Read Online Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics) by Honoré de Balzac - Free Book Online Page B

their efforts to lay the foundation of their future renown.
    ‘Lucien, do you know what I have just received from Paris?’ asked the printer, drawing a little 18 mo volume from his pocket. ‘Listen.’
    And David read, as only a poet could read, André Chénier’s bucolic poem entitled
Néère
and the one entitled
The Love-Sick Youth,
followed by the elegy on suicide which is couched in the style of antiquity, and finally Chénier’s last two iambic poems.
    ‘So that is what André Chénier is like!’ Lucien exclaimedagain and again. ‘It drives one to despair,’ he repeated for the third time when David, too moved to go on reading, handed the volume over to him, – ‘A poet discovered by another poet!’ he cried, when he saw by whom the preface was signed.
    ‘After writing all these poems,’ David continued, ‘Chénier still thought he had produced nothing worthy of publication.’
    In his turn Lucien read out the epic passage from
The Blind Poet
and several elegies. When he came to the fragment:
    Have they not bliss? Then there is none on earth,
     
    he kissed the book, and the two friends wept, for they were both of them madly in love. The vine-shoots were coming into colour, the aged walls of the house, full of fissures and bulges, with ugly cracks running across them in irregular fashion, had been adorned with the fluting, the embossments, the bas-reliefs and the innumerable embellishments of some strange, faery architecture. Fantasy had scattered its blossoms and rubies over the dingy little courtyard. For David, André Chénier’s Camilla had changed into his beloved Eve, and for Lucien into a great lady to whom he was paying court. Poetry had draped the majestic folds of its starry gown over the printing-office in which ‘monkeys’ and ‘bears’ were performing their antics. It was just on five o’clock, but the two friends were neither hungry nor thirsty; life was one golden dream, and all the riches of the world lay at their feet. They could descry that patch of blue on the horizon to which Hope points a finger for those whose life is overclouded, while saying with siren voice: ‘Go, spread your wings: you will find escape from misery in that stretch of gold, silver or azure.’ At this instant an apprentice named Cérizet, a Paris street-urchin whom David had brought to Angoulême, opened the little glass door from the workshop to the court, and indicated where the two friends sat to a stranger who came towards them and gave a bow.
    ‘Monsieur,’ he said to David, pulling an enormous copybook from his pocket. ‘Here is a memoir I should like to have printed. Would you give me an estimate of the cost?’
    ‘Monsieur, we do not print such sizable manuscripts,’ David replied without even glancing at the copybook. ‘Go and see Messrs Cointet.’
    ‘But we have a case of very pretty type which would be suitable,’ Lucien added, taking the manuscript. ‘Perhaps you would be good enough to come again tomorrow and leave us your work so that we may reckon up the cost of printing.’
    ‘Is it not Monsieur Lucien Chardon whom I have the honour…?’
    ‘Himself, sir,’ answered the proof-reader.
    ‘I am happy, sir,’ the author said, ‘to make the acquaintance of a young poet of such brilliant promise. I come from Madame de Bargeton.’
    Lucien reddened on hearing this name and stammered a few words to express his gratitude for the interest Madame de Bargeton was taking in him. David noticed the blush and his friend’s embarrassment, and left him in conversation with this country gentleman, who had written a memorandum on the culture of silkworms, and was impelled by vanity to get into print so that his colleagues of the Agricultural Society could read his monograph.
    ‘Well, well, Lucien!’ said David when the gentleman had gone away. ‘Can it be that you’re in love with Madame de Bargeton?’
    ‘Desperately!’
    ‘But there’s a wider gulf of prejudice between you and her than