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Lost Illusions
Also Published by the University of Minnesota Press
Lost Souls
Honoré de Balzac
LOST ILLUSIONS
¢
Translated
and with an Introduction by
Raymond N. MacKenzie

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis
London
Copyright 2020 by Raymond N. MacKenzie

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-­2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
ISBN 978-1-5179-0543-9

A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Library

of Congress.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-­opportunity educator and employer.

26 25 24 23 22 21 20    10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents

Translator’s Introduction
Raymond N. M acKenzie
vii

Lost Illusions
1. The Two Poets
3
2. The Parisian Adventures of a Great Man from the Provinces
121
3. The Ordeals of an Inventor
Introduction: The Sorrowful Confessions of a Child
of the Century
387
Part I. The History of a Legal Case
395
Part II. The Fatal Member of the Family
472

Translator’s Notes
555
This page intentionally left blank
Translator’s Introduction
Raymond N. MacKenzie

Lost Illusions has a central place both in Balzac’s work and in the history
of the novel. Indeed, that title would fit hundreds of the best novels ever
written, by novelists from Jane Austen and Goethe to James Joyce and
Proust. When the novel as we know it came into its own in the European
eighteenth century, or even earlier, with Don Quixote, it always made a
truth claim: a novel depicts things the way they really are. The novel
has always made an implicit promise to remove our illusions about the
way things are, or the way people are, or the way things are done, and
to present us with a truer, clearer image. But lest that sound too positive
and too much like a gain, there is a deep melancholy about the illusions
that Balzac refers to, for they were illusions regarding beauty, idealism,
and purity; losing them is painful, as is the fall from innocence to experi-
ence, and the knowledge gained is necessary but bitter. The post-­illusion
world of Balzac is our world, the disenchanted realm of modernity. Some
readers, such as Oscar Wilde, felt that Balzac’s world was more convinc-
ingly real, more sharply focused than the actual world:

The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention

of Balzac. . . . We are merely carrying out, with footnotes and
unnecessary additions, the whim or fancy or creative vision of a
great novelist.1

Wilde was enamored of paradoxes, and the idea that the novelist had
not imitated but created reality delighted him, but this is more than a
clever phrase. Peter Brooks explicates Wilde’s point: Balzac gave form
to the century’s “emerging urban agglomerations, its nascent capitalist
viii | Translator’s Introduction
dynamics, its rampant cult of the individual personality.”2 In other words,
Balzac taught us what we are and what we are doing in the brave new
world of modernity.

The Genesis of the Novel

Lost Illusions is a big novel, but it took its present shape only very slowly,
growing more by accretion than by deliberate plan. Taking some time
here to trace its evolution can serve as a good introduction to Balzac and
his working methods, and it will help us catch a glimpse of the underly-
ing shape of this long, seemingly sprawling book.3 In 1833 he listed the
title Illusions perdues as forthcoming in his series of novels that would
be collected under the heading Scenes de la vie de province (Scenes from
Provincial Life), but it seems likely that at that point he only had a
title—­in other words, that he only knew he wanted to write a novel
about disillusionment. Then, in 1835, he had contracted with his pub-
lisher for a novel with that title, and the book would be due in February
1836. But busy with many other projects, as he almost always was, he got
behind, and in June the publisher, Madame Louise Bechet, demanded
that he produce the work or suffer financial consequences. At that point
he went off to the little château of Saché in Touraine, where a friend of
his lived, a place he had used before as a quiet getaway; the threat from
Madame Bechet had clearly rattled him. He wrote to Madame Hańska
on June 16, 1836:

[I have just received] a legal notice from Madame Bechet, who

summons me to furnish her within twenty-­four hours my two
volumes in 8vo, with a penalty of fifty francs for every day’s delay!
I must be a great criminal and God wills that I shall expiate my
crimes! Never was such torture! This woman has had ten vol-
umes 8vo out of me in two years, and yet she complains at not
getting twelve!
You will be some time without news of me, for I shall probably
flee into the valley of the Indre and there write in twenty days the
two volumes of that woman and get rid of her. For such an enter-
prise one must have no distraction, no thought other than that
of the work we write. Yes, if I die for it, I must be done with these
obligations. . . . Here I am, rebeginning a horrible struggle—­that
of money interests and books to write! Put an end to the last of
my contracts by satisfying Madame Bechet, and write a fine book!
And I have twenty days! And it shall be done! The Héritiers Boir-
ouge and Illusions perdues will be written in twenty days!
 Translator’s Introduction | ix
I leave you, as you see, more harassed, more persecuted, more
occupied than ever. I have the sad presentiment that nothing can
end well out of all this. Human nature has its limits, the strong
as well as the weak, and I shall soon have attained my limit.4

Much of this letter is self-­dramatization, of course, but he did write furi-

ously at Saché from June 23 through 26—­so furiously that he made him-
self ill and had a kind of nervous collapse.
Nonetheless, the novel was still not even close to completion, and he
returned to Paris and to other tasks. Later that summer Madame Bechet
(who had remarried and was now Madame Jacquillart) sold her rights
to Balzac’s work to one of her managers, Edmond Werdet, who set up
shop on his own. Finally, in November 1836, Balzac returned to concen-
trated work on Lost Illusions, finishing on January 20, 1837, and Werdet
had the book printed and ready for sale in February.
But that volume titled Illusions perdues was only part one of the novel
we read today, ending with Lucien’s arrival in Paris and his initial despair
at the loss of Madame de Bargeton. Clearly, Balzac’s original conception
of the book was much more limited, much more tightly focused on class
distinctions in Angoulême; by the end Lucien has had some illusions
stripped away, but he has not yet fallen as far as he would eventually.
Read on its own, part one does have a completeness about it, and as such
it is aesthetically satisfying.
But by January 1837 Balzac knew there was more to be done with the
tale and the characters, and he was already planning a continuation of
Lucien’s story. On February 10, 1837, the novel just barely printed and in
the shops, he wrote to Madame Hańska:

Illusions perdues is the introduction to a much more extensive

work. These barbarous editors, impelled by money consider-
ations, insist on their three hundred and sixty pages, no matter
what they are. Illusions perdues required three volumes; there
are still two to do, which will be called Un Grand homme de
province à Paris; this will, later, be joined to Illusions perdues.

Other projects got in the way, for Balzac was never working on just
one thing at a time. (During the years he was composing Lost Illusions,
he finished and published some nineteen other works.) But he seems
to have continued to think about the second part all during 1837 and
1838. Toward the end of 1838 he told the publisher Souverain that the
book was almost finished, and the two signed a contract in December.
Balzac only finished the book in April, however, and this new second
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x | Translator’s Introduction
volume, titled Un grand homme de province à Paris, finally appeared
in June 1839. This is what we now call part two of Lost Illusions, by far
the longest of the three sections, chronicling Lucien’s journalistic career
and relationship with Coralie. Part two expands the canvas and Balzac’s
themes enormously: we are no longer concerned with an individual, Luc-
ien, but with a whole social structure that is increasingly corrupted and
corrupting. Literature in this Parisian world is not the effusion of genius
Lucien had believed it to be but instead is a mere commodity, only some-
thing to be weighed, measured, bought, and sold; literary greatness and
glory become crass matters of marketing and behind-­the-­scenes negoti-
ating, usually involving severe moral compromise. In 1820s Paris, journal-
ism is the vehicle for establishing literary greatness, and Lucien quickly
learns that journalism really has no relation to truth but only responds
to the agendas of whoever pulls the strings and pays the right amount to
the right people. The world of the theaters becomes a kind of controlling
metaphor for a world where everything is pretense and mere show. With
part two, Lost Illusions becomes a sweeping indictment, a bold and scath-
ing depiction of a degenerate society. But the work was still not complete,
and in the preface to this second volume Balzac announced the title of
a third one to come: Les Souffrances d’un inventeur (the suffererings of
an inventor).
This third part was written in fits and starts, when he could find time
for it, over the following years, and was finally published serially in June
1843 in a paper titled L’État. The work was now titled David Séchard, ou
les souffrances d’un inventeur. Then, when it was republished in Decem-
ber 1843 as part three of Illusions perdues, it was again retitled, this time
as Ève et David. This long gestation was even longer than the summary
suggests, for a full ten years earlier Balzac had referred to an idea for a
book along the same lines. He had written to Madame Hańska a decade
before, on February 3, 1833:

I am going [to Angoulême] in a few days. I am obliged to rush

to Saintes, the capital of Saintonge, to study the faubourg where
Bernard de Palissy lived; he is the hero of the Souffrances d’un
inventeur, which I shall write very quickly at Angoulême, on my
return from Saintes.

The inventor story line, then, was always associated with Angoulême,
though Balzac was only able to write it some ten years later. When the
novel Lost Illusions returns the reader to Angoulême with part three,
the return gives the novel a certain symmetry and unity, and we turn
 Translator’s Introduction | xi
from the corrupt world of literary journalism to the naïve idealism of
the inventor David Séchard, and from the corrupt sexual relationships
of the Paris scenes to a poor but happy family and a marriage based on
love and respect. But here too the corruption of the larger society is never
far away, and it comes to the fore with the machinations of the Cointet
brothers, two of the most appalling businessmen Balzac ever created.
They are abetted by the “Judas,” Cérizet; at the end of the novel, his star
is on the rise, another kind of indictment.
But there is one more incident that both brings Lost Illusions to an
end while at the same time propelling the story of Lucien forward—­the
meeting with the false Spanish priest, who goes by the name of Car-
los Herrera. This episode has attracted a great deal of critical atten-
tion, in part because of the implicitly homoerotic attraction between
the false priest and Lucien, a topic to which I’ll return. For now, how-
ever, it’s enough to stress how this episode is remarkable from a plotting
point of view, for it fails to conclude the novel, and, instead, functions
as a kind of cliffhanger: who is this priest, who appears out of nowhere
like some supernatural being, who goes on to make what sounds like a
demonic assault on Lucien’s soul? What kind of Faustian bargain is being
struck? What will be demanded of Lucien? All those questions would
be answered in a follow-­up novel, Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes,
which would only appear four years later, in 1847 (and the extent to which
Lost Illusions and that later novel form a kind of grand whole is a subject
for another time). As a result, Lost Illusions ends not so much by wrap-
ping up as by opening up.
So the book we know as Lost Illusions had a long and winding his-
tory, evolving out of a constellation of diverse preoccupations that had
been present in Balzac’s thinking and writing almost from the beginning:
the aristocracy and the commoner, the provincial and the Parisian, the
materiality and the business end of writing—­printing, bookselling—­and
the elusive spirituality of serious literature. All these slowly took shape
in the story of Lucien, ultimately becoming Balzac’s longest novel, and
one he came to recognize in retrospect as something of a cornerstone of
his vast project, his Comédie humaine. He referred to Lost Illusions in
March of 1843 as the most crucial work in the whole Comédie humaine
(“l’oeuvre capitale de l’oeuvre”).5

