Lost Illusions

The Prefect and the General in command of the garrison were the last comers, and with them came the country gentleman who had brought the treatise on silkworms to David that very morning.  Evidently he was the mayor of some canton or other, and a fine estate was his sufficient title to gentility; but from his appearance, it was plain that he was quite unused to polite society.  He looked uneasy in his clothes, he was at a loss to know what to do with his hands, he shifted about from one foot to another as he spoke, and half rose and sat down again when anybody spoke to him.  He seemed ready to do some menial service; he was obsequious, nervous, and grave by turns, laughing eagerly at every joke, listening with servility; and occasionally, imagining that people were laughing at him, he assumed a knowing air.  His treatise weighed upon his mind; again and again he tried to talk about silkworms; but the luckless wight happened first upon M. de Bartas, who talked music in reply, and next on M. de Saintot, who quoted Cicero to him; and not until the evening was half over did the mayor meet with sympathetic listeners in Mme. and Mlle. du Brossard, a widowed gentlewoman and her daughter.

Mme. and Mlle. du Brossard were not the least interesting persons in the clique, but their story may be told in a single phrase—­they were as poor as they were noble.  In their dress there was just that tinge of pretension which betrayed carefully hidden penury.  The daughter, a big, heavy young woman of seven-and-twenty, was supposed to be a good performer on the piano, and her mother praised her in season and out of season in the clumsiest way.  No eligible man had any taste which Camille did not share on her mother’s authoritative statement.  Mme. du Brossard, in her anxiety to establish her child, was capable of saying that her dear Camille liked nothing so much as a roving life from one garrison to another; and before the evening was out, that she was sure her dear Camille liked a quiet country farmhouse existence of all things.  Mother and daughter had the pinched sub-acid dignity characteristic of those who have learned by experience the exact value of expressions of sympathy; they belonged to a class which the world delights to pity; they had been the objects of the benevolent interest of egoism; they had sounded the empty void beneath the consoling formulas with which the world ministers to the necessities of the unfortunate.

M. de Severac was fifty-nine years old, and a childless widower.  Mother and daughter listened, therefore, with devout admiration to all that he told them about his silkworm nurseries.

“My daughter has always been fond of animals,” said the mother.  “And as women are especially interested in the silk which the little creatures produce, I shall ask permission to go over to Severac, so that my Camille may see how the silk is spun.  My Camille is so intelligent, she will grasp anything that you tell her in a moment.  Did she not understand one day the inverse ratio of the squares of distances!”

This was the remark that brought the conversation between Mme. du Brossard and M. de Severac to a glorious close after Lucien’s reading that night.

A few habitues slipped in familiarly among the rest, so did one or two eldest sons; shy, mute young men tricked out in gorgeous jewelry, and highly honored by an invitation to this literary solemnity, the boldest men among them so far shook off the weight of awe as to chatter a good deal with Mlle. de la Haye.  The women solemnly arranged themselves in a circle, and the men stood behind them.  It was a quaint assemblage of wrinkled countenances and heterogeneous costumes, but none the less it seemed very alarming to Lucien, and his heart beat fast when he felt that every one was looking at him.  His assurance bore the ordeal with some difficulty in spite of the encouraging example of Mme. de Bargeton, who welcomed the most illustrious personages of Angouleme with ostentatious courtesy and elaborate graciousness; and the uncomfortable feeling that oppressed him was aggravated by a trifling matter which any one might have foreseen, though it was bound to come as an unpleasant shock to a young man with so little experience of the world.  Lucien, all eyes and ears, noticed that no one except Louise, M. de Bargeton, the Bishop, and some few who wished to please the mistress of the house, spoke of him as M. de Rubempre; for his formidable audience he was M. Chardon.  Lucien’s courage sank under their inquisitive eyes.  He could read his plebeian name in the mere movements of their lips, and hear the anticipatory criticisms made in the blunt, provincial fashion that too often borders on rudeness.  He had not expected this prolonged ordeal of pin-pricks; it put him still more out of humor with himself.  He grew impatient to begin the reading, for then he could assume an attitude which should put an end to his mental torments; but Jacques was giving Mme. de Pimentel the history of his last day’s sport; Adrien was holding forth to Mlle. Laure de Rastignac on Rossini, the newly-risen music star, and Astolphe, who had got by heart a newspaper paragraph on a patent plow, was giving the Baron the benefit of the description.  Lucien, luckless poet that he was, did not know that there was scarce a soul in the room besides Mme. 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 every one 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; when silence, in fact, was at last secured, Lucien went to the round table near Mme. de Bargeton.  A fierce thrill of excitement ran through him as he did so.  He announced in an uncertain voice that, to prevent disappointment, he was about to read the masterpieces of a great poet, discovered only recently (for although Andre de Chenier’s poems appeared in 1819, no one in Angouleme had so much as heard of him).  Everybody interpreted this announcement in one way—­it was a shift of Mme. de Bargeton’s, meant to save the poet’s self-love and to put the audience at ease.

