Lost Illusions (Complete Edition). Honore de Balzac
at the blow, but he struck the bottom with his feet, and rose to the surface again, vowing to subjugate this little world. He rose like a bull, stung to fury by a shower of darts, and prepared to obey Louise by declaiming Saint John in Patmos; but by this time the card-tables had claimed their complement of players, who returned to the accustomed groove to find amusement there which poetry had not afforded them. They felt besides that the revenge of so many outraged vanities would be incomplete unless it were followed up by contemptuous indifference; so they showed their tacit disdain for the native product by leaving Lucien and Mme. de Bargeton to themselves. Every one appeared to be absorbed in his own affairs; one chattered with the prefect about a new crossroad, another proposed to vary the pleasures of the evening with a little music. The great world of Angouleme, feeling that it was no judge of poetry, was very anxious, in the first place, to hear the verdict of the Pimentels and the Rastignacs, and formed a little group about them. The great influence wielded in the department by these two families was always felt on every important occasion; every one was jealous of them, every one paid court to them, foreseeing that they might some day need that influence.
“What do you think of our poet and his poetry?” Jacques asked of the Marquise. Jacques used to shoot over the lands belonging to the Pimentel family.
“Why, it is not bad for provincial poetry,” she said, smiling; “and besides, such a beautiful poet cannot do anything amiss.”
Every one thought the decision admirable; it traveled from lip to lip, gaining malignance by the way. Then Chatelet was called upon to accompany M. du Bartas on the piano while he mangled the great solo from Figaro; and the way being opened to music, the audience, as in duty bound listened while Chatelet in turn sang one of Chateaubriand’s ballads, a chivalrous ditty made in the time of the Empire. Duets followed, of the kind usually left to boarding-school misses, and rescued from the schoolroom by Mme. du Brossard, who meant to make a brilliant display of her dear Camille’s talents for M. de Severac’s benefit.
Mme. du Bargeton, hurt by the contempt which every one showed her poet, paid back scorn for scorn by going to her boudoir during these performances. She was followed by the prelate. His Vicar-General had just been explaining the profound irony of the epigram into which he had been entrapped, and the Bishop wished to make amends. Mlle. de Rastignac, fascinated by the poetry, also slipped into the boudoir without her mother’s knowledge.
Louise drew Lucien to her mattress-cushioned sofa; and with no one to see or hear, she murmured in his ear, “Dear angel, they did not understand you; but, ‘Thy songs are sweet, I love to say them over.’”
And Lucien took comfort from the pretty speech, and forgot his woes for a little.
“Glory is not to be had cheaply,” Mme. de Bargeton continued, taking his hand and holding it tightly in her own. “Endure your woes, my friend, you will be great one day; your pain is the price of your immortality. If only I had a hard struggle before me! God preserve you from the enervating life without battles, in which the eagle’s wings have no room to spread themselves. I envy you; for if you suffer, at least you live. You will put out your strength, you will feel the hope of victory; your strife will be glorious. And when you shall come to your kingdom, and reach the imperial sphere where great minds are enthroned, then remember the poor creatures disinherited by fate, whose intellects pine in an oppressive moral atmosphere, who die and have never lived, knowing all the while what life might be; think of the piercing eyes that have seen nothing, the delicate senses that have only known the scent of poison flowers. Then tell in your song of plants that wither in the depths of the forest, choked by twining growths and rank, greedy vegetation, plants that have never been kissed by the sunlight, and die, never having put forth a blossom. It would be a terribly gloomy poem, would it not, a fanciful subject? What a sublime poem might be made of the story of some daughter of the desert transported to some cold, western clime, calling for her beloved sun, dying of a grief that none can understand, overcome with cold and longing. It would be an allegory; many lives are like that.”
“You would picture the spirit which remembers Heaven,” said the Bishop; “some one surely must have written such a poem in the days of old; I like to think that I see a fragment of it in the Song of Songs.”
“Take that as your subject,” said Laure de Rastignac, expressing her artless belief in Lucien’s powers.
“The great sacred poem of France is still unwritten,” remarked the Bishop. “Believe me, glory and success await the man of talent who shall work for religion.”
“That task will be his,” said Mme. de Bargeton rhetorically. “Do you not see the first beginnings of the vision of the poem, like the flame of dawn, in his eyes?”
“Nais is treating us very badly,” said Fifine; “what can she be doing?”
“Don’t you hear?” said Stanislas. “She is flourishing away, using big words that you cannot make head or tail of.”
Amelie, Fifine, Adrien, and Francis appeared in the doorway with Mme. de Rastignac, who came to look for her daughter.
“Nais,” cried the two ladies, both delighted to break in upon the quiet chat in the boudoir, “it would be very nice of you to come and play something for us.”
“My dear child, M. de Rubempre is just about to recite his Saint John in Patmos, a magnificent biblical poem.”
“Biblical!” echoed Fifine in amazement.
Amelie and Fifine went back to the drawing-room, taking the word back with them as food for laughter. Lucien pleaded a defective memory and excused himself. When he reappeared, nobody took the slightest notice of him; every one was chatting or busy at the card-tables; the poet’s aureole had been plucked away, the landowners had no use for him, the more pretentious sort looked upon him as an enemy to their ignorance, while the women were jealous of Mme. de Bargeton, the Beatrice of this modern Dante, to use the Vicar-General’s phrase, and looked at him with cold, scornful eyes.
“So this is society!” Lucien said to himself as he went down to L’Houmeau by the steps of Beaulieu; for there are times when we choose to take the longest way, that the physical exercise of walking may promote the flow of ideas.
So far from being disheartened, the fury of repulsed ambition gave Lucien new strength. Like all those whose instincts bring them to a higher social sphere which they reach before they can hold their own in it, Lucien vowed to make any sacrifice to the end that he might remain on that higher social level. One by one he drew out the poisoned shafts on his way home, talking aloud to himself, scoffing at the fools with whom he had to do, inventing neat answers to their idiotic questions, desperately vexed that the witty responses occurred to him so late in the day. By the time that he reached the Bordeaux road, between the river and the foot of the hill, he thought that he could see Eve and David sitting on a baulk of timber by the river in the moonlight, and went down the footpath towards them.
While Lucien was hastening to the torture in Mme. de Bargeton’s rooms, his sister had changed her dress for a gown of pink cambric covered with narrow stripes, a straw hat, and a little silk shawl. The simple costume seemed like a rich toilette on Eve, for she was one of those women whose great nature lends stateliness to the least personal detail; and David felt prodigiously shy of her now that she had changed her working dress. He had made up his mind that he would speak of himself; but now as he gave his arm to this beautiful girl, and they walked through L’Houmeau together, he could find nothing to say to her. Love delights in such reverent awe as redeemed souls know on beholding the glory of God. So, in silence, the two lovers went across the Bridge of Saint Anne, and followed the left bank of the Charente. Eve felt embarrassed by the pause, and stopped to look along the river; a joyous shaft of sunset had turned the water between the bridge and the new powder mills into a sheet of gold.
“What a beautiful evening it is!” she said, for the sake of saying something; “the air is warm and fresh, and full of the scent of flowers, and there is a wonderful sky.”
“Everything speaks to our heart,” said David, trying to proceed to love by way of analogy. “Those who love find infinite delight in discovering the poetry of their own inmost souls in