Lost Illusions quotes

in 1802 he had made no progress in either art; but by allowing a handsome margin for “wear and tear” in his estimates, he managed to pay a foreman’s wages. The once easygoing journeyman was a terror to his “bears” and “monkeys.”

Where poverty ceases, avarice begins.

From the day when Séchard first caught a glimpse of the possibility of making a fortune, a growing covetousness developed and sharpened in him a certain practical faculty for business—greedy, suspicious, and keen-eyed. He carried on his craft in disdain of theory.

Didot. They may be fine printers, but their inventions won’t take in the provinces for another hundred years. So there you are.”

A generous man is a bad bargain-driver.

David’s nature was of the sensitive and affectionate type that shrinks from a dispute, and gives way at once if an opponent touches his feelings.

Delighted as he was with his sale of the business, he was not quite easy in his mind as to the payment. To the throes of the vendor, the agony of uncertainty as to the completion of the purchase inevitably succeeds.

Passion of every sort is essentially Jesuitical.

Here was a man who thought that education was useless, forcing himself to believe in the influence of education. He was mortgaging thirty thousand francs upon the ideas of honor and conduct which education should have developed in his son;

Then he would join David at dinner and go back to Marsac, chewing the cud of uneasy reflection.

Avarice, like love, has the gift of second sight, instinctively guessing at future contingencies, and hugging its presentiments.

Séchard senior living at a distance, far from the workshop and the machinery which possessed such a fascination for him, reminding him, as it did, of days when he was making his way, could feel that there were disquieting symptoms of inactivity in his son.

Both felt high swelling hopes of manifold success; both consciously possessed the high order of intelligence which sets a man on a level with lofty heights, consigned though they were socially to the lowest level.

Fate’s injustice was a strong bond between them.

And then, by different ways, following each his own bent of mind, they had attained to poesy. Lucien, destined for the highest speculative fields of natural science, was aiming with hot enthusiasm at fame through literature;

for when he analyzed the society of today, his restless mind was apt to take its stand on the lower ground of those diplomatists who hold that success justifies the use of any means however base.

It is one of the misfortunes attendant upon great intellects that perforce they comprehend all things, both good and evil.

The two young men judged society by the more lofty standard because their social position was at the lowest end of the scale, for unrecognized power is apt to avenge itself for lowly station by viewing the world from a lofty standpoint.

Enthusiasm, that virtue within a virtue, forming the saint, inspiring the devotion hidden from all eyes and glowing out upon the world in verse, turns to exaggeration, with the trifles of a narrow existence for its object.

Far away from the centres of light shed by great minds, where the air is quick with thought, knowledge stands still, taste is corrupted like stagnant water, and passion dwindles, frittered away upon the infinitely small objects which it strives to exalt.

Herein lies the secret of the avarice and tittle-tattle that poison provincial life. The contagion of narrow-mindedness and meanness affects the noblest natures;

de Nègrepelisse (who kept them waiting so long that his son-in-law in fact predeceased him), and Naïs’ brilliant intellectual gifts, and the wealth that lay like undiscovered ore in her nature, profited her nothing, underwent the transforming operation of Time and changed to absurdities.

For our absurdities spring, in fact, for the most part, from the good in us, from some faculty or quality abnormally developed.

Pride, untempered by intercourse with the great world becomes stiff and starched by contact with petty things; in a loftier moral atmosphere it would have grown to noble magnanimity.

She envied that bluestocking of the desert, Lady Hester Stanhope; she longed to be a sister of Saint Camilla and tend the sick and die of yellow fever in a hospital at Barcelona; ’twas a high, a noble destiny!

In short, she thirsted for any draught but the clear spring water of her own life, flowing hidden among green pastures.

She adored Byron and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or anybody else with a picturesque or dramatic career. Her tears were ready to flow for every misfortune; she sang paeans for every victory.

A sunset certainly is a glorious poem; but if a woman describes it, in high-sounding words, for the benefit of matter-of-fact people, is she not ridiculous?

There are pleasures which can only be felt to the full when two souls meet, poet and poet, heart and heart.

She had a trick of using high-sounding phrases, interlarded with exaggerated expressions, the kind of stuff ingeniously nicknamed tartines by the French journalist, who furnishes a daily supply of the commodity for a public that daily performs the difficult feat of swallowing it.

Personable and of a good figure, a clever billiard-player, a passable amateur actor, he danced well, and excelled in most physical exercises; he could, moreover, sing a ballad and applaud a witticism.

Supple, envious, never at a loss, there was nothing that he did not know⁠—nothing that he really knew.

He knew nothing, for instance, of music, but he could sit down to the piano and accompany, after a fashion, a woman who consented after much pressing to sing a ballad learned by heart in a month of hard practice.

Like Spanish grandees and the old Austrian nobility at Vienna, these folk, men and women alike, called each other by their Christian names, a final shade of distinction in the inmost ring of Angoumoisin aristocracy.

Lucien loved Naïs as a young man loves the first woman who flatters him, for Naïs prophesied great things and boundless fame for Lucien.

She used all her skill to secure her hold upon her poet; not merely did she exalt him beyond measure, but she represented him to himself as a child without fortune whom she meant to start in life;

Lucien was too much of a boy to analyze his ladylove; he gave way to unfeigned despair when she opened the campaign by entrenching herself behind the more or less skilfully devised scruples which women raise to have them battered down.

When a woman begins to talk about her duty, regard for appearances or religion, the objections she raises are so many redoubts which she loves to have carried by storm.

But on the guileless Lucien these coquetries were thrown away; he would have advanced of his own accord.

The forthcoming soirée gave him his opportunity. Ambition blended with his love. He loved, and he meant to rise, a double desire not unnatural in young men with a heart to satisfy and the battle of life to fight.

Society, summoning all her children to one banquet, arouses ambition in the very morning of life.

Youth is robbed of its charm, and generous thoughts are corrupted by mercenary scheming.

He loved, and he meant to rise, a double desire not unnatural in young men with a heart to satisfy and the battle of life to fight. Society, summoning all her children to one banquet, arouses ambition in the very morning of life.

Youth is robbed of its charm, and generous thoughts are corrupted by mercenary scheming.

The idealist would fain have it otherwise, but intrusive fact too often gives the lie to the fiction which we should like to believe, making it impossible to paint the young man of the nineteenth century other than he is.

Lucien left the letter with the housemaid, went to the office, and spent the day in reading proofs, superintending the execution of orders, and looking after the affairs of the printing-house. He said not a word to David.

While youth bears a child’s heart, it is capable of sublime reticence.

Perhaps, too, Lucien began to dread the Phocion’s axe which David could wield when he chose, perhaps he was afraid to meet those clear-sighted eyes that read the depths of his soul.

But if Lucien did not see these aspects of the question, his aristocratic instinct discerned plenty of difficulties of another kind, and he took alarm.

A fine manner is not the invariable outcome of noble feeling; and while no man at court had a nobler air than Racine, Corneille looked very much like a cattle-dealer, and Descartes might have been taken for an honest Dutch merchant; and visitors to La Brède, meeting Montesquieu in a cotton nightcap, carrying a rake over his shoulder, mistook him for a gardener.

A knowledge of the world, when it is not sucked in with mother’s milk and part of the inheritance of descent, is only acquired by education, supplemented by certain gifts of chance—a graceful figure, distinction of feature, a certain ring in the voice.

Down once more in L’Houmeau he wished that he had not written that letter; he wished he could have it back again; for down the vista of the future he caught a glimpse of the inexorable laws of the world.

He guessed that nothing succeeds like success, and it cost him something to step down from the first rung of the scaling ladder by which he meant to reach and storm the heights above.

Pictures of his quiet and simple life rose before him, pictures fair with the brightest colors of blossoming love. There was David; what a genius David had—David who had helped him so generously, and would die for him at need;

He had divined the way to win Eve.