Lucien began with Le Malade, and the poem was received with a murmur of applause; but he followed it with L’Aveugle, which proved too great a strain upon the average intellect.  None but artists or those endowed with the artistic temperament can understand and sympathize with him in the diabolical torture of that reading.  If poetry is to be rendered by the voice, and if the listener is to grasp all that it means, the most devout attention is essential; there should be an intimate alliance between the reader and his audience, or swift and subtle communication of the poet’s thought and feeling becomes impossible.  Here this close sympathy was lacking, and Lucien in consequence was in the position of an angel who should endeavor to sing of heaven amid the chucklings of hell.  An intelligent man in the sphere most stimulating to his faculties can see in every direction, like a snail; he has the keen scent of a dog, the ears of a mole; he can hear, and feel, and see all that is going on around him.  A musician or a poet knows at once whether his audience is listening in admiration or fails to follow him, and feels it as the plant that revives or droops under favorable or unfavorable conditions.  The men who had come with their wives had fallen to discussing their own affairs; by the acoustic law before mentioned, every murmur rang in Lucien’s ear; he saw all the gaps caused by the spasmodic workings of jaws sympathetically affected, the teeth that seemed to grin defiance at him.

When, like the dove in the deluge, he looked round for any spot on which his eyes might rest, he saw nothing but rows of impatient faces.  Their owners clearly were waiting for him to make an end; they had come together to discuss questions of practical interest.  With the exceptions of Laure de Rastignac, the Bishop, and two or three of the young men, they one and all looked bored.  As a matter of fact, those who understand poetry strive to develop the germs of another poetry, quickened within them by the poet’s poetry; but this glacial audience, so far from attaining to the spirit of the poet, did not even listen to the letter.

Lucien felt profoundly discouraged; he was damp with chilly perspiration; a glowing glance from Louise, to whom he turned, gave him courage to persevere to the end, but this poet’s heart was bleeding from countless wounds.

“Do you find this very amusing, Fifine?” inquired the wizened Lili, who perhaps had expected some kind of gymnastics.

“Don’t ask me what I think, dear; I cannot keep my eyes open when any one begins to read aloud.”

“I hope that Nais will not give us poetry often in the evenings,” said Francis.  “If I am obliged to attend while somebody reads aloud after dinner, it upsets my digestion.”

“Poor dearie,” whispered Zephirine, “take a glass of eau sucree.”

“It was very well declaimed,” said Alexandre, “but I like whist better myself.”

After this dictum, which passed muster as a joke from the play on the word “whist,” several card-players were of the opinion that the reader’s voice needed a rest, and on this pretext one or two couples slipped away into the card-room.  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 Chenier’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 ticked by strong spirits.

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

Amelie brightened visibly.

“Why, that is easily explained,” said she.  “M. de Rubempre works for a printer.  It is as if a pretty woman should make her own dresses,” she added, looking at Lolotte.