The Human Comedy

That “human comedy” ultimately came to span some ninety-­four differ-
ent narratives—­full-­length novels, brief stories, novellas—­and though
xii | Translator’s Introduction
Balzac sometimes spoke of it as a very systematic work, it is more
helpful to think of it as an enormous, ever-­expanding organic body of
fiction; like a few other capacious and always growing works of the nine-
teenth century—­Byron’s Don Juan, for example, or Whitman’s Leaves of
Grass—­it ended only with the end of its author’s life.
Balzac was a prolific writer from the start, though he turned to writ-
ing less out of a sense of vocation than as a method of making his way
in the world and becoming a success—­rather like Lucien, in fact. Balzac
was able to draw Lucien’s dreams of glory so well because he had known
them (though it is hard to imagine Balzac ever having been quite as ide-
alistic and naïve as Lucien was). His early novels, some published under
pseudonyms, have few readers today,6 but those books served as a kind
of apprenticeship. When those novels failed to find much of a reader-
ship, though, he became discouraged, and he left fiction behind for sev-
eral years in the mid-­1820s, setting up instead as a printer and publisher.
This is where he gained his intimate knowledge of the printing process
and paper fabrication, both of which loom so large in Lost Illusions. But
a fatal combination of bad luck and bad business decisions led to disaster
and a lifetime of debts that he could never quite get under control. That
constant indebtedness, though, forced him to return to writing, and led
up to what he considered his breakthrough work: Le Dernier Chouan
(1829), his first historical novel, and the first one he published under
his own name. This tale concerning counterrevolutionary skullduggery
in Brittany during the 1790s—­chouans being a name given to Royalist
insurgents during the early years of the French Revolution—­is an origi-
nal and effective mix of intrigue and historical research, and Balzac was
quite correct in sensing that he had finally hit upon the kind of novel he
could do better than anyone else.
The early 1830s saw him beginning to be a popular writer, and soon
he was projecting a collection of his works, reprinted and in many cases
significantly revised, under the general heading of Études de moeurs
(studies concerning manners, ways of life). He projected that this would
be a twelve-­volume collection—­this Études de moeurs was the collection
Madame Bechet had agreed to—­and the project shows us he was already
seeing his work as forming a larger whole. It also shows that Balzac was
already seeing himself as something more than, or other than, a story-
teller: he would be a kind of sociologist, historian, documentarian, a
witness to his time—­or, rather, to recent history. Though written in the
1830s and 1840s, most of Balzac’s mature work is set in the 1820s, allow-
ing him just enough historical distance for maximum understanding of
the milieu in which his characters moved.
 Translator’s Introduction | xiii
The Études de moeurs collection was to be divided into four parts:
scenes of private, provincial, Parisian, and country life. The ambition
driving such a project is in itself remarkable, though that ambition was
in part fueled by constant debt. Money was always an issue, always part
of his literary calculation, as we see over and over again in his correspon-
dence. He tells Madame Hańska, “Put on one side thirty-­seven thousand
francs to pay, and on the other side twenty-­eight francs’ worth of paper,
a bottle of ink, and a few quill-­pens I have just bought, and you will have
an idea of my position, assets, and debts” (July 13, 1834).
In the early 1830s, around the time he was settling his plans for the
Études de moeurs, Balzac made a momentous discovery: he realized that
by letting the characters from one book reappear in others, he could
begin to unify all the disparate tales and books, and that this would
allow him to create a whole fictional universe. This discovery led Bal-
zac to form an even grander plan than the Études de moeurs: his fic-
tional works, whether short stories or full-­length novels, would all work
together to create a whole, a picture of all of French society in the 1820s
and early 1830s, from princes, politicians, and aristocrats to prostitutes
and criminals, from sophisticated Parisians to uneducated peasants. Bal-
zac’s great novel of 1835, Père Goriot, was the first to exploit this, or more
precisely the first that “showed he had adopted the idea as an essential
component of his technique.”7 He had been revising his earlier books
anyway, and he now went back to adapt or insert or rename earlier char-
acters. The number of reappearing characters soon swelled and spread
into a vast network. Eventually he came to call this universe of his, this
master work, his Comédie humaine: the human comedy.8
The term suggests comparison with Dante’s great medieval poem The
Divine Comedy (and of course daring to put oneself on the same level as
Dante is another instance of Balzac’s enormous ambition). At first glance,
the juxtaposition of the two titles is surely meant to be heavily ironic:
one of the things most readers have noticed is the absence of the divine
in the modern world that Balzac depicts, for one thing, and the absence
of the ultimate happy ending that Dante’s use of the term commedia
implied. Stressing the disjuncture between Dante’s world of faith and
cosmic grandeur and the faithless, greedy, hypocritical world of 1820s
Paris would seem to be the thrust of Balzac’s title.
But the title is suggestive beyond that contrast, important as it is. Just
as Dante had managed to synthesize the entirety of the Catholic Chris-
tian vision of the afterlife along with the entirety of the theology and
philosophy of his time, Balzac wanted his work to be a modern synthe-
sis, a kind of encyclopedic vision of the world as he saw it. Ultimately the
xiv | Translator’s Introduction
Comédie humaine would grow to include nearly one hundred stories and
novels (the number varies depending on how one counts certain titles),
with hundreds of characters who reappear in various settings and situ-
ations. Whole family stories emerge across all these works, and the his-
tory, politics, and social relations of France are explored and analyzed
from what seems like an endless series of varying angles. And allowing
the reader to see these numerous characters from different perspectives,
sometimes in the background, sometimes in the foreground, and in dif-
ferent situations at different points in their lives, gives them a depth that
is unrivaled in fiction. Graham Robb puts it this way:

We get to know these characters in exactly the same way we

become familiar with real people, little by little, by personal
acquaintance or hearsay, learning of their childhood sometimes
many years after meeting them (a process Proust termed “retro-
spective illumination”), discovering that we already know their
friends or relatives, or finding out how they became so undeserv-
edly rich. (254)

There are some two thousand named characters in the Comédie, far too
many for a reader to keep track of, but the reader of Balzac’s works is
constantly experiencing the shock of recognition, which enhances the
sense of depth and reality that Balzac aimed at.9 But from an artis-
tic point of view, the disadvantage is that it is very difficult to see the
Comédie as a whole, to perceive it as a single, carefully molded entity.
Though the enormous Comédie humaine does not have the elegant shape
of The Divine Comedy, it does rival Dante’s work in ambition and scope.10
Where should one begin in reading the Comédie humaine? There is
no single, obvious starting point. Many readers have suggested either
Père Goriot (1835) or Eugénie Grandet (1833), both of which have the
advantage of relative brevity, and both of which are superb novels, among
Balzac’s masterpieces. But Lost Illusions can usefully be seen as the truly
foundational text in the vast Comédie, both in its form and its themes.
The form of the book, as we have seen, evolved over several years; it
was not planned from the start, and its various sections are constantly
threatening to throw the whole work out of balance. Digressions on the
history of printing, on papermaking, on publishing and bookselling, on
the legal profession in the provinces, on journalistic practices—­all these
seem designed almost to distract us from plot and character, those two
most basic elements of the novel as a genre. Then there is the way part
two seems to have been an afterthought of part one, and the way part
 Translator’s Introduction | xv
three seems to have been a separate idea dating way back to 1833, involv-
ing a historical personage. Clearly, if we expect a novel to maintain a clas-
sic kind of unity and focus, Lost Illusions will not make it easy for us.
Growing and evolving by accumulation rather than by design, it mirrors
the Comédie itself. We sense a unity, a completeness, in Lost Illusions as
well as in the larger Comédie, but it is a unity of tone, of sensibility, and
of outlook rather than plot structure.
Balzac’s novelistic structures might be better seen as montages, sug-
gests Allan H. Pasco, who defines montage as the bringing together of
potentially independent unities—­like bringing together part one with
parts two and three of Lost Illusions. Pasco argues that Balzac antici-
pated modern and postmodern scientific outlooks by creating “a world
where sequences may become orbits joining beginning to end, where
opposing or parallel entities are integrated into the subsuming whole.”11
Thus the many plot strands and subplot strands of Lost Illusions spin
outward, weblike, as do the many tales and novels that make up the
much vaster web of the Comédie; the various books open up to each
other as if they were not so much individual, complete, separate works
but rather porous entities, each one opening up on the others; that poros-
ity, Dominque Massonnaud suggests, is a quality essential to Balzac and
the Comédie.12

Illusions and Realities

The unity of outlook that holds this web together is perhaps implicit in
the title Lost Illusions. Balzac paints a world that is defined by a clear-­
sightedness that is almost but not quite cynicism. The prime mover of
his Comédie is not a beneficent God drawing all things to himself but
rather human passions, usually reducible to a trinity of human drives:
money, sex, and power. To recognize the reality and the intensity of these
drives, however, is not to abandon all hope for humanity, but rather to
understand the human condition. When Carlos Herrera gives Lucien
his Machiavellian sermon toward the end of the book, we know that to
some extent the lesson reflects Herrera himself, but to a great extent the
lesson is also simply derived from Balzac’s observations of humanity.
Balzac’s willingness to acknowledge these darker drives without becom-
ing overwhelmed by them, without quite succumbing to despair over
them, is perhaps what has always attracted critics of modernity to his
work. He offers not only a diagnosis of modernity and its discontents
but an example of the kind of stance one might take toward this post-­
idealistic world—­the stance of the critic, the observer, the witness. Marx
xvi | Translator’s Introduction
and Engels were great admirers of Balzac; Marx, in fact, had planned to
write a study of his fiction. George Lukács’s study of Lost Illusions is per-
haps the best of many excellent Marxian readings of the book:

Lost Illusions is a tragi-­comic epic showing how . . . the spirit

of man is drawn into the orbit of capitalism. The theme of the
novel is the transformation of literature (and with it of every
ideology) into a commodity and this complete “capitalization” of
every sphere of intellectual, literary and artistic activity fits the
general tragedy of the post-­Napoleonic generation into a much
more profoundly conceived social pattern than can be found in
the writings even of Stendhal, Balzac’s greatest contemporary.13

