So into journalism Lucien plunges, making his mark in a Liberal, anti-Bourbon newspaper by writing trenchant theatre reviews. He learns the trade of tearing apart worthy books, while puffing unworthy ones for a price. He learns the power of the press in opening doors and intimidating publishers; he learns of the jack-ups between publishers and journalists; and he learns the true explanation of many biased news stories that blandly present themselves as disinterested. For a short period he earns enough to become a dandy-about-town, joins in the all-night parties (or orgies) of theatre people, and sets up a menage with a young actress Coralie, with whom he makes passionate love. And his debts mount up. Other journalists begin to envy him, and would be happy to see him cancelled. In the Liberal press, Lucien and others write thinly-disguised lampoons of members of aristocratic high society, including the likes of Louise de Bargeton. But Saint-Germain aristos counter-attack, for there are Royalist newspapers, equally grubby as the Liberal ones. Madame de Bargeton comes back into Lucien’s life and plays on his vanity by saying that she and her friends can arrange for a patent of nobility to be granted to him – in other words, he can officially be made an aristocrat. The catch is that he now has to work for the Royalist press, which he does. At once he has the humiliation of seeing his (still unpublished) sonnets parodied and ridiculed by Liberal journalists to whom he had shown them. And at once the Royalist press get him to throw away any personal integrity by writing articles mocking the same Daniel d’Arthez who had offered him help and good advice. Royalist publishers are just as unimpressed by his novel as Liberal publishers were. In the end he is discredited by both political camps; his debts fall due; he tries to cover them by hopeless gambling; he takes to forging cheques using the name of his brother-in-law David Sechard ; the actress Coralie falls sick and dies after the claque have hissed her off the stage. Impoverished, universally detested, he walks home to his provincial town with just a few francs in his pocket. Complete defeat.

And there, I believe, Balzac should have left it, for Part Three Les Souffrances de l’Inventeur (The Sufferings of an Inventor) is in great part not about Lucien de Rubempre. Balzac begins Les Souffrances de l’Inventeur with an account of Lucien’s return home. But much of the third part of Lost Illusions is about the heroic attempts of Lucien’s sister Eve and her husband David Sechard to keep a press going. David is single-mindedly experimenting with ways of producing a cheaper brand of quality paper – but he is thwarted by rivals, by creditors, by unscrupulous lawyers and also by dud cheques that have been forged in his name by Lucien. David has more personal probity than Lucien has, but is generally even more naïve than Lucien. His story is another version of a man who sets out with high hopes and gets crushed. David has to go into hiding over debts that have been run up in his name. Only after all this has been told in great detail does Lucien return to centre stage. Put briefly, Lucien submits to flattery and is invited to a banquet supposedly to honour him as a local celebrity returned from Paris. But it is a trap, for when he is drunk he lets slip the whereabouts on his brother-in-law. David is promptly arrested and imprisoned and Lucien realizes that he has ruined the lives of his sister and brother-in-law. At the very end of this novel Balzac, rather weakly, creates more-or-less happy endings for some of the main characters, but the true ending of Lost Illusions comes when Lucien de Rubempre is on the verge of committing suicide as he realizes what harm he has done to so many people  (David, Eve, Daniel d’Arthez, Coralie etc.) all in the interests of his egotistical wish for fame and applause. His illusions are all gone. But now, heavy-handedly, comes the moral. In his suicidal mood, Lucien meets the “Abbe Carlos Herrera”, apparently a Spanish priest diplomat, who ridicules him out of his self-indulgent feelings and, like Mephistopheles, promises to show him the road to power and fame in Paris by exercise of the will. For many, many pages he preaches to Lucien such gems as “Never regard men, still less women, otherwise than as instruments”. Lucien accepts to become the priest’s “companion” in conquering society. There is a soupcon of a homosexual relationship here. And in case you are thinking it’s a strange sermon for a priest to preach it is because, as all Balzacians know, the “priest” is really the master criminal Vautrin in disguise – one of those characters who appear repeatedly in many of Balzac’s novels.

So much for a necessarily long synopsis.

What, in the end, have we  (and Lucien) learnt in the novel? Class differences, of course, but they are very much to the fore in all of Balzac’s novels. Then the nature of both journalistic and literary circles. There may be some writers of integrity, but the world of journalism is pitiless and the world of literature and literary criticism is often corrupt, with much rivalry, back-biting, dishonesty, puffery, adherence to current fashions and monetary influences. Honesty doesn’t get you far and neither do idealistic thoughts of literature as a brotherhood. Better, then, in a dog-eat-dog world, to run with the dogs that have the sharpest teeth. Many of these ideas came out of Balzac’s own life. Remember he was a provincial who came to Paris, and he began his career as a hack who wrote, pseudonymously, trashy sensationalist pot-boilers. Scholars still haven’t decided how many he wrote under assumed names before he produced his first real, and signed, novel Les Chouans. He knew thoroughly France’s equivalent of Grub Street.