“He printed his poetry himself!” said the women among themselves.

“Then, why does he call himself M. de Rubempre?” inquired Jacques.  “If a noble takes a handicraft, he ought to lay his name aside.”

“So he did as a matter of fact,” said Zizine, “but his name was plebeian, and he took his mother’s name, which is noble.”

“Well, if his verses are printed, we can read them for ourselves,” said Astolphe.

This piece of stupidity complicated the question, until Sixte du Chatelet condescended to inform these unlettered folk that the prefatory announcement was no oratorical flourish, but a statement of fact, and added that the poems had been written by a Royalist brother of Marie-Joseph Chenier, the Revolutionary leader.  All Angouleme, except Mme. de Rastignac and her two daughters and the Bishop, who had really felt the grandeur of the poetry, were mystified, and took offence at the hoax.  There was a smothered murmur, but Lucien did not heed it.  The intoxication of the poetry was upon him; he was far away from the hateful world, striving to render in speech the music that filled his soul, seeing the faces about him through a cloudy haze.  He read the sombre Elegy on the Suicide, lines in the taste of a by-gone day, pervaded by sublime melancholy; then he turned to the page where the line occurs, “Thy songs are sweet, I love to say them over,” and ended with the delicate idyll Neere.

Mme. de Bargeton sat with one hand buried in her curls, heedless of the havoc she wrought among them, gazing before her with unseeing eyes, alone in her drawing-room, lost in delicious dreaming; for the first time in her life she had been transported to the sphere which was hers by right of nature.  Judge, therefore, how unpleasantly she was disturbed by Amelie, who took it upon herself to express the general wish.

“Nais,” this voice broke in, “we came to hear M. Chardon’s poetry, and you are giving us poetry out of a book.  The extracts are very nice, but the ladies feel a patriotic preference for the wine of the country; they would rather have it.”

“The French language does not lend itself very readily to poetry, does it?” Astolphe remarked to Chatelet.  “Cicero’s prose is a thousand times more poetical to my way of thinking.”

“The true poetry of France is song, lyric verse,” Chatelet answered.

“Which proves that our language is eminently adapted for music,” said Adrien.

“I should like very much to hear the poetry that has cost Nais her reputation,” said Zephirine; “but after receiving Amelie’s request in such a way, it is not very likely that she will give us a specimen.”

“She ought to have them recited in justice to herself,” said Francis.  “The little fellow’s genius is his sole justification.”

“You have been in the diplomatic service,” said Amelie to M. du Chatelet, “go and manage it somehow.”

“Nothing easier,” said the Baron.

The Princess’ private secretary, being accustomed to petty manoeuvres of this kind, went to the Bishop and contrived to bring him to the fore.  At the Bishop’s entreaty, Nais had no choice but to ask Lucien to recite his own verses for them, and the Baron received a languishing smile from Amelie as the reward of his prompt success.

“Decidedly, the Baron is a very clever man,” she observed to Lolotte.

But Amelie’s previous acidulous remark about women who made their own dresses rankled in Lolotte’s mind.

“Since when have you begun to recognize the Emperor’s barons?” she asked, smiling.

Lucien had essayed to deify his beloved in an ode, dedicated to her under a title in favor with all lads who write verse after leaving school.  This ode, so fondly cherished, so beautiful—­since it was the outpouring of all the love in his heart, seemed to him to be the one piece of his own work that could hold its own with Chenier’s verse; and with a tolerably fatuous glance at Mme. de Bargeton, he announced “TO HER!” He struck an attitude proudly for the delivery of the ambitious piece, for his author’s self-love felt safe and at ease behind Mme. de Bargeton’s petticoat.  And at the selfsame moment Mme. de Bargeton betrayed her own secret to the women’s curious eyes.  Although she had always looked down upon this audience from her own loftier intellectual heights, she could not help trembling for Lucien.  Her face was troubled, there was a sort of mute appeal for indulgence in her glances, and while the verses were recited she was obliged to lower her eyes and dissemble her pleasure as stanza followed stanza.