Indeed, Lucien’s shifting view of literature—­from being the natural prod-

uct of genius to being a mere commodity—­is one of the bitter themes in
the book, and the varieties of publishers we meet underscore the point.
Balzac was responding to a very immediate reality, for publishing itself
in the 1820s and 1830s was transforming radically, from a kind of artis-
tic, or artisanal enterprise to a purely commercial venture, as a new, less
knowledgeable, and less educated species of entrepreneurs was pouring
into the field all over France.14 Lukács sees in Balzac’s world the very
instantiation of Marx’s famous phrase about life under capitalism: “All
that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.” And the novel to
a very great extent supports this reading.15
But not entirely. Balzac also depicts a group of dedicated idealists
called the Cénacle, and their role in the book and in the overall picture of
French society that the Comédie presents is not trivial. Nor is it trivial to
point out that there was a real-­life group of artists and writers known as
the Cénacle, led by the brothers Émile and Antoni Deschamps, a group
who put out their own, influential periodical titled La Muse française
in 1823–­24. Paul Bénichou writes that “this first cénacle bore within it
a fervor, a creative hope: it is marked with the stamp peculiar to those
rare and privileged literary moments when the spirit renews itself.”16 The
Deschamps’ Cénacle, with its belief in genius and in the liberation of the
soul through literature, art, and philosophy, became a model for numer-
ous others throughout the century; in fact, such groupings of idealis-
tic artists supporting each other became, as Vincent Laisney describes
it, virtually unavoidable in Parisian literary life—­and in nineteenth-­
century novels as well.17 Balzac’s Cénacle and its central figure, Daniel
d’Arthez, show that idealism and genuine intellectual endeavor are not
 Translator’s Introduction | xvii
dead, though they are relegated to the margins of the glittering world
that is Paris.
Another aspect of the novel that counters the charge of universal cyn-
icism involves the young actress Coralie and her devoted love for Luc-
ien. That love begins with sheer physical attraction, but Balzac allows it
to grow and deepen for the short time that is allowed to Coralie. She is
one of the novel’s most appealing characters—­lively, clever, worldly wise
but not entirely jaded, and genuinely in love. Her early death takes the
novel to perhaps its lowest, darkest emotional level, and the grotesque
touch that Lucien must write a series of bawdy ballads in order to have
enough money to bury her only puts her essential goodness, even inno-
cence, in higher relief.18
Not everyone, therefore, is corrupt; not every love is mere lust or,
worse, mere self-­advancement. But corruption does lurk everywhere, and
it is shown to be especially lethal with the ambitious, like Lucien. The
heart of this corruption is not to be found in, or blamed on, the gov-
ernment or even the social order in general, though both of those are
depicted as cruel and ugly at various points. The heart of it appears to
be somehow related to the city itself: Paris. The unnamed German dip-
lomat, a guest at the party Lousteau and Florine throw, puts it this way:

“When [General] Blücher arrived at the heights of Montmar-

tre with Saacken in 1814—­a nd please pardon me, Messieurs, for
taking you back to that day that was so fatal for you—­Saacken,
who was a brute, said: ‘Now we’re going to burn Paris!’ Blücher
replied, ‘Be careful: Paris is the only thing that will eventually
be the death of France.’” (“The Parisian Adventures of a Great
Man from the Provinces”)

Paris is presented as the site of cultural, social, and moral infection;

and it appears in similar guise over and over in the various works com-
prising the Comédie. The great city represents the accumulation of all the
worst in humankind. There is a long literary tradition, of course, depict-
ing city life as corrupt and country life as pure and innocent, a tradition
that goes back to eighteenth-­century novelists like Marivaux and Field-
ing and beyond, but Balzac’s Paris seems a more extreme case, seems
something more than a traditional motif. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson
argues that Paris—­the site of revolutions, an emperor’s rise and fall, and
an uneasy restoration of a monarchy that would be toppled yet again in
1830—­that this city lent itself readily to symbolizing the decay of order
xviii | Translator’s Introduction
and peace, in other words, the coming of a disruptive, alienating moder-
nity.19 Ferguson’s general point rings true for the way Balzac depicts Paris
in the novels, but, interestingly, this is not the way he always saw it. He
wrote to Madame Hańska enthusiastically about the city:

You cannot imagine how beautiful Paris is becoming. We needed

the reign of a trowel to arrive at such grand results. This magnif-
icence, which advances daily and on all sides, will make us wor-
thy of being the capital of the world. The boulevards paved with
asphalt, lighted by bronze candelabra with gas, the increasing
splendor of the shops, of that fair, two leagues long, perpetually
going on and varied by ever new handiworks, compose a specta-
cle that is unequalled. In ten years we shall be clean; “Paris mud”
will be out of the dictionaries; we shall become so magnificent
that Paris will be really a great lady, the first of queens, crowned
with battlements. (September 1, 1837)

A passage like that underlines for us how deliberately Balzac in his fic-
tion was using Paris as a symbol, no matter how he wished to appear to
be a mere documentarian, and it teaches us to be more attentive to the
deliberately literary quality of Balzac’s realism than we sometimes are;
the novels may have much to teach us, but they are not quite the trans-
parent windows on the world that they might want to appear to be.
If the fictional Paris then is the nexus of all the instabilities, all the
dislocations, all the falseness of modernity, the world of Parisian jour-
nalism is the most representative illustration of the new reality. The
new media—­the proliferating newspapers and journals—­create an ever-­
expanding fog of false discourse. The party at Florine’s, again, is the set-
ting for an explicit discussion of the point. The journalists themselves
admit that the press has become a positive evil, and one of them, Vignon,
puts it bluntly:

“The newspaper, instead of playing the role of the priest, has

become a mere tool for the different parties; now it’s become a
business, and like any business, it follows no faith and has no
principles. As Blondet says, every paper is just a shop in which
words are sold to the public, and everyone buys the particular
color of words he prefers. If there were a paper for hunchbacks,
it would labor morning and night to prove the beauty, the good-
ness, the necessity of humps. A paper no longer exists in order to
enlighten the reader, only to flatter his opinions. Soon enough, all
the papers will be amoral, hypocritical, brazen, dishonest, and
murderous: they will be the murderers of ideas, of philosophical
 Translator’s Introduction | xix
systems, of men, and they will flourish for doing so. They will
enjoy the payoff that all rational creatures are always working
toward: evil will be done, and no one will be responsible.” (“The
Parisian Adventures of a Great Man from the Provinces”)

Vignon here makes a point very similar to the one Lukács made: every-
thing has become commodity, everything is up for sale, including litera-
ture and truth itself.
Lost Illusions goes to great lengths to associate the world of the jour-
nalist with the world of theater, with the clear implication that, though
the journalist claims to be telling us a truth, he is simply performing
a role. Thus it is not surprising that the journalists and the actors are
so closely connected. Everything is show. One of the first things Luc-
ien learns is how important it is to have the right clothes, for the world
of show depends on carefully calibrated semiotics. Peter Brooks traces
the semiotics of things—­clothing, accessories, furniture—­throughout the
novel, “the things one needs to acquire as signs of what one is, or wants
to be. The problem is played out across all the major registers of the
novel.”20 Things, from clothing to accessories of every kind, function
as signs with important social meaning. This is related to a point that
Erich Auerbach had made decades earlier in his classic study Mimesis:
in Balzac, the character and his or her surroundings become one—­that
is, the surroundings, the details, the things, explain and express the per-
son, and vice versa:

[Balzac] not only . . . places the human beings whose destiny he is

seriously relating in their precisely defined historical and social
setting, but also conceives this connection as a necessary one:
to him every milieu becomes a moral and physical atmosphere
which impregnates the landscape, the dwelling, furniture, imple-
ments, clothing, physique, character. . . .21

Auerbach’s point has recently been developed further by Franco

Moretti, who sees the Balzacian connection between the person and the
things of his or her setting as essential in the construction of the mod-
ern bourgeois character—­and not just the novelistic representation of
the character but the real-­life bourgeois.22
But these things surrounding a person and functioning as signs do
not always signify what they appear to: in other words, the sign and
what it represents, in the modern world, do not always align. To under-
line this disjuncture, Balzac uses the theater both as a setting and as a
metaphor. Lucien’s first trip to the theater is not to watch from a seat in
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xx | Translator’s Introduction
the audience; instead, he observes from backstage, from the wings, the
coulisses. Sotirios Paraschas suggests that the concept of the “backstage”
is a dominant one in Lost Illusions: we readers are taken to the backstage
of the theater, to the backstage of the newspapers, and even, in the so-­
called wooden galleries where authors and publishers wheel and deal, to
the backstage of novels themselves.23 Much of the story involves Lucien
losing his illusions about the production of literature and learning that
it is almost entirely a matter of business and marketing, with scarcely
any room for the individual genius that Lucien—­and perhaps we readers
as well—­had always believed in and venerated. Journalism, theater, and
literature are shown to be similar, and there is one further, humiliating,
term to be added to the equation: all three of those once venerated insti-
tutions are aligned with prostitution. Lousteau makes the connection
explicit in his first long discussion with Lucien:

“This reputation that we desire so badly is almost always a kind

of prostitution that goes about wearing a crown. Yes, the lowest
types of literature are like the poor girl shivering on the street
corner; and as for the second-­rate literature, that’s the kept mis-
tress who has made her way out of the brothels of journalism,
and she’s the one I’m trying to master. Successful literature—­
she’s the glittering, insolent courtesan with furnished apart-
ments, who pays her taxes, who receives grand lords, treating
them well or badly as she likes, who has liveried servants and
a fine carriage and the power to keep her creditors at bay. But
oh, for the men who see her—­as I did not long ago, and for you,
who still see her that way—­as an angel with diaphanous wings,
dressed in white, . . . finally growing wealthy but only through
her virtue, rising back up to the heavens with her immaculate
character intact—­as long as she does not go to her pauper’s grave
soiled, despoiled, raped, and forgotten: men like that need to
build a fence of bronze around their minds, and find a way to
keep their hearts warm despite the ice storms of experience,
and men like that are very rare in the place you see spread out
before you.” As he said this he gestured out toward the great city,
its smoke rising up in the dusk. (“The Parisian Adventures of a
Great Man from the Provinces”)

There is a great deal of bitterness in these sequences of the novel, no

doubt reflecting Balzac’s own conflicted view of himself and his role—­
envisioning himself alternately as the Prometheus, the great maker and
creator, and as the poor hack, driven by crushing debt to grind out as
many words for as many francs as possible. He writes to Madame Hańska:
 Translator’s Introduction | xxi
A man who has only his pen, and who must meet ten thousand
francs a year when he does not have them, is compelled to many
sacrifices. It was soon, not one hundred and thirty-­t wo thousand
francs that I owed, but one hundred and forty thousand, for how
did I fight the necessity that pressed upon me? With an aide-­de-­
camp who may be compared to the vulture of Prometheus [that
is, Madame Bechet’s assistant, Werdet]; with usurers who made
me pay nine, ten, twelve, twenty per cent interest, and who con-
sumed in applications, proceedings, and errands fifty per cent
and more of my time. Moreover, I had signed agreements with
publishers who had advanced me money on work to be done; so
that when I signed the Bechet agreement I had to deduct from the
thirty thousand francs she was to pay me for the first twelve vol-
umes of the Études de Mœurs ten thousand francs to indemnify
Gosselin and two other publishers. (July 19, 1837)