The mute delights of this love of theirs differed from the transports of stormy passion, as wildflowers in the fields from the brilliant flowers in garden beds.

Interchange of glances, delicate and sweet as blue water-flowers on the surface of the stream; a look in either face, vanishing as swiftly as the scent of briar-rose;

The aspirant for love and honors felt that the way had been made smooth for him; the young man and the comrade felt all his heart go out towards his friend.

It was one of those moments that come very seldom in our lives, when all the forces in us are sweetly strung, and every chord vibrating gives out full resonance.

And yet, this goodness of a noble nature increased Lucien’s human tendency to take himself as the centre of things. Do not all of us say more or less, “L’État, c’est moi!” with Louis Quatorze?

for if youth that has not yet gone astray is pitiless for the sins of others, it is ready, on the other hand, to put a magnificent faith in them.

It is only, in fact, after a good deal of experience of life that we recognize the truth of Raphael’s great saying⁠—“To comprehend is to equal.”

The power of appreciating poetry is rare, generally speaking, in France; esprit soon dries up the source of the sacred tears of ecstasy; nobody cares to be at the trouble of deciphering the sublime, of plumbing the depths to discover the infinite.

and as it was often a good while before he succeeded, his smiles appeared after a delay, like the explosion of a shell which has entered the earth and worked up again. His respect for his wife, moreover, almost amounted to adoration.

And so long as we can adore, is there not happiness enough in life?

Anaïs’ husband was as docile as a child who asks nothing better than to be told what to do; and, generous and clever woman as she was, she had taken no undue advantage of his weaknesses.

she kept him brushed, neat, and tidy, looked closely after him, and humored him; and humored, looked after, brushed, kept tidy, and cared for, M. de Bargeton had come to feel an almost doglike affection for his wife.

It is so easy to give happiness that costs nothing!

Mme. de Bargeton, knowing that her husband had no pleasure but in good cheer, saw that he had good dinners; she had pity upon him, she had never uttered a word of complaint;

de Bargeton who could understand poetry. The whole matter-of-fact assembly was there by a misapprehension, nor did they, for the most part, know what they had come out for to see.

There are some words that draw a public as unfailingly as the clash of cymbals, the trumpet, or the mountebank’s big drum; “beauty,” “glory,” “poetry,” are words that bewitch the coarsest intellect.

When everyone had arrived; when the buzz of talk ceased after repeated efforts on the part of M. de Bargeton, who, obedient to his wife, went round the room much as the beadle makes the circle of the church, tapping the pavement with his wand;

But Louise, and the Bishop, and pretty Laure de Rastignac besought Lucien to continue, and this time he caught the attention of his audience with Chénier’s spirited reactionary “Iambes.” Several persons, carried away by his impassioned delivery, applauded the reading without understanding the sense.

People of this sort are impressed by vociferation, as a coarse palate is tickled by strong spirits.

During the interval, as they partook of ices, Zéphirine despatched Francis to examine the volume, and informed her neighbor Amélie that the poetry was in print.

“Madame, we cannot feel too reverently towards the noble spirits in whom God has set some ray of this light,” said the Bishop, addressing Lolotte. “Yes, poetry is something holy.

Poetry implies suffering.

How many silent nights those verses that you admire have cost! We should bow in love and reverence before the poet; his life here is almost always a life of sorrow; but God doubtless reserves a place in heaven for him among His prophets.

he must give the results of whole systems of philosophy in a few picturesque lines; indeed, his songs are like seeds that must break into blossom in other hearts wherever they find the soil prepared by personal experience.

How can you express unless you first have felt? And is not passion suffering?

Poetry is only brought forth after painful wanderings in the vast regions of thought and life.

instead of earning money, he will spend it. You have accustomed him to believe in his great powers, in fact, but the world at large declines to believe in any man’s superior intellect until he has achieved some signal success.

Now success in literature is only won in solitude and by dogged work.

What will Mme. de Bargeton give your brother in return for so many days spent at her feet? Lucien has too much spirit to accept help from her;

“No, not generous, only wise,” said David. “

And now that we are quite alone under the sky, with no listeners except the bushes and the reeds by the edge of the Charente, let me tell you about my anxiety as to Lucien’s present step, dear Eve.

After all that I have just said, I hope that you will look on my fears as a refinement of friendship. You and your mother have done all that you could to put him above his social position;

How can he maintain himself in the society to which his tastes incline him? I know Lucien; he likes to reap, he does not like toil; it is his nature.

Social claims will take up the whole of his time, and for a man who has nothing but his brains, time is capital.

He likes to shine; society will stimulate his desires until no money will satisfy them; instead of earning money, he will spend it.

“But so long as mother is strong enough for her tiring life, so long as I live, we shall earn enough, perhaps, between us to keep Lucien until success comes. My courage will never fail,” said Eve, brightening. “

There is no hardship in work when we work for one we love; it is not drudgery.

It makes me happy to think that I toil so much, if indeed it is toil, for him. Oh, do not be in the least afraid, we will earn money enough to send Lucien into the great world. There lies his road to success.”

“And there lies his road to ruin,” returned David. “Dear Eve, listen to me.

A man needs an independent fortune, or the sublime cynicism of poverty, for the slow execution of great work.

Believe me, Lucien’s horror of privation is so great, the savor of banquets, the incense of success is so sweet in his nostrils, his self-love has grown so much in Mme.

“

Where is the woman who does not feel that she is loved?

”

you might compare these last to the much-admired statues which must come down at once from their pedestal if the frost chips off a nose or a finger.

They are not permitted to be human; they are required to be forever divine and forever impeccable.

So one glance exchanged between Mme. de Bargeton and Lucien outweighed twelve years of Zizine’s connection with Francis in the social balance; and a squeeze of the hand drew down all the thunders of the Charente upon the lovers.

And so they grow tired of one another, expend their longings in empty space; and, having time for reflection, come to their own conclusions about each other.

Many a passion that has taken the field in gorgeous array, with colors flying and an ardor fit to turn the world upside down, has turned home again without a victory, inglorious and crestfallen, cutting but a foolish figure after these vain alarums and excursions.

Such mishaps are sometimes due to the diffidence of youth, sometimes to the demurs of an inexperienced woman, for old players at this game seldom end in a fiasco of this kind.

The horror that some women feel for premeditation does honor to their delicacy; they would rather surrender upon the impulse of passion, than in fulfilment of a contract.

In general, prescribed happiness is not the kind that any of us desire.

Mme. de Bargeton read fixed purpose in Lucien’s eyes and forehead, and in the agitation in his face and manner, and proposed to herself to baffle him, urged thereto partly by a spirit of contradiction, partly also by an exalted conception of love.

What more must you have? Can it be that your love is influenced by the clamor of the senses, when it is the noblest privilege of the beloved to silence them? For whom do you take me? Am I not your Beatrice?

If I am not something more than a woman for you, I am less than a woman.

”

Some people no longer look the same when detached from the background of faces, objects, and surroundings which serve as a setting, without which, indeed, they seem to lose something of their intrinsic worth.

Personality demands its appropriate atmosphere to bring out its values, just as the figures in Flemish interiors need the arrangement of light and shade in which they are placed by the painter’s genius if they are to live for us.

This is especially true of provincials. Mme. de Bargeton, moreover, looked more thoughtful and dignified than was necessary now, when no barriers stood between her and happiness.

You need only think of your dress. A woman moving in good society could not well do less; and if you mean to obtain a Receiver-General’s appointment for M. de Bargeton, or a post in the Household, you ought not to look poverty-stricken.

Here, in Paris, they only give to the rich.

It is most fortunate that you brought Gentil to go out with you, and Albertine for your own woman, for servants are enough to ruin you here. But with your introductions you will seldom be home to a meal.”