But, for this reader at any rate, there are many problems with Lost Illusions. Chief defects are the character of Lucien de Rubempre himself and the composite novel’s general formlessness. Lucien is often naïve and gullible to a degree that defies credibility. Further, it is hard to believe Balzac likes Lucien and it is hard for us to like him either. Not only is Lucien naïve, but he has all the weaknessess of Balzac’s “bad” characters without any of their strengths. Lucien is ambitious and uses other people as conveniences, but he lacks the single-minded will to succeed and easily falls prey to what we know to be second-rate minds. Despite his periodical repentances (over the death of Coralie, over the ruination of David and Eve, over the ridiculing of Daniel d’Arthez) he does not learn from his experience, and it is significant that Balzac has to introduce, near the end of the novel, a character (Vautrin the “priest”) to preach his cynical message of ruthlessness. Towards the end of an earlier and much better novel, Le Pere Goriot (published 1835), Balzac also had Vautrin preaching this message to his main character Rastignac; but Rastignac was a more mature man who had already, bit by bit, learnt the nasty way the world worked by observing the self-interest of a family that destroyed itself. He did not really have to be schooled, by somebody else, in the ways of the world.

The complete naivete of David Sechard, too trusting by half, parallels Lucien’s. It is David’s wife Eve who knows what practicality is and who has some backbone – a dominant female figure who is both strong and virtuous. But David himself, for all his hard work, comes across as gullible. Did Balzac really believe that all talented and inventive people were as weak as this? As I said at the top of this review, I do not believe Lost Illusions is one of Balzac’s best novels, but it is filled with interesting detail and action.

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And now I will explain how “something came up which made me plunge back into Balzacville” as I promised at the top of this review.

At the recent International Film Festival, I saw the two-and-a-half-hour-long French film Illusions Perdues, based on Balzac’s composite novel, released in France in 2021. Made on a huge budget, lavish in its presentation of 1820s Paris in all its sordor and splendour, it was a huge hit in France and scored many major awards at the French Cesars [the French equivalent of the Oscars or BAFTAs]. If I gave a thumb-nail review of it, I would say it reflects accurately Balzac’s vision of a pitiless society and a corrupt literary and journalistic culture in which even talented people quickly learn to “sell out”. It gives us the heart of the novel with great skill and manages to move at a cracking pace. A stylistic fault is that the film depends very much on an ongoing voice-over commentary to explain things, but I cannot be too critical of this as most of the commentary is lifted straight out of Balzac’s text. Of course even 2-and-a-half hours of film cannot convey everything that is found in 700 pages of novel. Compression is necessary in all film adaptations of long novels.

So here are some of the major differences between film and novel. Quite wisely, I think, screenplay writer and director Xavier Giannoli ditches all of the last third of Balzac’s trilogy. The film ends with Lucien (played by Benjamin Voisin) returning home defeated, and then having an epiphany where he understands that he can live more honestly now that he has lost his illusions. There is no Vautrin giving him a long, corrupting sermon. And of course, equally wisely, the film dumps the whole parallel story of Eve and David Sechard. Similarly, the film ignores most of the petty intrigues and squabblings of provincial aristocrats in the first third of Balzac’s trilogy. In effect, 90% of the film consists of the second part of Balzac’s composite novel.

So far so good, making for an intensely-focused story. But some of the characterisation is surprising. In the novel Madame Louise de Bargeton has no more interest in Lucien once she gets to Paris, and returns into his life only in order to trap him by dangling before him the prospect of having aristocratic status bestowed on him. She is as cold-hearted as the rest of the noblesse. In the film Louise de Bargeton (played sensitively by Cecile de France) truly loves Lucien, regrets that she ever broke with him and has some sentimental scenes with him. Speaking of love, the film of course has many bum-shaking, boobs-flapping explicit sex scenes, which are not exactly in Balzac’s work, but which are certainly alluded to by Balzac. He wrote freely of prostitutes, mistresses, liaisons etc in a way that was not possible for contemporaneous novelists in Victorian England. The film has much excellent casting. Vincent Lacoste plays Etienne Lousteau, the opportunist journalist who introduces Lucien to the world of journalism. With his cockiness and cynical wit, he almost steals the film from Benjamin Voisin’s Lucien. A minor character in Balzac’s novel – the czar of hacks who organizes how books will be reviewed - is expanded into a major role played by Gerard Depardieu. What I most regret in the film is the absence of Daniel d’Arthez, the one character in the novel who shows real literary integrity and allows Balzac to suggest that it is not all of the literary tribe who are corrupt.

Some French critics praised the film for making the story relevant to today, with its awareness of what would now be called “fake news” and with journalism corporatized and built on monetary interests. Others said that the film tried too hard to suggest such parallels. Then there were a few who called out the film for a few anachronisms – some waltz tunes on the soundtrack belong to a much later era than the 1820s. Likewise some of the theatres mentioned in the film didn’t exist in the 1820s and there was a mention of Parisian boulevards which weren’t constructed until the reign of Napoleon III. But these all seem matters of little moment. The film Illusions Perdues enlivens Balzac’s novel and understands what the author was condemning. Worth seeing if you can stand the massive cynicism of its characters. 

 [Lucien (left) embraces the journalist Etienne Lousteau (right)]