In this respect, it may not be too much of an exaggeration to call Lost

Illusions one of Balzac’s most personal novels. There is something of him
in Lucien, in Lousteau, perhaps even in Carlos Herrera.
That false priest who comes onstage toward the end of the novel is of
course the master criminal Vautrin; Balzac’s readers would have remem-
bered him from Père Goriot, where he attempted to seduce Eugène de
Rastignac, just as he attempts—­and succeeds—­here with Lucien. The
first moment Herrera/Vautrin catches sight of Lucien is vividly described.
The false priest has got down from his carriage at the bottom of a steep
hill, as passengers did, to make it easier for the horses to get up the
incline. Lucien, intent on suicide, has been absentmindedly gathering
flowers, and now steps onto the road:

When [Herrera] heard Lucien coming up onto the road from the
vineyard, the man turned and appeared to be struck by the pro-
foundly melancholic beauty of the poet, with his symbolic bou-
quet and his elegant attire. His face took on the expression of a
hunter who has finally sighted his long-­sought prey after much
fruitless tracking. As sailors do, he slowed his pace as he waited
for Lucien to catch up. . . . (“The Ordeals of an Inventor”)

The “symbolic bouquet” evokes a wedding scene, with Lucien as the

bride. We remember that Lucien’s feminine beauty has been stressed
throughout the novel, from the very first time we readers met him:

Lucien was thin, and of middle height. Looking at his feet, one
might have been tempted to guess that he was a girl in disguise,
xxii | Translator’s Introduction
and such a guess would be even more likely because, like so many
subtle, not to say cunning, men, he had slender hips like a wom-
an’s. This hint is almost always accurate, and it was certainly so
with Lucien, for his restless spirit often brought him, when he
paused to analyze the current realities of society, to that state of
moral corruption peculiar to diplomats who believe that success
justifies all means, no matter how shameful. (“The Two Poets”)

The connection between “slender hips” and cunning is an instance of Bal-

zac’s interest in physiognomy, in the nineteenth-­century belief in some
connection between one’s looks and one’s moral or intellectual nature,
a concept that led to pseudoscientific fields like phrenology and, more
grimly, to eugenics and race theory. Balzac is relatively unsystematic
about this, but he does indulge in it often enough.24 The androgynous
qualities of Lucien are of interest, and the reader may speculate what
Balzac was doing or suggesting with this.25 In any case, the erotic attrac-
tion Herrera/Vautrin feels immediately for Lucien is clear, and their long
walk and later drive together becomes one of literature’s great tempta-
tion or seduction scenes. When Lucien points out the Rastignac house as
they pass by, Herrera/Vautrin enigmatically stops and walks off, gazing
down the lane that leads toward the house—­a moment that seems inex-
plicable to Lucien, but not to the reader, who remembers his attempted
seduction of Eugène de Rastignac in Père Goriot.
A good guide to this sequence in the novel is Marcel Proust, a close and
careful reader of Balzac, who makes many references to him through-
out À la Recherche du temps perdu and discusses his work in concen-
trated fashion in a chapter of his critical study Contre Sainte-­Beuve. He
notes that “the way Vautrin stops Lucien on the road, when he does not
know him and so could only be attracted to him by his good looks” sug-
gests—­in a time when such things could only be suggested—­“an unad-
mitted thought.” Proust then alludes to one of French romanticism’s
finest, most poignant works, Victor Hugo’s poem, “Tristesse d’Olimpio”
(1840), in which the poet returns to a place that once meant everything
to him, only to find that nature has continued to evolve and change, with
no regard for his feelings. Proust says that “indisputably, the finest thing
is the marvelous passage where the two travelers pass the tumble-­down
manor-­house where Rastignac was born. I call that the ‘Tristesse d’Olim-
pio’ of homosexual love.”26
But the homoeroticism is only one of multiple layers in this extraor-
dinary sequence. Another important layer involves the supernatural: it
 Translator’s Introduction | xxiii
feels like much more than mere chance that Lucien would step up out of
the vineyard and onto the road with his “bouquet” at exactly the moment
Herrera was standing there and looking at him. Is it Providence, working
to keep Lucien from his intended suicide, or the opposite, a Satanic kind
of intervention? On the level of literary realism, this chance encoun-
ter is a serious blow to verisimilitude, and so we are entitled to ask
whether Balzac wants us to adjust our expectations away from realism
and toward some other register of literary style: the diabolical pact feels
as if it came from the world of Faust and myth rather than the world of
the realist novel.27 Kyoko Murata explores the pact with the demonic in
Balzac, here and in several other novels, noting that in many cases the
pact becomes gendered in strange and subtle ways: Murata points out the
weirdly maternal in Vautrin, as he wishes to protect and strengthen Luc-
ien; moreover, she notes, Vautrin is also acting like a kind of author, writ-
ing a new story for Lucien to inhabit, which adds yet another rich layer
to the sequence.28 Vautrin himself, a criminal who is a master of disguise
and of far-­flung schemes and intrigues, likewise challenges credibility,
seeming to come from the world of melodrama and romance. He argu-
ably prefigures later criminal masterminds like the Moriarty of Arthur
Conan Doyle. But even if he seems to belong to the later world of crime
and mystery novels, as Lynn R. Wilkinson says, “Vautrin represents an
energy and artistic autonomy lost in the little worlds of later art novels
that reflect the experiences of anemic young men.”29 Structurally, too, the
scene challenges our expectations: while Balzac brings the story of Ève
and David to a clear sense of closure, the story of Lucien refuses to close,
ending instead on a “to be continued” note. Annika Mörte Alling has
written a searching analysis of the problems posed by the novel’s end-
ing, attempting to see whether Balzac’s strange combination of closure
and opening has its own aesthetic justification.30 The ending forces us to
see Lost Illusions as part of the much larger whole that is the Comédie
humaine, ­and may propel us directly into the volume that will continue
and conclude Lucien’s story, Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes.

The Text and the Translation

Balzac rewrote and refashioned his works constantly, though the revi-
sions reached a sort of stopping point with the so-­called Furne edition
of the Comédie humaine (1842 et seq.). Most modern editions of Illusions
perdues are based on the Furne edition, but some retain the chapter titles
Balzac had used in earlier editions, and this translation retains them as
xxiv | Translator’s Introduction
well. They serve an important purpose in helping the reader navigate a
long and complex narrative, and they are often witty or otherwise inter-
esting in themselves.
For my translation I have relied on three modern editions: Illusions
perdues, edited by Antoine Adam (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1967); La
Comédie humaine V, edited by Pierre-­Georges Castex and Roland Chol-
let (Paris: Gallimard [Bibliothèque de la Pléiade], 1977); and Illusions
perdues, edited by Jacques Noiray (Paris: Gallimard [Folio Classique],
2013). I occasionally quote from those editors’ notes in my own endnotes,
and when that is the case I indicate them by last name: Adam, Chollet,
or Noiray.
Apart from retaining the chapter titles, I have tried to represent Bal-
zac’s style as faithfully as I could. In the interests of better, more read-
able English I have at times broken up or rearranged sentences, but I
have tried not to overdo this. The reader will still find plenty of long and
rather unwieldy Balzacian sentences, which are an important element
in the texture of the novel. Paragraphs tend to be quite long, and I have
almost always honored the original, despite the (sometimes very great)
temptation to break them up for greater readability: those long expanses
of prose are also important to the work’s texture.
Balzac has long had the reputation of being a poor stylist. He wrote
too much, too quickly, under too much pressure, and so on, to be able to
polish his sentences and phrases as a Flaubert did—­or so the traditional
account goes. But more recent scholars and critics have begun to ques-
tion that appraisal and even to appreciate Balzac’s style, the most nota-
ble among them being Éric Bordas. Bordas has developed an approach
to Balzac based on what he calls a plurality of enunciation (drawing on
earlier work by the great Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin), which arises
from and expresses Balzac’s intuition that in modernity there is no such
thing as unitary, fixed meaning.31 This new appreciation has encouraged
me to stick more closely to Balzac’s sentences and style than some other
translators have done.
For most readers, Balzac’s style may seem a little rough and ready, but
it will also seem entirely suited to his sensibility and outlook. That sensi-
bility is the force that holds Lost Illusions together—­as it does the whole
Comédie humaine. Henry James wrote extensively and warmly about
Balzac on several occasions. He focused on the surprisingly deep connec-
tion that we readers sense between the man and the work, between Bal-
zac and his Comédie; James used the image of a kind of saturation. He
said that there are contradictions and flaws to be found in this novel and
in Balzac’s other works, true, but “they never come back to that fault in
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 "But you must know which way he went?" Mrs. Boundrish persisted
obstinately.

"Indeed, I am neither as observant nor as curious as you suppose," she

replied sweetly, vexed at having shown temper to a casual travelling
acquaintance—a mere "passing ship"—whereupon Mr. and Mrs. Boundrish
exchanged glances; while Ermengarde, incidentally remarking upon the
well-known chill of the sunset hour, rose and walked in the opposite
direction to her inquisitors—homewards—remembering as she went that it
was not the first time that questions concerning the youth who might have
been her son, if she had been ten years older, had annoyed her. The pettiness
and impertinence of these underbred tourists—tourists are never of the first
person; people have owned to criminality, but not to being tourists—the
worst of these small hotels—people are so mixed up and thrown together.

"Well, and if the poor boy is hard hit," she meditated, "a grand passion
is a necessary phase in a young man's development, and the more hopeless
the better. But the bourgeois mind cannot grasp the beauty of an ideal
devotion, of the unselfish homage a gallant youth gladly pays to one in
every way hopelessly above him. A Boundrish can vulgarize even that
poetic passion. How very lucky that the object of the poor lad's devotion
happens to be a staid and sensible matron old enough to give motherly
advice and young enough to be sympathetic," she reflected complacently,
while she went slowly back to the house and dressed for table d'hôte.

She was still pursuing this current of reflection while she went
downstairs in her simple semi-toilet, adorned no longer by tributary
flowers, and sank upon the least hard-hearted of the drawing-room easy-
chairs.

"Oh, I say, Mrs. Allonby!" cried Miss Boundrish, bursting into the half-
lighted, empty room with her usual grace and charm, and punctuating her
remarks with gurgles, "I'm jolly glad you're safe, so far. That Bontemps girl
is going for you the minute she sees you. There has been the most awful
row downstairs about you. Best double-lock your door to-night, and be
careful to eat nothing that has not been tasted by somebody else."
 "My dear Miss Boundrish," she replied gently, observing that no one
else was in the room; "you are young, and your imagination is vivid; do you
think it quite wise to mix yourself up with the people of the house?"

But Dorris was not to be crushed; she only gurgled scornfully, and
would have made some pert retort, had not the thin man, who, after all, had
been lounging unseen in a shadowed corner, suddenly glided to the piano,
struck some full bass chords and begun to improvise in a pleasant fashion
he had at times: when the room was empty and he felt moved to confide his
thoughts and dreams to the spirit in the instrument.