TO HER.

Out of the glowing heart of the torrent of glory and light,
  At the foot of Jehovah’s throne where the angels stand afar,
Each on a seistron of gold repeating the prayers of the night,
          Put up for each by his star.

Out from the cherubim choir a bright-haired Angel springs,
  Veiling the glory of God that dwells on a dazzling brow,
Leaving the courts of heaven to sink upon silver wings
          Down to our world below.

God looked in pity on earth, and the Angel, reading His thought,
  Came down to lull the pain of the mighty spirit at strife,
Reverent bent o’er the maid, and for age left desolate brought
          Flowers of the springtime of life.

Bringing a dream of hope to solace the mother’s fears,
  Hearkening unto the voice of the tardy repentant cry,
Glad as angels are glad, to reckon Earth’s pitying tears,
          Given with alms of a sigh.

One there is, and but one, bright messenger sent from the skies
  Whom earth like a lover fain would hold from the hea’nward flight;
But the angel, weeping, turns and gazes with sad, sweet eyes
          Up to the heaven of light.

Not by the radiant eyes, not by the kindling glow
  Of virtue sent from God, did I know the secret sign,
Nor read the token sent on a white and dazzling brow
          Of an origin divine.

Nay, it was Love grown blind and dazed with excess of light,
  Striving and striving in vain to mingle Earth and Heaven,
Helpless and powerless against the invincible armor bright
          By the dread archangel given.

Ah! be wary, take heed, lest aught should be seen or heard
  Of the shining seraph band, as they take the heavenward way;
Too soon the Angel on Earth will learn the magical word
          Sung at the close of the day.

Then you shall see afar, rifting the darkness of night,
  A gleam as of dawn that spread across the starry floor,
And the seaman that watch for a sign shall mark the track of their flight,
          A luminous pathway in Heaven and a beacon for evermore.

“Do you read the riddle?” said Amelie, giving M. du Chatelet a coquettish glance.

“It is the sort of stuff that we all of us wrote more or less after we left school,” said the Baron with a bored expression—­he was acting his part of arbiter of taste who has seen everything.  “We used to deal in Ossianic mists, Malvinas and Fingals and cloudy shapes, and warriors who got out of their tombs with stars above their heads.  Nowadays this poetical frippery has been replaced by Jehovah, angels, seistrons, the plumes of seraphim, and all the paraphernalia of paradise freshened up with a few new words such as ’immense, infinite, solitude, intelligence’; you have lakes, and the words of the Almighty, a kind of Christianized Pantheism, enriched with the most extraordinary and unheard-of rhymes.  We are in quite another latitude, in fact; we have left the North for the East, but the darkness is just as thick as before.”

“If the ode is obscure, the declaration is very clear, it seems to me,” said Zephirine.

“And the archangel’s armor is a tolerably thin gauze robe,” said Francis.

Politeness demanded that the audience should profess to be enchanted with the poem; and the women, furious because they had no poets in their train to extol them as angels, rose, looked bored by the reading, murmuring, “Very nice!” “Charming!” “Perfect!” with frigid coldness.

“If you love me, do not congratulate the poet or his angel,” Lolotte laid her commands on her dear Adrien in imperious tones, and Adrien was fain to obey.

“Empty words, after all,” Zephirine remarked to Francis, “and love is a poem that we live.”

“You have just expressed the very thing that I was thinking, Zizine, but I should not have put it so neatly,” said Stanislas, scanning himself from top to toe with loving attention.

“I would give, I don’t know how much, to see Nais’ pride brought down a bit,” said Amelie, addressing Chatelet.  “Nais sets up to be an archangel, as if she were better than the rest of us, and mixes us up with low people; his father was an apothecary, and his mother is a nurse; his sister works in a laundry, and he himself is a printer’s foreman.”