A man of any consequence in his native place, where he cannot go out but he meets with some recognition of his importance at every step, does not readily accustom himself to the sudden and total extinction of his consequence.

You are somebody in your own country, in Paris you are nobody.

The transition between the first state and the last should be made gradually, for the too abrupt fall is something like annihilation.

“Will she always look like that?” said he to himself, ignorant that the morning had been spent in preparing a transformation.

In the provinces comparison and choice are out of the question; when a face has grown familiar it comes to possess a certain beauty that is taken for granted.

But transport the pretty woman of the provinces to Paris, and no one takes the slightest notice of her; her prettiness is of the comparative degree illustrated by the saying that among the blind the one-eyed are kings. Lucien’s eyes were now busy comparing Mme.

Châtelet, elegant, and as much at home as an actor treading the familiar boards of his theatre, in two days had recovered all the ground lost in the past six months.

Ordinary people will not admit that our sentiments towards each other can totally change in a moment, and yet certain it is, that two lovers not seldom fly apart even more quickly than they drew together.

In Mme. de Bargeton and in Lucien a process of disenchantment was at work; Paris was the cause. Life had widened out before the poet’s eyes, as society came to wear a new aspect for Louise.

but the agonies of less fortunate mortals are as well worth our attention as crises and vicissitudes in the lives of the mighty and privileged ones of earth. Is not the pain equally great for either?

Suffering exalts all things.

And, after all, suppose that we change the terms, and for a suit of clothes, more or less fine, put instead a ribbon, or a star, or a title; have not brilliant careers been tormented by reason of such apparent trifles as these?

She was laughing and chatting with Mme. Firmiani, one of the most charming women in Paris.

A voice indeed cried, “Intellect is the lever by which to move the world,” but another voice cried no less loudly that money was the fulcrum.

He would not stay any longer on the scene of his collapse and defeat, and went towards the Palais Royal. He did not know the topography of his quarter yet, and was obliged to ask his way.

“Permit me to introduce M. de Rubempré,” she said. “You rank too high in the world of letters not to welcome a debutant. M. de Rubempré is from Angoulême, and will need your influence, no doubt, with the powers that bring genius to light.

So far, he has no enemies to help him to success by their attacks upon him.

Is there enough originality in the idea of obtaining for him by friendship all that hatred has done for you to tempt you to make the experiment?”

And not only were they at ease in their speech, they were at ease in their dress, nothing looked new, nothing looked old, nothing about them was conspicuous, everything attracted the eyes.

The fine gentleman of today was the same yesterday, and would be the same tomorrow.

Lucien guessed that he himself looked as if he were dressed for the first time in his life.

that your father, when he was alive, was an apothecary in L’Houmeau, a suburb of Angoulême; and that your sister, a charming girl, gets up shirts to admiration, and is just about to be married to a local printer named Séchard.

Such is the world! You no sooner show yourself than it pulls you to pieces.

“M. de Marsay came to Mme. d’Espard to laugh at you with her; so the two ladies, thinking that your presence put them in a false position, went out at once. Do not attempt to go to either house. If Mme.

Do not attempt to go to either house. If Mme. de Bargeton continued to receive your visits, her cousin would have nothing to do with her. You have genius; try to avenge yourself.

The world looks down upon you; look down in your turn upon the world.

Take refuge in some garret, write your masterpieces, seize on power of any kind, and you will see the world at your feet. Then you can give back the bruises which you have received, and in the very place where they were given. Mme.

After the first unlucky venture in fashionable life which absorbed his capital, he threw himself into his work with the first earnest enthusiasm, which is frittered away so soon over the difficulties or in the bypaths of every life in Paris.

The most luxurious and the very poorest lives are equally beset with temptations which nothing but the fierce energy of genius or the morose persistence of ambition can overcome.

Lucien used to drop in at Flicoteaux’s about half-past four, having remarked the advantages of an early arrival; the bill-of-fare was more varied, and there was still some chance of obtaining the dish of your choice.

The young journalist, with whom he had made a one-sided friendship, never came now to Flicoteaux’s. Lucien was waiting for a chance—which failed to present itself.

In Paris there are no chances except for men with a very wide circle of acquaintance; chances of success of every kind increase with the number of your connections; and, therefore, in this sense also the chances are in favor of the big battalions.

Lucien had sufficient provincial foresight still left, and had no mind to wait until only a last few coins remained to him. He resolved to face the publishers.

Lucien went back across the Pont Neuf absorbed in reflection.

From all that he understood of this mercantile dialect, it appeared that books, like cotton nightcaps, were to be regarded as articles of merchandise to be sold dear and bought cheap.

“I have made a mistake,” said Lucien to himself; but, all the same, this rough-and-ready practical aspect of literature made an impression upon him.

“Oh! you are a poet! Then I don’t want your romance,” and the old man handed back the manuscript. “The rhyming fellows come to grief when they try their hands at prose.

In prose you can’t use words that mean nothing; you absolutely must say something.

”

The King allowed the author a pension. ‘Genius is patience,’ as Buffon said.

And patience after all is a man’s nearest approach to Nature’s processes of creation.

What is Art, monsieur, but Nature concentrated?”

The King allowed the author a pension. ‘Genius is patience,’ as Buffon said. And patience after all is a man’s nearest approach to Nature’s processes of creation.

What is Art, monsieur, but Nature concentrated?

”

Nature sweeps away sickly or deformed creatures, and Society rejects an imperfectly developed talent. Any man who means to rise above the rest must make ready for a struggle and be undaunted by difficulties.

A great writer is a martyr who does not die; that is all.

—There is the stamp of genius on your forehead,” d’Arthez continued, enveloping Lucien by a glance;

“There is no cheap route to greatness,” Daniel went on in his kind voice. “

The works of Genius are watered with tears.

The gift that is in you, like an existence in the physical world, passes through childhood and its maladies. Nature sweeps away sickly or deformed creatures, and Society rejects an imperfectly developed talent.

They are, every one of them, descended from Clarissa Harlowe. And returning continually, as he did, to the same idea of woman, how could he do otherwise than produce a single type, varied only by degrees of vividness in the coloring?

Woman brings confusion into Society through passion. Passion gives infinite possibilities.

Therefore depict passion; you have one great resource open to you, foregone by the great genius for the sake of providing family reading for prudish England.

envy, the hideous treasure of disappointment, abortive talent, failure, and mortified vanity, was quite unknown among them. All of them, moreover, were going their separate ways. For these reasons, Lucien and others admitted to their society felt at their ease in it.

Wherever you find real talent, you will find frank good fellowship and sincerity, and no sort of pretension, the wit that caresses the intellect and never is aimed at self-love.

When the first nervousness, caused by respect, wore off, it was unspeakably pleasant to make one of this elect company of youth. Familiarity did not exclude in each a consciousness of his own value, nor a profound esteem for his neighbor;

Talk was unflagging, full of charm, and ranging over the most varied topics; words light as arrows sped to the mark.

There was a strange contrast between the dire material poverty in which the young men lived and the splendor of their intellectual wealth.

They looked upon the practical problems of existence simply as matter for friendly jokes. The cold weather happened to set in early that year. Five of d’Arthez’s friends appeared one day, each concealing firewood under his cloak;

The temptation to use any means to this end is the greater since that men of letters are lenient with bad faith and extend an easy indulgence to treachery.

There is an element in friendship which doubles its charm and renders it indissoluble⁠—a sense of certainty which is lacking in love.

These young men were sure of themselves and of each other; the enemy of one was the enemy of all; the most urgent personal considerations would have been shattered if they had clashed with the sacred solidarity of their fellowship.

One morning he went out, manuscript in hand, and reached the Rue du Coq; he would sell The Archer of Charles IX to Doguereau; but Doguereau was out.