Then Ermengarde, ruffled and inwardly raging, but grateful for Mr.
Welbourne's paternal care, took a seat touching the piano, and was silent;
the man with the ascetic face came in and stood like a statue behind the
player; the room slowly filled; but Mr. Welbourne, contrary to custom,
played on, as if something within him must find expression in music, even
when a buzz of talk hummed through the room and lights were turned up,
until dinner.

Chapter XIII

The Publisher's Parcel

Though conjectures as to the manner in which poor Agatha Somers had

become possessed of the necklace disturbed Ermengarde's sleep, and the
glow of the sapphires coloured all her thoughts of her, she was obliged to
take the creature to her heart; there was in her something so lovable and so
pathetic, especially that appeal in her eyes—so she confided to Mr.
Welbourne, who smiled and seemed gratified by this view of their mutual
friend, though he said little.
 She seems fond of me, Ermengarde reflected; I wonder why? How
great, she mused, is the attraction that virtue has for the depraved and
rectitude for the outcast! Who could tell what redeeming influence a good
woman's kindness might exercise upon this erring young soul? She would
certainly befriend the wanderer in every possible way, except that of
helping her to dispose of ill-gotten jewellery. Perhaps there might be some
grain of truth, some small foundation in fact, for the circumstantial family
history this ingenious young person had related to her by the wood fire that
evening. She was undoubtedly well-bred, possibly well-born; it was highly
probable that she had been nurtured in comfort, if not luxury—still, how did
she come by that necklace? It was a small fortune in itself. Nobody reduced
to bread-labour would keep so much money locked up. Again, what
possible work of a secretarial character could she be doing in this land of
lotus-eating? Or how could a penniless young woman afford such an
expensive holiday as this? Was she, could she be, a female detective?

In that case, who could she be shadowing, up here in the mountains,

among this little company of highly respectable, not to say frumpish, folk?
Surely not the thin man—yet human character abounds in the unexpected
and even the incredible—had Mr. Welbourne, after all, a wife desirous of
shunting him? Was he a wolf in sheep's clothing, a hypocrite steeped in
iniquity? Lame and deformed people often have a twist in their character—
not that poor Mr. Welbourne was deformed—indeed, had his fleshly
covering been a little more abundant, he would have been rather good-
looking, his features well-cut, his eyes bright and animated. There was
nobody else to shadow at Les Oliviers—no English body else, that is—the
visitors mostly consisted of family parties.

No; she must be some kind of spy or conspirator, in league as she was
with the Anarchist. Yet Ivor Paul was hardly a spy or a conspirator; both the
thin man and the fair Dorris agreed in placing him as the scion of a family
of rank; they knew that he was only five lives off a peerage, but those lives
were young and vigorous. Lady Seaton, who knew the ins and outs and
most intricate ramifications of every family of consequence, and never
forgot who married who, and how they were connected with everybody
else, a widow old enough to mention her age without prevarication, and
herself allied in some distant and complicated manner to every coronet-
bearing English name, had known his father in his youth; she remembered
that his mother had married a second time; she had forgotten the man's
name; it would come back to her presently. Sir George, her late husband,
had been in public life; the present baronet represented a North-country
constituency, and had been a Minister. So far, the truth of Agatha's story
was confirmed; though what the woman of mystery's relations with this
young man might be, it was wiser not to dwell upon. And if she improvised
ailing aunts at need, so did Miss Boundrish, about whom, with all her
delightful deviations from the normal English girl, there was no manner of
mystery, her father giving himself out for what he undoubtedly was—a
plain, substantial British merchant.

"Our young friend," Mr. Welbourne observed one day after some act of
kindness on the part of Agatha to Ermengarde, whose weakness had not yet
entirely left her, "appears to be much attached to you, Mrs. Allonby."

"But I can't think why," she replied; "though I can't help liking the girl
myself."

"Why should you help it? A kindly nature," he added, with a sigh so
deep and so despairing that she was sorry for him. Had the thin man met
with so few kindly natures on his earthly pilgrimage; or was it, could it, at
his age be, hopeless passion?

Lady Seaton had but recently come up to the peace of the house on the
ridge from one of the great hotels below, where there was too much
crowding and racket for her. She was fairly well read and interested in
many things, and had shown much friendliness, mixed with something that
was almost deference, to Ermengarde. In the course of half an hour's
desultory chat in the garden she had become acquainted with all the leading
facts in Mrs. Allonby's life; Charlie's name, age, school, disposition, and
beauty; the busy journalist husband; the attack of influenza; the subsequent
depression, and present holiday trip; while Ermengarde had had a vague
notion that they had been discussing the climate and topography of the
Riviera, and Lady Seaton's own health, all the time.

"You must be very proud of your husband, Mrs. Allonby," she said,
when they were parting on that occasion, and Ermengarde made some
vague and wondering assent to the assumption.

A husband is a not unusual piece of personal property; why on earth be

proud of it? Still, she was not going to let people think she was ashamed of
poor old Arthur, who, with all his faults, was probably no worse than other
men—besides, even if he were ever so bad, he was her man, and she must
stand up for him. "A poor thing, sirs, but mine own."

Since Lady Seaton's arrival Ermengarde had been dimly conscious of a

difference in people's manner to her, as if that of the kind-hearted old lady
had been infectious, or her avowed interest had conferred some distinction
upon her.

Once, when she had tucked herself up cosily in a nook behind a rose-
trellis and fallen asleep in the sunshine, she had been waked by a murmur of
voices from people on the other side of her trellis, and heard in the adored
treble shout of the Boundrish, "Well! I simply call it scandalous. I wonder
the Bontemps put up with it. Such goings on are a reflection upon us all."

"You need have no fear, Miss Boundrish," replied Lady Seaton's low,
distinct voice, in which Ermengarde detected a subtle hint of sarcasm, "you
are quite beyond any such reflection."

"Well, I don't know about that," she replied with complacent gurgles.
"One doesn't care to associate with people who get themselves talked about.
An inherited instinct, I suppose," with more gurgles. "Besides, how do you
know who she is, or whether she has a husband at all? Grass-widows who
run about the Continent alone, and play at Monty to that extent that they
have to pop their jewels——"

Ermengarde smiled at this. "After all, I'm not the only one who pops
jewels here," she thought; "but who on earth can the Boundrish be going for
now?"

"—Why, I saw her go in myself, and she thought I didn't know her
under her black gossamer, and I saw the things in the window afterwards
——"
 "You were there, too?" the thin man interjected, with a greenish glitter
in his eye.

"Oh yes; nothing escapes me——"

"So it appears, and nobody," he murmured to himself.

"—A grass-widow who does that kind of thing needn't go about with her
nose in the air, snubbing people she couldn't possibly get in with at home,
not to speak of the disgraceful way in which she persecutes that poor silly
young Isidore, who will probably get the sack owing to her, besides losing
his fiancée——"

Ermengarde smiled to herself. Was the poor boy engaged, then? and
how could his engagement affect the only grass-widow besides herself in
the house? It certainly was well known that the latter gave the young man a
good deal of unnecessary trouble, but what had that to do with this
supposed engagement of his?

"Though it's true," the artless girl continued, "that she has given up
wearing his flowers at dinner, just to put people off the scent, and persuades
herself that nobody notices all the little walks and talks on the quiet—

Ermengarde, who had listened guilelessly, supposing these remarks to

be addressed to the general public, suddenly changed colour, while another
voice, that of Agatha, as suddenly struck in, "Miss Boundrish, you are
positively slanderous. Such things ought not to be said, even if true, which
they are not."

"Say, Miss Somers, don't you get mad," the American lady began. "I
judge this young Isidore can look after himself some, whoever makes eyes
at him, Miss Boundrish. There are folks must flirt, if it's only with a
broomstick; they just can't help making eyes when there's any men around.
I guess they don't know they're doing it all the time."

"When people are attractive," came in Lady Seaton's exact intonation,

"they are often accused of trying to attract."
 "Oh, attract," gurgled Miss Boundrish. "How anyone can be attracted by
a nose like that—why, you might hang your hat upon it. And as for her
waist——"

"Want of style," her mother suggested, "while her dress——"

"Oh, she don't calculate to dress any. She just slumps along anyhow up
in these mountains, I judge. I never was much on the apple-cheeked, yalla-
haired sort—British gells are too beefy for my taste—else she's pretty
enough, and, my! don't her eyes snap; nights, when she kind of fancies
herself!"

"And thinks she can play bridge, and tries to strum on the piano," added
Dorris viciously.

"Were our fair friend the subject of masculine comment," observed Mr.
Welbourne impressively, "the verdict would, I venture to predict, be one of
whole-hearted admiration on every count."

"Thank you," sighed Ermengarde in her corner, whence she dared not
try to escape.

"Oh, a man's woman is pretty much the same as a lady's man," Dorris
gurgled, "so they say."

"You may stake your pile on that, Miss Boundrish," the American
corroborated.

"And you don't suppose that hair of hers is all grown on the premises,"
continued Dorris acidly.

"Whatever you suppose, I've seen it brushed out," Agatha retorted

—"lovely hair, like floss-silk."

"At any rate, no hair could be that colour naturally, and it gets brighter
every day—thanks to the climate, I suppose. The Monte Carlo yellows are
famous, you know——"
 "Cat!" murmured Ermengarde. "How I should enjoy the twisting of
yours!"

"But what I simply can't stand," pursued the injured maiden plaintively,
"is her making herself out to be somebody—pretending to be that man's
wife——"

"Ah, well! this can't be me. I don't pretend to be anybody's wife,"

thought Ermengarde.

"She is his wife," Agatha said.

"Or one of his wives. He may have dozens for all we know——"

"Dorris, my dear," faltered her poor mother, blushing wildly.

"Well, mater, so he may; that kind of man often does. And, as I said
before, nobody knows anything about her, or whether she has any husband
at all—she may have five—or six——"

"Seven is considered a round, complete, and therefore sacred, number,

though the wife of Bath only had five," observed Mr. Welbourne
thoughtfully.

"Bath! What Bath? D'you mean Lord Bath's wife?" Dorris asked. "And
did he get her divorced?"

"For the Land's sake, Miss Boundrish," shouted Mrs. Dinwiddie, the
American lady, "if you don't just tickle me to death! Lord Bath——" while
the thin man chuckled grimly to himself.

"I never can remember about titled people," Dorris complained bitterly,
as if this defect of memory was owing to the malice of present company.
"And I should have thought that Americans never knew anything to forget,"
she added vindictively.

"That is so—'cept when we marry dukes. But don't you fret, Miss
Boundrish, there's a sight of things better worth knowing than that, you put
your bottom dollar on it."
 Agatha and Lady Seaton had in the meantime drawn Mrs. Boundrish
into other talk, and the thin man had reminded them of an early promise to
come to a private view of his sketches, in which project Miss Boundrish,
who was within earshot, promptly included herself.