“If his father sold biscuits for worms” (vers), said Jacques, “he ought to have made his son take them.”

“He is continuing in his father’s line of business, for the stuff that he has just been reading to us is a drug in the market, it seems,” said Stanislas, striking one of his most killing attitudes.  “Drug for drug, I would rather have something else.”

Every one apparently combined to humiliate Lucien by various aristocrats’ sarcasms.  Lili the religious thought it a charitable deed to use any means of enlightening Nais, and Nais was on the brink of a piece of folly.  Francis the diplomatist undertook the direction of the silly conspiracy; every one was interested in the progress of the drama; it would be something to talk about to-morrow.  The ex-consul, being far from anxious to engage in a duel with a young poet who would fly into a rage at the first hint of insult under his lady’s eyes, was wise enough to see that the only way of dealing Lucien his deathblow was by the spiritual arm which was safe from vengeance.  He therefore followed the example set by Chatelet the astute, and went to the Bishop.  Him he proceeded to mystify.

He told the Bishop that Lucien’s mother was a woman of uncommon powers and great modesty, and that it was she who found the subjects for her son’s verses.  Nothing pleased Lucien so much, according to the guileful Francis, as any recognition of her talents—­he worshiped his mother.  Then, having inculcated these notions, he left the rest to time.  His lordship was sure to bring out the insulting allusion, for which he had been so carefully prepared, in the course of conversation.

When Francis and the Bishop joined the little group where Lucien stood, the circle who gave him the cup of hemlock to drain by little sips watched him with redoubled interest.  The poet, luckless young man, being a total stranger, and unaware of the manners and customs of the house, could only look at Mme. de Bargeton and give embarrassed answers to embarrassing questions.  He knew neither the names nor condition of the people about him; the women’s silly speeches made him blush for them, and he was at his wits’ end for a reply.  He felt, moreover, how very far removed he was from these divinities of Angouleme when he heard himself addressed sometimes as M. Chardon, sometimes as M. de Rubempre, while they addressed each other as Lolotte, Adrien, Astolphe, Lili and Fifine.  His confusion rose to a height when, taking Lili for a man’s surname, he addressed the coarse M. de Senonches as M. Lili; that Nimrod broke in upon him with a “MONSIEUR LULU?” and Mme. de Bargeton flushed red to the eyes.

“A woman must be blind indeed to bring this little fellow among us!” muttered Senonches.

Zephirine turned to speak to the Marquise de Pimentel—­“Do you not see a strong likeness between M. Chardon and M. de Cante-Croix, madame?” she asked in a low but quite audible voice.

“The likeness is ideal,” smiled Mme. de Pimentel.

“Glory has a power of attraction to which we can confess,” said Mme. de Bargeton, addressing the Marquise.  “Some women are as much attracted by greatness as others by littleness,” she added, looking at Francis.

The was beyond Zephirine’s comprehension; she thought her consul a very great man; but the Marquise laughed, and her laughter ranged her on Nais’ side.

“You are very fortunate, monsieur,” said the Marquis de Pimentel, addressing Lucien for the purpose of calling him M. de Rubempre, and not M. Chardon, as before; “you should never find time heavy on your hands.”

“Do you work quickly?” asked Lolotte, much in the way that she would have asked a joiner “if it took long to make a box.”

The bludgeon stroke stunned Lucien, but he raised his head at Mme. de Bargeton’s reply—­

“My dear, poetry does not grow in M. de Rubempre’s head like grass in our courtyards.”

“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.  This young man is a poet,” he added laying a hand on Lucien’s head; “do you not see the sign of Fate set on that high forehead of his?”

Glad to be so generously championed, Lucien made his acknowledgments in a grateful look, not knowing that the worthy prelate was to deal his deathblow.

Mme. de Bargeton’s eyes traveled round the hostile circle.  Her glances went like arrows to the depths of her rivals’ hearts, and left them twice as furious as before.