Lucien little knew how indulgent great natures can be to the weaknesses of others.

Every one of the friends had thought of the peculiar troubles besetting the poetic temperament, of the prostration which follows upon the struggle, when the soul has been overwrought by the contemplation of that nature which it is the task of art to reproduce.

“Thy vanity, dear poet, is so great that it intrudes itself even into thy friendships!” cried Fulgence. “

All vanity of that sort is a symptom of shocking egoism, and egoism poisons friendship.

”

Very well, be Tasso without his folly. Perhaps the world and its pleasures tempt you? Stay with us. Carry all the cravings of vanity into the world of imagination. Transpose folly.

Keep virtue for daily wear, and let imagination run riot, instead of doing, as d’Arthez says, thinking high thoughts and living beneath them.

”

“Where has work brought you?” asked Lucien, laughing.

“When you start out from Paris for Italy, you don’t find Rome halfway,” said Joseph Bridau.

“You want your peas to grow ready buttered for you.”

You would be so delighted to exercise your power of life and death over the offspring of the brain, that you would be an out-and-out journalist in two months’ time. To be a journalist—that is to turn Herod in the republic of letters.

The man who will say anything will end by sticking at nothing.

That was Napoleon’s maxim, and it explains itself.”

You could never resist the temptation to pen a witticism, though it should bring tears to a friend’s eyes. I come across journalists in theatre lobbies; it makes me shudder to see them.

Journalism is an inferno, a bottomless pit of iniquity and treachery and lies; no one can traverse it undefiled, unless, like Dante, he is protected by Virgil’s sacred laurel.

”

but if you were to turn spy, I should shun you with abhorrence, for a spy is systematically shameless and base. There you have journalism summed up in a sentence.

Friendship can pardon error and the hasty impulse of passion; it is bound to be inexorable when a man deliberately traffics in his own soul, and intellect, and opinions.

”

“Well, my dear fellow, go on! I am listening to you, am I not?

That fact in itself is as good as praise in Paris.

”

“

There is a world behind the scenes in the theatre of literature.

The public in front sees unexpected or well-deserved success, and applauds; the public does not see the preparations, ugly as they always are, the painted supers, the claqueurs hired to applaud, the stage carpenters, and all that lies behind the scenes.

and the very best thing of all, from their point of view, is criticism which draws down a reply; it is far more effectual than bald praise, forgotten as soon as read, and it costs more in consequence.

Celebrity, my dear fellow, is based upon controversy.

I am a hired bravo; I ply my trade among ideas and reputations, commercial, literary, and dramatic; I make some fifty crowns a month; I can sell a novel for five hundred francs;

They become booksellers’ hacks for the clearheaded dealers in printed paper, who would sooner take the rubbish that goes off in a fortnight than a masterpiece which requires time to sell.

The life is crushed out of the grubs before they reach the butterfly stage.

They live by shame and dishonor.

“In short, my dear fellow, in literature you will not make money by hard work, that is not the secret of success; the point is to exploit the work of somebody else. A newspaper proprietor is a contractor, we are the bricklayers.

The more mediocre the man, the better his chance of getting on among mediocrities; he can play the toad-eater, put up with any treatment, and flatter all the little base passions of the sultans of literature.

There is Hector Merlin, who came from Limoges a short time ago; he is writing political articles already for a Right Centre daily, and he is at work on our little paper as well.

The bookseller sees a possible loss of money, while the writer of books dreads a possible rival; the first shows you the door, the second crushes the life out of you.

To do really good work, my boy, means that you will draw out the energy, sap, and tenderness of your nature at every dip of the pen in the ink, to set it forth for the world in passion and sentiment and phrases.

Yes; instead of acting, you will write; you will sing songs instead of fighting; you will love and hate and live in your books;

Politics and literature seemed to converge in Dauriat’s shop. He had seen a great poet prostituting his muse to journalism, humiliating Art, as woman was humiliated and prostituted in those shameless galleries without, and the provincial took a terrible lesson to heart.

Money! That was the key to every enigma.

Lucien realized the fact that he was unknown and alone, and that the fragile clue of an uncertain friendship was his sole guide to success and fortune.

“If anybody comes here with manuscripts,” he continued, looking at the fingernails of a well-kept hand, “ask him whether it is poetry or prose; and if he says poetry, show him the door at once.

Verses mean reverses in the book trade.

”

and after all your journeyings in the fields of thought, the monument reared with your lifeblood is simply a good or a bad speculation for a publisher. Your work will sell or it will not sell; and therein, for them, lies the whole question.

A book means so much capital to risk, and the better the book, the less likely it is to sell.

A man of talent rises above the level of ordinary heads; his success varies in direct ratio with the time required for his work to be appreciated. And no publisher wants to wait. Today’s book must be sold by tomorrow.

A man of talent rises above the level of ordinary heads; his success varies in direct ratio with the time required for his work to be appreciated. And no publisher wants to wait.

Today’s book must be sold by tomorrow.

Acting on this system, publishers and booksellers do not care to take real literature, books that call for the high praise that comes slowly.”

In the theatre as in the publishing trade, and in the publishing trade as in the newspaper-office—it was everywhere the same; there was not a word of art or of glory.

The steady beat of the great pendulum, Money, seemed to fall like hammer-strokes on his heart and brain.

And yet while the orchestra played the overture, while the pit was full of noisy tumult of applause and hisses, unconsciously he drew a comparison between this scene and others that came up in his mind.

“

Conscience, my dear fellow, is a stick which everyone takes up to beat his neighbor and not for application to his own back.

Come, now! who the devil are you angry with? In one day chance has worked a miracle for you, a miracle for which I have been waiting these two years, and you must needs amuse yourself by finding fault with the means? What!

A sort of malaria that infects the soul seems to lurk among those dark, filthy passages filled with machinery, and lit with smoky, greasy lamps.

The solemnity and reality of life disappear, the most sacred things are matter for a jest, the most impossible things seem to be true.

Lucien felt as if he had taken some narcotic, and Coralie had completed the work. He plunged into this joyous intoxication.

“The influence and power of the press is only dawning,” said Finot. “

Journalism is in its infancy; it will grow.

In ten years’ time, everything will be brought into publicity. The light of thought will be turned on all subjects, and—”

“Blondet is right,” said Claude Vignon. “Journalism, so far from being in the hands of a priesthood, came to be first a party weapon, and then a commercial speculation, carried on without conscience or scruple, like other commercial speculations.

Every newspaper, as Blondet says, is a shop to which people come for opinions of the right shade.

If there were a paper for hunchbacks, it would set forth plainly, morning and evening, in its columns, the beauty, the utility, and necessity of deformity. A newspaper is not supposed to enlighten its readers, but to supply them with congenial opinions.

Every newspaper, as Blondet says, is a shop to which people come for opinions of the right shade. If there were a paper for hunchbacks, it would set forth plainly, morning and evening, in its columns, the beauty, the utility, and necessity of deformity.

A newspaper is not supposed to enlighten its readers, but to supply them with congenial opinions.

Give any newspaper time enough, and it will be base, hypocritical, shameless, and treacherous; the periodical press will be the death of ideas, systems, and individuals; nay, it will flourish upon their decay. It will take the credit of all creations of the brain;

“Ideas and opinions can only be counteracted by opinions and ideas,” Vignon continued. “By sheer terror and despotism, and by no other means, can you extinguish the genius of the French nation; for the language lends itself admirably to allusion and ambiguity.

Epigram breaks out the more for repressive legislation; it is like steam in an engine without a safety-valve.

—The King, for example, does right; if a newspaper is against him, the Minister gets all the credit of the measure, and vice versa. A newspaper invents a scandalous libel—it has been misinformed.

Journalism will outdo the actor who put his son’s ashes into the urn to draw real tears from his eyes, or the mistress who sacrifices everything to her lover.”