The American went off in another direction, and Ermengarde, unable to

stir an inch without attracting attention, kept her eyes fiercely shut, so as to
look asleep, till the footsteps died away. Then she rose and went round to
the front of the terrace, where Agatha still sat among the flowers, with a
fountain pen and a paper partially covered with cipher in her hand, but
looking over the sunny amplitude of space to the sea.

She started at seeing Ermengarde, and seemed relieved when the latter
told her she had been dozing behind the trellis, and had waked to hear the
conversation. "For your part of which, thank you," she said, smiling. "No
doubt I ought to have got away, but I hadn't wit or pluck enough," she
added, sitting by Agatha, and laying her hand caressingly on her arm.
"What that horrid cat said about popping jewellery was partly true. I sold
the chain I got at the Carnival, and—a ring—and—h'm—I redeemed the
ring only yesterday—there it is—and I hope nobody else will ever know
what a fool I've been. The solid truth is, I should have had to go home to
England at once if I hadn't got back those few louis I lost that afternoon—
and I badly wanted to stay on."

"Did Mr. Mosson give you a wrinkle, or was it pure luck?" Agatha
asked, warmed to the heart by this unwonted cordiality.

"Oh, pure luck."

"It's so beguiling—that first luck," Agatha sighed. "And then, when the
luck goes, there's the necessity and hope of getting the losses back. The
demon of chance sits there, I suppose, like a great spider, weaving, weaving
his poison-webs, till the poor fly, caught and tangled hopelessly all round,
can struggle no more. And people live on this—on these blighted lives,
broken homes, shattered hearts, and widespread misery and despair! Have
you seen the cathedral, Mrs. Allonby—that snow-white, brand-new,
dazzling immensity of marble at Monaco, flaunting among the palms and
pines and flowers, all built out of these cruel gains, these despairs and
miseries and degradations? And that palace? Nearly all the palace is new,
built out of Casino winnings, as you remember."

"Perhaps that's why it's so vulgar. You want to wipe it out of the picture
—cathedral and palace, too, built of money."

"Not of money," she said, her eyes shining with a hard brilliance. "No,
built of broken hearts—women's hearts, mothers' hearts, wives' hearts. Oh,
to see the whole accursed monstrosity levelled to the ground! I cannot
speak of it."

What did this sudden passion mean, Ermengarde wondered; then she
remembered the "connexion by marriage," and was sorry for her.

"According to Mr. Welbourne, it is not the gamblers who make the

income," she said. "It is the people who stop a few days at Monte Carlo, and
throw away a couple of louis at the tables to pass the time. After all, most
amusements have to be paid for, and what enjoyment is not liable to
abuse?"

"Enjoyment," cried Agatha, "enjoyment!"

"The gambling instinct, the delight in the excitement of chance, seems

pretty deeply rooted in human nature."

"What vile passion is not deeply rooted in human nature? Mrs. Allonby,
I could tell you tragedies. But no——"

Could anything be more moral, correct, and praise-worthy than this

impetuous outburst?

And yet, on the very next day, who should Ermengarde meet in the
Casino, coming out of the Salle de Jeu, but the woman of mystery herself?
Not alone, certainly, but in earnest conversation with the ubiquitous and
elusive Anarchist, whom she began to suspect of being no creature of flesh
and blood, but some sinister spirit haunting her path with evil intent. So
absorbed in their talk were those two that they passed her without
recognition, as she turned aside to go into the concert-hall with the
American lady and the thin man, who chanced to be with her that day.

A Thursday Classic Concert was being given by the world-famous

orchestra; the hall was crowded. Ermengarde thought she recognized
everybody she knew on the Riviera in different parts of the house. An aunt,
a genuine relative of her own, from Cap Martin, nodded across the fauteuils
to her, and missed her in coming out, not wholly to Mrs. Allonby's regret.
Elderly relatives are for the fireside, with purring cats, singing tea-kettles
and buttered muffins, but they scarcely seem in keeping with places of
public amusement. Family matters should never be discussed at full-dress
functions.

It was very pleasant outside in the sunlit Gardens by the café, where
chairs in a commanding position had been easily found. Fine orchestral
music agreeably excites the imagination while it soothes the nerves. Never
had the Pathetic Symphony of Tchaikowsky been more beautifully played;
it lingered and echoed with harmonious heart-break in the imagination,
heightening the beauty of the scenery, making the fresh air fresher and the
tea even more enjoyable.

Lady Seaton came up, bringing a nephew, and was easily induced to
join the tea-party. The nephew turned out well. Ermengarde observed that
his nose was in the Greek style, and his eyes twinkled like the little star of
infantile verse. She was in the happy and peaceful mood induced by the
subconsciousness of absolutely becoming and perfectly fitting costume. A
glance snatched at a little mirror in her bag had assured her that not a hair
was out of place, and neither flush nor pallor marred a complexion
unsullied by powder or paint. In short, they were all in a mood of great
content and enjoyment, when a sudden, a too familiar, sound struck upon
Ermengarde's ear, and drew cold chills down her back. It was the voice of
Miss Boundrish.

Vainly did the whole party, struck with sudden silence, try to look the
other way, and avoid meeting the fair girl's speedwell blue eye, which
beamed with friendly recognition and good fellowship. Making her way
steadily through the crowd, with the captive Teuton in her wake, she bore
resolutely down upon them, her coral lips wreathed in smiles, and
graciously announced her intention to join their party.

The captive, innocent of offence, obediently placed chairs in their circle,

and gloomily discoursed upon the performance of the orchestra and the
shots at the Tir aux Pigeons in correct English and an accent of resigned
despair, Dorris, whenever the conversation threatened to become at all
interesting, breaking in upon it with some trivial personality.

Mrs. Dinwiddie, fortified by three cups of scented China tea, and

refreshed by several deep plunges into a box of superfine bonbons handed
her by the thin man, had been drawn from raptures over the kettle-drums
into some enlightening hints at the mysteries of American political
machinery in different States, of which she had experimental knowledge.

Everybody, especially the Prussian officer, was listening with interest;

no one spoke, except to draw out further information; even Ermengarde's
familiar demon, the Anarchist, who, to her disgust, was sitting at a table
near, drinking something through a long straw, was hanging upon Mrs.
Dinwiddie's words, when Dorris, after several baffled attempts by various
irrelevant remarks and inept questions, promptly snubbed by the genial
Yankee, to plunge headlong into the talk, suddenly shouted, "Mrs. Allonby,
I do want to know something very badly," with such energy and emphasis
that it was impossible not to give some faint response.

"Yes?" said Ermengarde, politely patient, though she had not forgotten
the fair girl's depreciation of her nose, which certainly had a tiny tilt at the
tip.

"I want badly to know," Dorris called across Mrs. Dinwiddie, "whether
you really are the wife of the Allonby?"

"That is so," echoed the American, her interest suddenly diverted. "Do
tell, Mrs. Allonby, are you?"

"How can I tell?" she objected. "I know very well which is my Allonby,
but how do I know which is yours?"
 "Land's sake!" cried Mrs. Dinwiddie, "Why, the famous Allonby, to be
sure—the author of 'Storm and Stress.' Are you a relative of that prominent
writer?"

What was the woman driving at? 'Storm and Stress'? Was it—could it be
the title of Arthur's latest effusion?

"Well," she replied slowly and thoughtfully, "I never like to be too
certain about anything—it is not good manners, so I was brought up to
think—but I—ah—I think—yes, I rather fancy that I am—connected with
him—the writing-man you are speaking of. As far as I know, he is some sort
of a connexion of mine—by marriage—only a connexion by marriage."

A curious snorting sound drew momentary and disgusted attention to

the Anarchist, who appeared to be choking badly through the long straws—
foreigners are so hopelessly ignorant of the niceties of table manners. Mrs.
Dinwiddie looked disappointed, even defrauded, until she caught
Ermengarde's eye, when her high-featured visage expanded into a genial
smile. But Dorris was all gurgles, triumphant, exasperating. "I knew it all
the time," she exclaimed scornfully. "I was sure you were not his wife, but
Lady Seaton and Mr. Welbourne would have it you were."

"Mr. Allonby's is a very remarkable work," Lady Seaton said. "I don't
know when I have been so thoroughly roused and invigorated by any book.
All thinking people must be grateful to the author of 'Storm and Stress.'"

"All thinking people are," the nephew added; with firm conviction.

"Very kind of you to say so," Ermengarde faintly murmured.

"They're just mad about it on our side," Mrs. Dinwiddie told her. "We
judge that Arthur Allonby has arrived with 'Storm and Stress' on our side."

"A not unusual way of crossing the Atlantic," Ermengarde hazarded, at

her wits' end, and imagining some wild mistake or confusion of names,
though not without some vague memory of the title mentioned, in
connexion with a postal packet from Arthur's publishers, the contents of
which she was always going, from a sense of duty, to investigate, and
always from innumerable causes omitting to. It would not run away; it
could be opened and read at any time, which is no time.

"Well, I reckon it didn't make him sick anyhow," Mrs. Dinwiddie

replied, with a grim smile, and Dorris stridently supposed that successful
writers usually went to America to read their works in public, and always
found that American cookery upset their internal economy more seriously
than crossing the Atlantic, an observation that appeared to afford joy to
everybody but the captive, whom it plunged into reverie of a melancholy
nature.

The Allonby! Not her own native charm, then, but the prestige of that
tiresome old Arthur's name was the cause of this new deference that had
come to Ermengarde of late. And he had never told her—a lump rose in her
throat—had left her to hear his good fortune casually from strangers. To be
sure, he could hardly have been expected to write to her: "I have just
become a celebrity," "My new novel is a marvel of genius," "I am one of the
most remarkable men of this age." Still, she was injured. A wife should not
be the last person to hear of a husband's promotion.

Going home in the train that afternoon, she found her neighbour
absorbed in a Tauchnitz volume, and sudden curiosity overpowering good
manners, she made out "Storm and Stress" on the top of the page. Dining
with friends in one of the big barrack hotels that evening, she saw the book
lying on little tables in the lounge, in the drawing-room, in her host's
sitting-room; and, her glance being detected upon it, heard that it was being
read all over Mentone, the Riviera, at Rome, at Florence, in the Engadine,
in Paris, wherever wandering Britons congregated; that it was being
discussed at suburban dinners and teas, and was found in the reading-rooms
of West End clubs; that it had been consigned to the fire by Bishops, and
preached about by Archdeacons; that it was talked of by people of culture,
and had even penetrated to our most ancient Universities, where
undergraduates, face downwards on the turf of sunny college gardens, had
been known to pass shining hours in its perusal. And he had never said a
word, and had grudged her five hats.

"How proud and happy you must be, dear Mrs. Allonby," said her
hostess. "And how does he take it? Is he surprised, or does he take it all for
granted? He must at least have known that he was going to make a hit."