“Ah, monseigneur,” cried Lucien, hoping to break thick heads with his golden sceptre, “but ordinary people have neither your intellect nor your charity.  No one heeds our sorrows, our toil is unrecognized.  The gold-digger working in the mine does not labor as we to wrest metaphors from the heart of the most ungrateful of all languages.  If this is poetry—­to give ideas such definite and clear expressions that all the world can see and understand—­the poet must continually range through the entire scale of human intellects, so that he can satisfy the demands of all; he must conceal hard thinking and emotion, two antagonistic powers, beneath the most vivid color; he must know how to make one word cover a whole world of thought; 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.  There are men and women in books, who seem more really alive to us than men and women who have lived and died—­Richardson’s Clarissa, Chenier’s Camille, the Delia of Tibullus, Ariosto’s Angelica, Dante’s Francesca, Moliere’s Alceste, Beaumarchais’ Figaro, Scott’s Rebecca the Jewess, the Don Quixote of Cervantes,—­do we not owe these deathless creations to immortal throes?”

“And what are you going to create for us?” asked Chatelet.

“If I were to announce such conceptions, I should give myself out for a man of genius, should I not?” answered Lucien.  “And besides, such sublime creations demand a long experience of the world and a study of human passion and interests which I could not possibly have made; but I have made a beginning,” he added, with bitterness in his tone, as he took a vengeful glance round the circle; “the time of gestation is long——­”

“Then it will be a case of difficult labor,” interrupted M. du Hautoy.

“Your excellent mother might assist you,” suggested the Bishop.

The epigram, innocently made by the good prelate, the long-looked-for revenge, kindled a gleam of delight in all eyes.  The smile of satisfied caste that traveled from mouth to mouth was aggravated by M. de Bargeton’s imbecility; he burst into a laugh, as usual, some moments later.

“Monseigneur, you are talking a little above our heads; these ladies do not understand your meaning,” said Mme. de Bargeton, and the words paralyzed the laughter, and drew astonished eyes upon her.  “A poet who looks to the Bible for his inspiration has a mother indeed in the Church.—­M. de Rubempre, will you recite Saint John in Patmos for us, or Belshazzar’s Feast, so that his lordship may see that Rome is still the Magna Parens of Virgil?”

The women exchanged smiles at the Latin words.

The bravest and highest spirits know times of prostration at the outset of life.  Lucien had sunk to the depths 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 every chance effect of the landscape, in the thin, clear air, in the scent of the earth.  Nature speaks for them.”

“And loosens their tongues, too,” Eve said merrily.  “You were very silent as we came through L’Houmeau.  Do you know, I felt quite uncomfortable——­”

“You looked so beautiful, that I could not say anything,” David answered candidly.

“Then, just now I am not so beautiful?” inquired she.

“It is not that,” he said; “but I was so happy to have this walk alone with you, that——­” he stopped short in confusion, and looked at the hillside and the road to Saintes.

“If the walk is any pleasure to you, I am delighted; for I owe you an evening, I think, when you have given up yours for me.  When you refused to go to Mme. de Bargeton’s, you were quite as generous as Lucien when he made the demand at the risk of vexing 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; but when you stimulated his ambition, did you not unthinkingly condemn him to a hard struggle?  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.  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; and he cannot afford, as we know, to cultivate her society, twice ruinous as it is for him.  Sooner or later that woman will throw over this dear brother of ours, but not before she has spoiled him for hard work, and given him a taste for luxury and a contempt for our humdrum life.  She will develop his love of enjoyment, his inclination for idleness, that debauches a poetic soul.  Yes, it makes me tremble to think that this great lady may make a plaything of Lucien.  If she cares for him sincerely, he will forget everything else for her; or if she does not love him, she will make him unhappy, for he is wild about her.”

“You have sent a chill of dread through my heart,” said Eve, stopping as they reached the weir.  “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. de Bargeton’s boudoir, that he will do anything desperate sooner than fall back, and you will never earn enough for his requirements.