“Journalism is, in fact, the People in folio form,” interrupted Blondet.

“The people with hypocrisy added and generosity lacking,” said Vignon. “All real ability will be driven out from the ranks of Journalism, as Aristides was driven into exile by the Athenians.

We are cleverer, Blondet and I, than Messieurs This and That, who speculate in our abilities, yet nevertheless we are always exploited by them.

We have a heart somewhere beneath the intellect; we have not the grim qualities of the man who makes others work for him.

We are indolent, we like to look on at the game, we are meditative, and we are fastidious; they will sweat our brains and blame us for improvidence.”

Now he understood all that Lousteau’s attack had meant. Lousteau had served his passions; while the brotherhood, that collective mentor, had seemed to mortify them in the interests of tiresome virtues and work which began to look useless and hopeless in Lucien’s eyes.

Work! What is it but death to an eager pleasure-loving nature?

And how easy it is for the man of letters to slide into a far niente existence of self-indulgence, into the luxurious ways of actresses and women of easy virtues! Lucien felt an overmastering desire to continue the reckless life of the last two days.

If you are naturally kindly, learn to be ill-natured, to be consistently spiteful. If you have never heard this golden rule before, I give it you now in confidence, and it is no small secret.

If you have a mind to be loved, never leave your mistress until you have made her shed a tear or two; and if you mean to make your way in literature, let other people continually feel your teeth; make no exception even of your friends; wound their susceptibilities, and everybody will fawn upon you.

”

… him by surprise, reading through rising tears, stricken to earth by such greatness of soul, feeling the worth of such a lesson, admiring the alterations, which taught him more of literature and art than all his four years’ apprenticeship of study and reading and comparison.

A master’s correction of a line made upon the study always teaches more than all the theories and criticisms in the world.

“What friends are these! What hearts! How fortunate I am!” he cried, grasping his manuscript tightly.

“I should die of mortification, jealousy, and all sorts of pain.

You cannot pluck love out of your heart as you draw a tooth.

”

“We have a hold on men through their pleasures,” said Florine, “while a diplomatist only works on their self-love.

A diplomatist sees a man made up for the occasion; we know him in his moments of folly, so our power is greater.

”

If he were a bachelor, he would go into society; if he were in a fair way to be a Royalist poet with a pension and the Cross of the Legion of Honor, he would be an optimist, and journalism offers starting-points by the hundred.

Journalism is the giant catapult set in motion by pygmy hatreds.

Have you any wish to marry after this? Vernou has none of the milk of human kindness in him, it is all turned to gall;

The flippant tone, the brilliant talk of this new friend, his views of life, his paradoxes, the axioms of Parisian Machiavelism—all these things impressed Lucien unawares.

Theoretically the poet knew that such thoughts were perilous; but he believed them practically useful.

Arrived in the Boulevard du Temple, the friends agreed to meet at the office between four and five o’clock. Hector Merlin would doubtless be there. Lousteau was right. The infatuation of desire was upon Lucien;

I am quite at your service, and you likewise will be ready to do anything for me. Circumstances change; principles are fixed.

Principles are the pivot on which the hands of the political barometer turn.

”

Franklin owned to the fraud in Necker’s house when he came to Paris, much to the confusion of French philosophism. Behold how the New World twice set a bad example to the Old!”

“In journalism,” said Lousteau, “everything that is probable is true. That is an axiom.”

“Criminal procedure is based on the same rule,” said Vernou.

“

Fame means ten years of sticking to work, and a hundred thousand francs lost or made in the publishing trade.

If you find anybody mad enough to print your poetry for you, you will feel some respect for me in another twelvemonth, when you have had time to see the outcome of the transaction.”

So-and-so’s book, which will form the subject of a second article.’

The second article never appears, and in this way you snuff out the book between two promises.

But in this case you are writing down, not Nathan, but Dauriat; he needs the pickaxe style. If the book is really good, the pickaxe does no harm; but it goes to the core of it if it is bad.

You will be written up; people are afraid of you; I shall have no difficulty in selling your book. I am the same man of business that I was four days ago. It is not I who have changed; it is you.

Last week your sonnets were so many cabbage leaves for me; today your position has ranked them beside Delavigne.

”

He had seen himself in print; he had just experienced the ineffable joy of the author, that first pleasurable thrill of gratified vanity which comes but once. The full import and bearing of his article became apparent to him as he read and reread it.

The garb of print is to manuscript as the stage is to women; it brings beauties and defects to light, killing and giving life; the fine thoughts and the faults alike stare you in the face.

Lucien, in his excitement and rapture, gave not another thought to Nathan. Nathan was a stepping-stone for him—that was all; and he (Lucien) was happy exceedingly—he thought himself rich.

“Oh! I thought you were cleverer than that, youngster,” said Blondet. “No. Upon my word, as I looked at that forehead of yours, I credited you with the omnipotence of the great mind—the power of seeing both sides of everything.

In literature, my boy, every idea is reversible, and no man can take upon himself to decide which is the right or wrong side.

Everything is bilateral in the domain of thought. Ideas are binary. Janus is a fable signifying criticism and the symbol of Genius. The Almighty alone is triform.

“Nathan exclaimed, ‘

Paragraphs pass away; but a great work lives!

’ He will be here to supper in two days, and he will be sure to fall flat at your feet, and kiss your claws, and swear that you are a great man.”

A discerning public will maintain that either C or L or Rubempré is in the right of it, or mayhap all the three.

Mythology, beyond doubt one of the grandest inventions of the human brain, places Truth at the bottom of a well; and what are we to do without buckets?

You will have supplied the public with three for one. There you are, my boy, Go ahead!”

a journalist might really possess the magical power of talismans in Eastern tales. Epigram is distilled rancor, the quintessence of a hate derived from all the worst passions of man, even as love concentrates all that is best in human nature.

The man does not exist who cannot be witty to avenge himself; and, by the same rule, there is not one to whom love does not bring delight.

Cheap and easy as this kind of wit may be in France, it is always relished. Lucien’s article was destined to raise the previous reputation of the paper for venomous spite and evil-speaking. His article probed two hearts to the depths;

It is a hideous joy, that grim, solitary pleasure, relished without witnesses; it is like a duel with an absent enemy, slain at a distance by a quill; a journalist might really possess the magical power of talismans in Eastern tales.

Epigram is distilled rancor, the quintessence of a hate derived from all the worst passions of man, even as love concentrates all that is best in human nature.

The man does not exist who cannot be witty to avenge himself; and, by the same rule, there is not one to whom love does not bring delight. Cheap and easy as this kind of wit may be in France, it is always relished.

“It is difficult to keep illusions on any subject in Paris,” answered Lucien as they turned in at his door. “

There is a tax upon everything⁠—everything has its price, and anything can be made to order⁠—even success.

”

“People will say, ‘Look elsewhere, simpleton; you have had your due already,’ as Champcenetz said to the Marquis de Genlis, who was looking too fondly at his wife,” added Blondet.

“Success is the ruin of a man in France,” said Finot. “We are so jealous of one another that we try to forget, and to make others forget, the triumphs of yesterday.”

“Contradiction is the life of literature, in fact,” said Claude Vignon.

For a month Lucien’s whole time was taken up with supper parties, dinner engagements, breakfasts, and evening parties; he was swept away by an irresistible current into a vortex of dissipation and easy work. He no longer thought of the future.

The power of calculation amid the complications of life is the sign of a strong will which poets, weaklings, and men who live a purely intellectual life can never counterfeit.

Lucien was living from hand to mouth, spending his money as fast as he made it, like many another journalist;

could you doubt that she would be free sooner or later? And can you suppose that she would like to be Madame Chardon? It was worth while to take some trouble to gain the title of Comtesse de Rubempré.