"Do you know the sex of the sphinx?" she returned faintly, some hot
inexplicable tears misting her eyes. "I have always been sure the sphinx
must have been a man. Men are so subtle—especially mine."

"Somebody was saying that the Allonbys don't quite hit it off," her
friend told her husband afterwards. "And it's my opinion that she doesn't
know where he is. I wonder if he knows where she is?"

When the wife of the Allonby reached her shelter on the ridge that
night, she avoided meeting anybody, especially Agatha, who was equally
anxious to avoid meeting her, and for the same reason—that she had been
having a good cry. But Agatha knew perfectly well why she had had
recourse to those waters of comfort, while Ermengarde had not the remotest
idea.

Having felt the usual relief from the world-old remedy, brushed out her
hair, wrapped herself in a dressing-gown, and smelt M. Isidore's latest floral
offering, Mrs. Allonby lighted a tall candle and set to work to master the
contents of the publisher's parcel.

So that, when an orange and crimson sunrise came up gloriously out of

a peacock green sea, it showed a woman asleep in an easy-chair by a
guttering candle, her head on one arm on a table, and half-hidden in a cloud
of fair hair, with a volume labelled "Storm and Stress" on the floor at her
side.

Chapter XIV

At Turbia
 "What Roman strength Turbia showed
In ruin by the mountain road.
How like a gem, beneath, the city
Of little Monaco, basking, glowed."

"Little Monaco, basking," and glowing, too, as the poet says, sits on its
rock that runs out into the sea, in a world of its own, cut off, distinct, aloof
from the every-day world, like some enchanted princess, walled away from
reality in a faery land by rose and fire. The tiny city, that is also a
principality, with a tiny harbour and arsenal at the rock foot, and a castled
palace where it joins the mainland, is little more than a stone's throw—less
than a long-range rifle-shot—from Monte Carlo, but in atmosphere worlds
away. It has nothing in common with it, except the deep gorge stretching
behind both and backed by the craggy bastion of the Tête du Chien and the
dark rich sea, that breaks impartially upon the rocky base of each.

You may step into a tram-car at the Casino out of a crowd of painted
women, sporting men, Jews, semi-invalids, respectable tourists, and
disreputable sharpers from every capital in Europe, and from some in Africa
and America, and in five minutes find yourself in an impossible fairy region
of tranquil beauty—a town that is partly Italian and partly dream-magic,
scantily peopled by priests, nuns, lay-sisters in various garb and wide-
winged cap, orphanage children, Monagask soldiers, a few peasant folk
leaning from roof-gardens and loggias in narrow, silent streets, and a
sprinkling of humble bourgeois in the recesses of small dark shops, selling
humble necessaries that nobody seems to want. Sometimes a procession of
richly vestured priests, and acolytes with candles and swinging censers,
slowly traverses the empty ways. The silence is so deep you can almost hear
it. Every vista is closed by pines, through the deep-green boughs and ruddy
stems of which glows that glorious deep-blue sea under a sky of paler blue.

And what a road it is that leads to the still city, winding round and up
the steep rock, upon which she sits superb above the waters, a rock hung
with rich-hued tapestry of geranium, cactus, rose, and even our old friend
the homely blackberry, transformed by the wizardry of the winter sun into
splendour of crimson and golden arras. Very few steps past the dazzling
new cathedral, that rises snow white above the quiet streets, lead you by a
short turn into those strange gardens, that are really enchanted woods of
olive, palm, and pine, with glorious flowers for undergrowth, cresting the
sheer, sea-fronting steep of rock, down the face of which flowers, gorgeous
creepers and hanging plants overflow to the white-combed breakers
beneath. Thence the Armida gardens and glaringly vulgar Monte Carlo
Casino gleam idealized in frames of olive foliage and pine-boughs, and all
the beauty of the vast sweep of coast in its amphitheatre of circling
mountains. Nightingale song throbs quick and rich above the deep murmur
of surging wave and sighing pine-top, always providing you go at the right
time; bees hum and the ring of a sail running down a mast with the wash of
steam vessels and motors is faintly heard through the clear and sunny air.
You may go back from this fairy land to the racket and worldliness of
Monte Carlo through the strange vegetable diablerie and Arabian Nights'
charm of the Casino gardens and their surrounding and intermingling shops
and restaurants, and enjoy a still more striking contrast in the simple act of
taking a seat in what Germans call a go-chair—Fahr-stuhl.

This prosaic modern convenience is found in a small dark enclosure that

recalls a prison exercise yard, sunless, squalid. Take a seat in it, and wait
patiently until it occurs to the mountain gnome or brownie in charge to
work some spell of Nature magic, when the thing rises like the Arabian
carpet, and in two minutes all the blazing diamonds, Parisian costumes, and
blatant vulgarities centred round the glaring Casino sink and fade into a few
blurred scars on the terraced hill-face below. Meanwhile the occupant of the
cushioned go-chair winds and soars between cultivated vine and lemon
terraces, scattered at intervals, with here and there a homestead and here
and there a pergola and flower-garden, but mainly through woods of black-
coned, light-foliaged Mediterranean pine and huge gnarled olives, black-
fruited, of inconceivable antiquity, their grey columnar trunks writhen by
secular, perhaps millennial, storms, rising from rich red soil between pale
grey boulders—soars and winds up the vast sides of the mighty gorge, so
thick and dark with olive and pine that the sparsely scattered brightness of
vine and lemon and mimosa is lost among dense foliage; winds and soars
till the woods thin and orange, olive, and myrtles are left far below, the
gardens and vineyards grow poorer, the air keener, and the long, craggy
bluff ending in the Tête du Chien is scaled, and the go-chair stops finally
under the shadow of the stately Roman tower of Turbia, massive and
scarcely worn by time, but half ruined by the wanton violence of
eighteenth-century spoilers.

And ever as the crude luxury and meretricious ornament of the pleasure-
town sinks, the splendour of the sea-bounded prospect spreads and grows,
from the purple majesty of Bordighera headland, running down from its
Alpine background, to the promontory of Cap d'Ail beyond the craggy bluff
that shelters Monte Carlo; with many a sheltered town and towered villa
and headland stepping into foam-fringed bays, enclosed in the grand sweep
of mountain coast. Just within the curve of the deep gorge under Turbia the
Irish-looking column of Les Moulins stands up clear and gaunt far below,
on the level-topped rock fringed with wood; Monaco shows bright and
distinct on the broad plain of vivid blue sea, and, the centre of all, softened
and lessened by distance, the white marble domes of the Casino are traced
upon the liquid sapphire, vulgar no more, but lovely as if seen through

"Magic casements, opening on the foam

Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn."

Only nothing is forlorn in this land of light and colour; all is gay, friendly,
full of laughter and life.

Yet on a certain radiant forenoon the Fahr-stuhl, or rope-railway, lifted

through all this wild poetic beauty a healthy, full-blooded young
Englishman, bright-eyed and well-groomed, blind to all.

He had wandered, aimless and unseeing, through the contrasted charm

and picturesque strength of Monaco, strolled by the tiny harbour, up the
hill, through the weird suggestion of writhen bone-like cactus-trees and
richness of palm and aloe, caroub and rose and glowing flower-bed, past
Casino and hotel, still unseeing, his features, made for facile laughter and
easy geniality, lined by care and drawn into heavy frowns. From the
gardens of Monaco he had looked long and wistfully into the sea breaking
so softly at the rock foot, and once again by the harbour, with a sort of
irresolute longing that came to nothing. In the funicular he had read and re-
read letters, and made calculations with pencilled figures, and then with
weary impatience torn them up and scattered them where the line ran steep
and sheer above the gorge.

And when he stepped out upon the craggy mountain rim at Turbia, his
listless feet took him to the plaster hotel tracing its mean outlines upon the
sky, beside the majesty of the fine tower that marks Cæsar's subjection of
conquered Liguria—subject to so many masters since—to Rome.

Perhaps he only went that way because the other occupants of the go-
chair, the lady with blackened eyes and red curls pinned outside her hat-
brim, the gentleman with the hooked nose, shiny hair, and vast white
waistcoat, the grave family party scattering exclamations of Wunderschön,
Prachtvoll, Echt malerisch, on the sunny air, the mature maidens, absorbed
in Baedekers, and lordly, tweed-clad Britons, conversing in grunts, went
straight from the rich flesh-pots of Monte Carlo to the oil and wine of a
mean restaurant perched on the stately crag-wall, making the centre view
point for scores of miles round.

For when he found himself in the grounds looking down upon the vast
splendour of mountain and sea, he seemed to recollect himself, turned and
went through the village that lies modestly behind the Roman tower, over
cobbled paths, under Roman archways, through narrow streets, picturesque
with loggia and outside stair and dark-arched entrance, through wide,
pleasant spaces planted with trees and scattered with long blocks of
limestone, used as seats, and polished to marble by the friction of
generations; here meeting a slow-paced pack-mule, peasant-led; here a
woman, wearing a huge and heavy basket on her head, like a crown; and
here a group of soldiers, in baggy trousers of stained red and worn tunic of
soiled blue, with a general air of having slept, unwashed, for weeks in
uniform. And west of the ancient village the craggy crest of the Tête du
Chien, the fortress of to-day, and east and south sea and mountain, and
everywhere garden growth, foliage, and scented blossom, and the beauty of
children at play and young women and handsome youths at work.

For all this the traveller, looking round and searching in the rich
vocabulary of British youth for a term at once fit and comprehensive, found
the choice phrase, "Rotten hole, this."
 He stopped at a corner house abutting on a tree-shadowed square, with a
loggia ending in a sort of roof-garden; and, stumbling through a dark
archway, and falling over several garden and household tools on to a steep
stairway, drew further upon his vocabulary for the epithet, "Beastly rotten
hole." By this time the rumble tumble of his wild scramble up the stairs had
brought out a stalwart form, a few rays of light and words of welcome, from
the door of a room opening on the loggia.

"Here at last, young un? How many more of you? Row enough for ten."

It was a shaggy-bearded, brown-faced man, with deep-set eyes of

piercing lustre and a forehead like a cliff-wall, roughly dressed, but clean-
looking as an Englishman, though his name ended in ski; he had risen from
a table covered with papers of various script, newspaper cuttings and
journals in many tongues, and furnished with a type-writing machine. A
bed, a chest of drawers topped by a milk-jug in a slop-basin, a small, square
looking-glass, a clothes-press, two chairs, an easel, a bag of golf-clubs,
some walking-sticks and mineral-water bottles, several pairs of boots, a
wood basket and books of all sizes, falling out of packing-cases and strewn
over bed, chairs, floor and every available ledge, completed the furniture of
a fair-sized sunny room with an open hearth, on which some wood ashes
gave token of a former fire.

"Snug," the host said, indicating the surroundings with a sweep of the
hand, and tipping a pile of books off a chair.

"Topping," replied the guest, stepping gingerly through the archipelago

of books, and surveying the scene with ill-dissembled disgust.