Love, you see, is a great vanity, which requires the lesser vanities to be in harmony with itself⁠—especially in marriage.

I might love you to madness—which is to say, sufficiently to marry you—and yet I should find it very unpleasant to be called Madame Chardon. You can see that.

She would have borne a great deal, but what scorn you showed her when you sent back her letters! Cruelty we can forgive; those who hurt us must have still some faith in us; but indifference!

Indifference is like polar snows, it extinguishes all life.

So, you must see that you have lost a precious affection through your own fault. Why break with her? Even if she had scorned you, you had your way to make, had you not?—your name to win back? Louise thought of all that.”

de Bargeton recovered her position. Lucien, convinced that he was a thousand times in the right, felt that he had been put in the wrong. Not one word of the causes of the rupture! not one syllable of the terrible farewell letter!

A woman of the world has a wonderful genius for diminishing her faults by laughing at them; she can obliterate them all with a smile or a question of feigned surprise, and she knows this.

She remembers nothing, she can explain everything; she is amazed, asks questions, comments, amplifies, and quarrels with you, till in the end her sins disappear like stains on the application of a little soap and water; black as ink you knew them to be;

“You both of you write romances too well to care to live them,” returned Rastignac. “

Can men and women who write ever fall in love with each other? A time is sure to come when they begin to make little cutting remarks.

”

and so far from disapproving, Coralie encouraged his extravagance with the peculiar shortsightedness of an all-absorbing love, which sees nothing beyond the moment, and is ready to sacrifice anything, even the future, to the present enjoyment. Coralie looked on cards as a safeguard against rivals.

A great love has much in common with childhood⁠—a child’s heedless, careless, spendthrift ways, a child’s laughter and tears.

In those days there lived and flourished a set of young men, some of them rich, some poor, and all of them idle, called “free-livers” (viveurs); and, indeed, they lived with incredible insolence—unabashed and unproductive consumers, and yet more intrepid drinkers.

“Intrigue raises less opposition than talent,” du Châtelet had said one day (for Lucien and the Baron had made up their quarrel); “a plot below the surface rouses no one’s attention.

Intrigue, moreover, is superior to talent, for it makes something out of nothing; while, for the most part, the immense resources of talent only injure a man.

”

“Why, the one pledge of which a great man can be sure, is given him by his friend the pawnbroker,” cried Blondet.

“If you want everything, you must owe for everything,” called Bixiou.

“No,” corrected des Lupeaulx, “if you owe for everything, you have had everything.”

The race of publishers, all agog for a second Norman conquest, were seeking industriously for a second Scott, just as at a rather later day everyone must needs look for asphalt in stony soil, or bitumen in marshes, and speculate in projected railways.

The stupidity of the Paris commercial world is conspicuous in these attempts to do the same thing twice, for success lies in contraries; and in Paris, of all places in the world, success spoils success.

So beneath the title of Strelitz, or Russia a Hundred Years Ago, Fendant and Cavalier rashly added in big letters the words, “In the style of Scott.”

He felt as if there were a furnace within him. Without heeding the voice, he laid a hundred and twenty louis on the black and lost.

Then to the torturing excitement of suspense succeeded the delicious feeling of relief known to the gambler who has nothing left to lose, and must perforce leave the palace of fire in which his dreams melt and vanish.

He found Lousteau at Véry’s, and flung himself upon the cookery (to make use of Lafontaine’s expression), and drowned his cares in wine.

“Oh! never mind those ninnies,” cried Coralie, springing upon his knee and putting her beautiful arms about his neck. “

They take life seriously, and life is a joke.

Besides, you are going to be Count Lucien de Rubempré. I will wheedle the Chancellerie if there is no other way. I know how to come round that rake of a des Lupeaulx, who will sign your patent.

His thousand crowns had vanished away; he could not forgive Lucien for this treacherous blow (as he supposed it) dealt to his interests.

The wounds of vanity refuse to heal if oxide of silver gets into them.

No words, no amount of description, can depict the wrath of an author in a paroxysm of mortified vanity, nor the energy which he discovers when stung by the poisoned darts of sarcasm;

… author receive a treacherous stab in the back, let him avoid the snares set for him with base hypocrisy, and endure the most unhandsome treatment, he must still exchange greetings with his assassin, who, for that matter, claims the esteem and friendship of his victim.

Everything can be excused and justified in an age which has transformed vice into virtue and virtue into vice.

Good-fellowship has come to be the most sacred of our liberties; the representatives of the most opposite opinions courteously blunt the edge of their words, and fence with buttoned foils.

Martainville’s staunch friendship injured Lucien.

Political parties show scanty gratitude to outpost sentinels, and leave leaders of forlorn hopes to their fate; ’tis a rule of warfare which holds equally good in matters political, to keep with the main body of the army if you mean to succeed.

The spite of the small Liberal papers fastened at once on the opportunity of coupling the two names, and flung them into each other’s arms. Their friendship, real or imaginary, brought down upon them both a series of articles written by pens dipped in gall.

Gaillard utterly confounded Lucien by saying roundly that newcomers must give proofs of their sincerity for some time before their party could trust them. There was more jealousy than he had imagined in the inner circles of Royalist and Ministerial journalism.

The jealousy of curs fighting for a bone is apt to appear in the human species when there is a loaf to divide; there is the same growling and showing of teeth, the same characteristics come out.

In every possible way these writers of articles tried to injure each other with those in power; they brought reciprocal accusations of lukewarm zeal; they invented the most treacherous ways of getting rid of a rival.

but if he can resist this first revolt of circumstances, if he can stand erect until the tempest passes over, or make a supreme effort and reach the serene sphere about the storm—then he is really strong.

To every man, unless he is born rich, there comes sooner or later “his fatal week,” as it must be called.

For Napoleon, for instance, that week was the Retreat from Moscow. It had begun now for Lucien.

Roles must come to find Coralie; she was too proud to implore authors or to submit to dishonoring conditions; she would not give herself to the first journalist who persecuted her with his advances and threatened her with his pen.

Genius is rare enough in the extraordinary art of the stage; but genius is only one condition of success among many, and is positively hurtful unless it is accompanied by a genius for intrigue in which Coralie was utterly lacking.

Lucien knew how much his friend would suffer on her first appearance at the Gymnase, and was anxious at all costs to obtain a success for her;

“Your book is sublime, d’Arthez,” said Lucien, with tears in his eyes, “and they have ordered me to write an attack upon it.”

“Poor boy! the bread that they give you is hard indeed!” said d’Arthez.

“I only ask for one favor, keep my visit a secret and leave me to my hell, to the occupations of the damned. Perhaps it is impossible to attain to success until the heart is seared and callous in every most sensitive spot.”

“When you climb a hot, shadowless hillside, you sometimes find fruit to quench your torturing thirst; and I have found it here and now,” said Lucien, as he sprang sobbing to d’Arthez’s arms and kissed his friend on the forehead.

“It seems to me that I am leaving my conscience in your keeping; some day I will come to you and ask for it again.”

“I look upon a periodical repentance as great hypocrisy,” d’Arthez said solemnly; “repentance becomes a sort of indemnity for wrongdoing. Repentance is virginity of the soul, which we must keep for God; a man who repents twice is a horrible sycophant.

“I look upon a periodical repentance as great hypocrisy,” d’Arthez said solemnly; “repentance becomes a sort of indemnity for wrongdoing.

Repentance is virginity of the soul, which we must keep for God; a man who repents twice is a horrible sycophant.

I am afraid that you regard repentance as absolution.”

Which is the stronger? The man or the disease? One has need be a great man, truly, to keep the balance between genius and character.

The talent grows, the heart withers.

Unless a man is a giant, unless he has the thews of a Hercules, he must be content either to lose his gift or to live without a heart.

Kolb would not peer among the things that you throw out into the yard if people offered him a thousand crowns to do it; but Cérizet picks them up and looks at them.”

It is hard for noble natures to think evil, to believe in ingratitude; only through rough experience do they learn the extent of human corruption; and even when there is nothing left them to learn in this kind, they rise to an indulgence which is the last degree of contempt.

“Pooh! pure Paris street-boy’s curiosity,” cried David.

But if Petit-Claud counted upon his employer, he counted yet more upon himself. He had more than average ability, and that of a kind not often found in the provinces, and rancor was the mainspring of his power.

A mighty hatred makes a mighty effort.

There is a great difference between a country attorney and an attorney in Paris; tall Cointet was too clever not to know this, and to turn the meaner passions that move a pettifogging lawyer to good account.

Let us admit frankly that the fees received are seldom as large as the fees demanded and deserved by a clever lawyer. Wherefore, in Paris, attorneys, doctors, and barristers, like courtesans with a chance-come lover, take very considerable precautions against the gratitude of clients.

The client before and after the lawsuit would furnish a subject worthy of Meissonier; there would be brisk bidding among attorneys for the possession of two such admirable bits of genre.

There is yet another difference between the Parisian and the country attorney. An attorney in Paris very seldom appears in court, though he is sometimes called upon to act as arbitrator (référé). Barristers, at the present day, swarm in the provinces;

It is true that he brings the balista of the law to work, and looks for the weapons in the armory of judicial contradictions, but he keeps his own convictions as to the case, while he does his best to gain the day.

In a word, a man loses his head not so much by thinking as by uttering thoughts.

The spoken word convinces the utterer; but a man can act against his own bad judgment without warping it, and contrive to win in a bad cause without maintaining that it is a good one, like the barrister.

In a word, a man loses his head not so much by thinking as by uttering thoughts.

The spoken word convinces the utterer; but a man can act against his own bad judgment without warping it, and contrive to win in a bad cause without maintaining that it is a good one, like the barrister.

Perhaps for this very reason an old attorney is the more likely of the two to make a good judge.

As a result of this double life, the attorney acquired the peculiar intellectual defects of the barrister, and retained the heavy responsibilities of the attorney. He grew talkative and fluent, and lost his lucidity of judgment, the first necessity for the conduct of affairs.

If a man of more than ordinary ability tries to do the work of two men, he is apt to find that the two men are mediocrities.

The Paris attorney never spends himself in forensic eloquence; and as he seldom attempts to argue for and against, he has some hope of preserving his mental rectitude.

for a small percentage appears under the humble title of “charges,” representing a premium on the financial genius and skill with which the capitalist puts his money out to interest.

The more money he makes out of you, the more he asks.

Wherefore it would be undoubtedly cheaper to discount a bill with a fool, if fools there be in the profession of bill-discounting.

but mind this that I tell you. Work in the bowels of the earth if you can, so that no one may watch you and gain a hint from your ways of working, or your plank will be stolen from under your feet.

An inventor and a simpleton often live in the same skin.

Your mind runs so much on your secrets that you cannot think of everything. People will begin to have their suspicions at last, and the place is full of paper manufacturers. So many manufacturers, so many enemies for you!

It does not really matter to me myself. An income of twelve hundred francs would be enough for me, and my father ought by rights to leave me three times as much some day.

Love and thought make up my life⁠—a divine life.

I am working for Lucien’s sake and for my wife’s.”

The want of cohesion is the great drawback of all vegetable fibre; straw, for instance, yields a very brittle paper, which may almost be called metallic and resonant.

These chances only befall bold inquirers into Nature’s methods!

“Now,” said he to himself, “I must contrive to do by machinery and some chemical agency the thing that I myself have done unconsciously.”

Ah! yes, dear, an inventor should endure the long painful travail of a great idea alone, he should not utter a word of it even to his wife. …

A woman is a woman still.

This Eve of yours could not help smiling when she heard you say, ‘I have found out,’ for the seventeenth time this month.”

David burst out laughing so heartily at his own expense that Eve caught his hand in hers and kissed it reverently.

It was a delicious moment for them both, one of those roses of love and tenderness that grow beside the desert paths of the bitterest poverty, nay, at times in yet darker depths.

As the storm of misfortune grew, Eve’s courage redoubled;

He was mentally incapable of understanding his son; he laid the blame of failure upon him, and even prided himself, as it were, on his superiority to a far greater intellect than his own, with the thought, “I am securing his bread for him.”

Moralists will never succeed in making us comprehend the full extent of the influence of sentiment upon self-interest, an influence every whit as strong as the action of interest upon our sentiments; for every law of our nature works in two ways, and acts and reacts upon us.

David, on his side, understood his father, and in his sublime charity forgave him. Kolb and David reached Marsac at eight o’clock, and suddenly came in upon the old man as he was finishing his dinner, which, by force of circumstances, came very near bedtime.

“I am a vinegrower, I am not a banker. And what is more, look you, business between father and son never turns out well. Stay and eat your dinner here; you shan’t say that you came for nothing.”

There are some deep-hearted natures that can force their own pain down into inner depths unsuspected by those dearest to them; and with them, when anguish forces its way to the surface and is visible, it is only after a mighty upheaval.

David’s nature was one of these. Eve had thoroughly understood the noble character of the man.

“Oh! so that is the way he came back from Paris, is it?” exclaimed Postel. “Yet he had some brains, poor fellow, and he was ambitious, too.

He went out to look for wool, and comes home shorn.

But what does he want here? His sister is frightfully poor; for all these geniuses, David and Lucien alike, know very little about business. There was some talk of him at the Tribunal, and, as judge, I was obliged to sign the warrant of execution.

“And the woman who took him from us brought him back on her carriage!” exclaimed Mme. Chardon.

“He went away sitting by Mme. de Bargeton’s side in her calèche, and he came back behind it.”

“Can I do anything for you?” asked the good curé, seeking an opportunity to take leave.

“Can I do anything for you?” asked the good curé, seeking an opportunity to take leave.

“A wound in the purse is not fatal, they say, monsieur,” said Mme. Chardon, “but the patient must be his own doctor.”

“If you have sufficient influence with my father-in-law to induce him to help his son, you would save a whole family,” said Eve.

Within himself he said, “I am behaving heroically.”

Poetic temperaments of this stamp begin as their own dupes.

He walked up through L’Houmeau, shame at the manner of his return struggling with the charm of old associations as he went. His heart beat quickly as he passed Postel’s shop;

Lucien saw the familiar workshop and courtyard, and on the staircase met his mother and sister, and for a moment, while their arms were about him, all three almost forgot their troubles.

In family life we almost always compound with our misfortunes; we make a sort of bed to rest upon; and, if it is hard, hope to make it tolerable.

If Lucien looked the picture of despair, poetic charm was not wanting to the picture. His face had been tanned by the sunlight of the open road, and the deep sadness visible in his features overshadowed his poet’s brow.

The change in him told so plainly of sufferings endured, his face was so worn by sharp misery, that no one could help pitying him.

Imagination had fared forth into the world and found sad reality at the homecoming.

Eve was smiling in the midst of her joy, as the saints smile upon martyrdom. The face of a young and very fair woman grows sublimely beautiful at the touch of grief;

The change in him told so plainly of sufferings endured, his face was so worn by sharp misery, that no one could help pitying him. Imagination had fared forth into the world and found sad reality at the homecoming.

Eve was smiling in the midst of her joy, as the saints smile upon martyrdom.

The face of a young and very fair woman grows sublimely beautiful at the touch of grief;

Imagination had fared forth into the world and found sad reality at the homecoming. Eve was smiling in the midst of her joy, as the saints smile upon martyrdom.

The face of a young and very fair woman grows sublimely beautiful at the touch of grief;

Lucien remembered the innocent girlish face that he saw last before he went to Paris, and the look of gravity that had come over it spoke so eloquently that he could not but feel a painful impression.

Lucien tossed his head, as one who should say, “I have measured myself against Parisians,” and the look in his sister’s eyes said unmistakably, “Yes, but you were defeated.”

“Nobody cares for me now,” Lucien thought. “In the home circle, as in the world without, success is a necessity.”

The poet tried to explain their lack of confidence in him; he had not been at home two days before a feeling of vexation rather than of angry bitterness gained hold on him.

Things had reached the point when the slightest misunderstanding, or little quarrel, or a fresh disappointment in Lucien would end in final estrangement.

Money difficulties may be arranged, but feelings are inexorable.

Next day Lucien received a copy of the local paper.

but when the union of two souls had been as perfect since life’s very beginnings, as it had been with Eve and Lucien, any blow dealt to that fair ideal is fatal.

Scoundrels can draw knives on each other and make it up again afterwards, while a look or a word is enough to sunder two lovers forever.

In the recollection of an almost perfect life of heart and heart lies the secret of many an estrangement that none can explain. Two may live together without full trust in their hearts if only their past holds no memories of complete and unclouded love;

“I would rather have ten thousand francs,” said old Séchard, fingering the bouquets and garlands with a satirical expression.

“You gave them daisies, and they give you posies in return; you deal in flowers.”

“So that is your opinion of the honors shown me by my fellow-townsmen, is it?” asked Lucien. All his melancholy had left him, his face was radiant with good humor.

Lucien kissed them; for when joy overflows like a torrent flood, we are fain to pour it out into a friend’s heart.

“When an author is intoxicated with success, he will hug his porter if there is nobody else on hand,” according to Bixiou.

“Why, darling, why are you crying?” he said, looking into Eve’s face. “Ah! I know, you are crying for joy!”

What was Voltaire’s apotheosis at the Théâtre-Français but the triumph of eighteenth century philosophy?

A triumph in France means that everybody else feels that he is adorning his own temples with the crown that he sets on the idol’s head.

The women’s presentiments proved correct. The distinguished provincial’s reception was antipathetic to Angoumoisin immobility; it was too evidently got up by some interested persons or by enthusiastic stage mechanics, a suspicious combination.

The whole machinery of modern society is so infinitely more complex than in ancient times, that the subdivision of human faculty is the result.

The great men of the days of old were perforce universal geniuses, appearing at rare intervals like lighted torches in an antique world.

In the course of ages the intellect began to work on special lines, but the great man still could “take all knowledge for his province.”

I have read your Archer of Charles IX; it is more than a romance, it is literature. Only two living men could have written the preface—Chateaubriand and Lucien.”

Lucien accepted the eulogies, and did not think it necessary to mention that d’Arthez had written the preface. Ninety-nine writers out of a hundred would have done the same.

“Well, nobody here seemed to have heard of you!” Petit-Claud continued, with apparent indignation. “When I saw the general indifference, I made up my mind to change all that. I wrote that article in the paper—”

“Poor fellows! They have been gambling for me,” said Lucien; he was quite touched by the letter.

A waft of the breeze from an unhealthy country, from the land where one has suffered most, may seem to bring the odors of Paradise; and in a dull life there is an indefinable sweetness in memories of past pain.

Eve was struck dumb with amazement when her brother came down in his new clothes. She did not recognize him.

“You vould haf done better gif you at nefer kom,” Kolb muttered audibly.

“I should have done better still if I had never come into the world,” Lucien answered.

“Goodbye, Kolb; I don’t bear you any grudge for thinking as I think myself. Tell David that I was sorry I could not bid him goodbye, and say that this was my last thought.”

Little, considering the gravity of the question, has been written on the subject of suicide; it has not been studied. Perhaps it is a disease that cannot be observed.

Suicide is one effect of a sentiment which we will call self-esteem, if you will, to prevent confusion by using the word “honor.”

When a man despises himself, and sees that others despise him, when real life fails to fulfil his hopes, then comes the moment when he takes his life, and thereby does homage to society—shorn of his virtues or his splendor, he does not care to …

The priest looked at Lucien.

“The diamond does not know its own value,” he said, and there was an inexpressible charm, and a touch of something like irony in his smile.

“None but a priest could flatter a poor man about to die,” exclaimed Lucien.

“You are not going to die,” the Spaniard returned authoritatively.

“I have heard many times of men that were robbed on the highroad, but I have never yet heard of one that found a fortune there,” said Lucien.

“You will hear of one now,” said the priest, glancing towards the carriage to measure the time still left for their walk together. “Listen to me,” he continued, with his cigar between his teeth;

We have made a flitting from our creditors, and we are honor personified down to the tips of our elegant little boots. … Come, confess, boldly; it will be just as if you were talking to yourself.”

Lucien felt like that hero of an Eastern tale, the fisher who tried to drown himself in mid-ocean, and sank down to find himself a king of countries under the sea.

The Spanish priest seemed so really affectionate, that the poet hesitated no longer; between Angoulême and Ruffec he told the story of his whole life, omitting none of his misdeeds, and ended with the final catastrophe which he had brought about.

And do you ask why you must do these things? You mean to rule the world, do you not? You must begin by obeying and studying it. Scholars study books; politicians study men, and their interests and the springs of action.

Society and mankind in masses are fatalists; they bow down and worship the accomplished fact.

Do you know why I am giving you this little history lesson? It seems to me that your ambition is boundless—”

for mankind in the mass are even more consummate hypocrites than any one individual can be when his interests demand a piece of acting.

Most of us spend a good part of our lives in clearing our minds of the notions that sprang up unchecked during our nonage. This is called ‘getting our experience.’

”

and men have expressed one kind of opinion and acted on another. There has been no consistency in national policy, nor in the conduct of individuals. You cannot be said to have any morality left.

Success is the supreme justification of all actions whatsoever.

The fact in itself is nothing; the impression that it makes upon others is everything. Hence, please observe a second precept: Present a fair exterior to the world, keep the seamy side of life to yourself, and turn a resplendent countenance upon others.

and men have expressed one kind of opinion and acted on another. There has been no consistency in national policy, nor in the conduct of individuals. You cannot be said to have any morality left. Success is the supreme justification of all actions whatsoever.

The fact in itself is nothing; the impression that it makes upon others is everything.

Hence, please observe a second precept: Present a fair exterior to the world, keep the seamy side of life to yourself, and turn a resplendent countenance upon others. Discretion, the motto of every ambitious man, is the watchword of our Order;

You cannot be said to have any morality left. Success is the supreme justification of all actions whatsoever. The fact in itself is nothing; the impression that it makes upon others is everything. Hence, please observe a second precept:

Present a fair exterior to the world, keep the seamy side of life to yourself, and turn a resplendent countenance upon others.

Discretion, the motto of every ambitious man, is the watchword of our Order; take it for your own. Great men are guilty of almost as many base deeds as poor outcasts;

Present a fair exterior to the world, keep the seamy side of life to yourself, and turn a resplendent countenance upon others. Discretion, the motto of every ambitious man, is the watchword of our Order; take it for your own.

Great men are guilty of almost as many base deeds as poor outcasts; but they are careful to do these things in shadow and to parade their virtues in the light, or they would not be great men.

Your insignificant man leaves his virtues in the shade; he publicly displays his pitiable side, and is despised accordingly. You, for instance, have hidden your titles to greatness and made a display of your worst failings.

You have nothing, you say? The Medicis, Richelieu, and Napoleon started from precisely your standpoint; but they, my child, considered that their prospects were worth ingratitude, treachery, and the most glaring inconsistencies.

You must dare all things to gain all things.

Let us discuss it. Suppose that you sit down to a game of bouillotte, do you begin to argue over the rules of the game? There they are, you accept them.”