"You seem jolly chippy this morning. What's the row?" continued the
host, handing a cigarette-box.

"Nothing much. Only stone-broke."

"What, again? I say, young un, you'll do this once too often."

"I jolly well have."

 "Oh, come along and have some lunch. Can you do with native fare? I
feed at the osteria over there, and hear all the gossip of the place. Olives,
cheese, omelettes, sardines, salad, coffee, vin du pays."

"Thanks. I bar the vinegar."

The enjoyment of this simple menu appeared to lighten the young man's
cheer considerably. His appetite, for a person who had been contemplating a
violent exit from a world of care at intervals all the forenoon, was not bad—
a circumstance not unobserved by his host. The table talk was impersonal
and even lighter than the fare. An anecdote spiced with dry humour drew
from the stony-broke a light-hearted, boyish laugh, the gay ring of which
attracted the attention and sympathetic smiles of some workmen and
peasants.

"He has a light heart, that one," they told each other in their patois, as if
the possession of a light heart were guarantee of all that is admirable in
man.

"Didn't you try ranching once?" the light-hearted one suddenly asked
the man of piercing gaze.

"I did. Once."

"Any money in ranching?"

"Best part of mine left in it."

"What has money in it? That's what I want to know?"

"What is that to you? You don't want money."

"Oh, don't I just! When I tell you I'm stone-broke."

"With you it's chronic. No, you don't want money. What you want is
sense."

"Anything else?"
 "Just a trifle of self-control, a smattering of principle, manliness—h'm
—honour!"

"Thanks, awfully. Have one of these?" His face crimsoned, darkened,

and set in a sullen ferocity. The elder man smiled behind his beard, glad to
have touched some harder stuff under the facile sweetness.

"Yes, young one, that's the right word," he repeated.

The boy got up, very pale, thanked him for the luncheon, and said that
he had to go. The man rose, too, put some silver on the table, and followed
him into the sunny street. There they walked silently side by side till they
reached the outskirts of the village, behind the Roman tower, where the turf
was broken by grey boulders and dotted with thorn and bramble-bushes,
and the air was sharp even in the brilliant sun.

"Very English," the elder man said, pointing to the turf; but the young
one was silent still, and his friend saw that he was fighting to keep back
tears.

"Just look at those soldiers," he added, when their road crossed another,
quite open, but labelled défense militaire, where some men in shabby
uniforms and dented képis were strolling. "Did they come out of a second-
hand clothes shop?"

"They don't walk; they shamble," the young man replied, roused to look
at them with a critical eye, and thinking of the smart, well-set-up fellows
under his own command with a home-sick pang.

"What should you give yours for that, eh?"

"It isn't so much your English, as your slang, that I wonder at, de
Konski. Where on earth did you get it?" the young man asked.

"In England probably. Yes, I have spent some time in England. Do you
know, Paul, I used to see a good deal of your mother at one time, and I have
never lost touch with her."
 "Ah, she didn't teach you slang," he reflected, wondering if the man had
been an old flame of his mother's. That he was for some good reason
passing under an assumed name he knew; that he was on intimate terms
with people of his acquaintance, and conversant with all his family affairs,
he was well aware, else he knew only that the man had befriended and
helped him as a friend of his cousin's.

"And I know more about her now than you do, perhaps, for I know what
is breaking her heart," the elder man added.

"Oh, hearts don't break so easily. But I know what will cut her up
awfully when she hears it," the youth said, jamming his hat sullenly over
his eyes. "But—well, my sisters will look after her. They'll make her happy.
As for me—well, it must be the ranks, or the Colonies—or the first
opportunity of being washed overboard—taken with cramp, swimming. No
other way. I did think of the sea—or a shot—this morning. But—she
mustn't think it's on purpose. She——"

"Come, come," remonstrated the elder man, laying a hand on his

shoulder. "Let's hear all about it. It's a rare thing that is past mending."

"No mending for me. Played out, and done for at last. What you—you
said—though you were a beast to say it—is true. Good for nothing—best
out of the way."

On this road, that was sheltered from the sharp breeze by the cliff, it was
hot. A glimpse of snow-peak up a gorge far inland was refreshing, and
yonder, on the left across a wooded ravine, came the blue glow of the sea
from the other side by unseen Villafranca behind the hill, whence warships
were steaming slowly.

The elder man sat down on a rock by the road, and observed all this
beauty of sunny sea and green mountain slope and far-vistaed gorge. The
other saw nothing. He stood with his face turned from his companion, who
observed a slight quiver in the square shoulder towards him; then the young
man suddenly flung himself face downwards on the grassy bank by his side,
while the bearded man lit a pipe and smoked thoughtfully for some seconds,
till the faint convulsive motion of the shoulders had stopped.
 "What is the net amount this time?" he asked then of the recumbent
figure, which turned slowly on its back and sat up, staring vacantly out into
the purple sea-spaces.

"It's the Spider," he said at last, "and, you see, it's been piled up
gradually—heaven knows how—I hadn't a notion. He's been
accommodating me from time to time with a few louis, and now he has
stuck on his beastly interest—made it run into four figures, and flung it at
me, yesterday. And the beast won't wait for my infernal luck to change, as
of course it must before long. Threatens to ask the chief to stop it out of my
pay."

"And what have you to meet this with?" asked the bearded man, taking
and reading the figures on the paper handed to him.

The young man drew a few francs from his pocket. "These, and a
longish score at the hotel, where they are beginning to dun me. Watch gone,
everything, but a pair of gold sleeve-links. Two horses at home, and a few
sticks in barracks, and several bills to pay. So the game's played out."

"It looks dark," the Pole acknowledged, "but there may be a gleam
somewhere."

"I've been so unlucky," the young man sighed—"everything against

me."

"You've had exactly the luck you deserve in this matter, and much better
than you deserve in others."

"Oh, hit a man when he is down! But I shouldn't have gone to the dogs
if she'd have stuck to me."

"What girl with any self-respect could stick to you in the company you
kept?"

"If you mean that poor woman—a good-hearted creature and more
sinned against than sinning—what harm was there in helping her out of a
tight place?"
 "A good many tight places, from the time you've been at it, I should say.
While your mother was pinching and denying herself, and your sisters were
deprived of all society and every pleasure natural to their age and station.
While your cousin was out in the world, working for daily bread——"

"Whose fault but her own? My mother's house always was and is open
to her. My mother has begged and implored her to stay; it is the greatest
grief to her to lose her."

"Your cousin is not the kind of woman to add to the burdens of those
dear to her. Do you know that she supplies your sisters with typewriting
work?"

"My sisters? Typewriting? What on earth for?"

"To help keep the house over your mother's head. People don't go on
selling stock without lessening their income."

"Selling stock?"

"How do you suppose widows raise money without selling stock, or

land, or whatever they happen to possess?"

"But I thought—I thought—her money was safely tied up."

"There are such things as releases—when the beneficiaries are of age

——"

"Then that is what Agatha meant. She was bound not to let it out; she
only hinted. I wish I had blown my brains out this morning."

"You'd never have felt the loss."

"I'm not the first man driven to the dogs by a woman's falseness, and I
shan't be the last. They're all alike—cold, and hard, and unforgiving,
making no allowance for a man's temptations, which they can't understand.
Heaven defend us all from good women, de Konski."
 "The good woman to whom I suppose you allude, your cousin, has been
a great blessing to me."

"Oh, has she? And how?"

"In many ways. Partly by the stimulus of a brave and beautiful nature,
purified by suffering, and unselfish to the core. In a more material sense, as
a most capable and useful and discreet secretary."

"Secretary? Private secretary? To you—to a man?"

"Certainly. The calling is recognized and honourable. There are many

more arduous and less pleasant ways of earning a competence—for women.
Still, I shall be glad for her sake when the day comes, as it surely will, for
me to lose my valuable secretary by a suitable marriage, though I can't help
being a little grateful to you for making it necessary for her to work."

"I? When I've been ready to marry her, and would have asked her any
time this two years, but for her everlasting snubbing and coldness?"

"Oh, I thought you said she was false."

"When I implored her not to leave my mother——"

"Whose bread you were taking to help disreputable females out of tight
places."

"By Heaven, de Konski, you hit hard! Of course I knew that my cousin
was in some way working for pay, but somehow I didn't realize—— Oh,
Lord, a private secretary! Mixed up in political intrigues! A paid secretary!"

"Who is to defend good women from dissipated boys? Yes, that sweet
and noble lady's fate is hard indeed. And the boy's mother! If good women
are hard, some of them have a pretty hard time of it."

"Well, they'll soon be shut of me, and the sooner the better. As for that
other poor woman, she knows how to stand by a fellow when he's knocked
out of time. She—she—well, never mind about her——"
 "Is she going to help you out of a tight place?"

"She would. She'd raise half for six months and the whole for three, at
five per cent."

"Does she think you would accept?"

"Do you?" he returned fiercely, giving de Konski's searching look

steadily back. "Am I a cur?"

The bearded face softened in a smile that was almost tender. "Poor
chap!" he said, laying a hand on his shoulder, and looking with unseeing
eyes across the gorge and away over the sea to the faint mountain chain
rising dim and dreamlike on the horizon.

"I was in a tight place once," said the Anarchist presently. "I had been
playing the fool rather more than most young asses do. So I went straight to
my chief and made a clean breast of it——"

"You were a soldier? I always thought so."

"And he put me on honour never to touch a card again—and helped and

—saved me."

"Mine breaks a chap," the boy said wearily. "Chauffeurs get good pay,
they say. I might be that, mightn't I?"

"What you have to do now is to raise this money, cut the whole thing,
before it comes to your chief's ears, and go straight. He won't stand this
kind of thing. I've heard him say it's incurable. But nothing is—except
cruelty, perhaps. Yes; this money must be raised at once."

"But how?" the boy asked, looking up with wondering eyes and a gleam
of incredulous hope.

De Konski was silent, smoking steadily with long, even puffs, and
staring with close-drawn brows at the sea, over which the black hulls of
battle-ships were now ranged in lines and squadrons half-hidden by the
smoke of their guns, beginning to boom in the opening thunders of sham
fight.

"But how?" the lad repeated, impatiently scanning the thoughtful face,
that seemed to seek solution of the problem from those smoke-hidden
monsters upon the velvety blue.

The firing was too fierce and incessant for any speech to be audible for
some seconds; then it suddenly stopped, and de Konski turned and was
about to reply, when his attention was arrested by the sound of a high treble
voice coming round the bend of the rock-strewn bank on which they were
sitting, screened from the sight of those approaching from Turbia. Many
had come thence and passed in the last half-hour on their way to see the
review off Villafranca.

"It's notorious," the high voice proclaimed. "She tried to pass as the wife
of the Allonby, the 'Storm and Stress' man, and took everybody in till I
asked her straight out one day, and caught her on the hop. She was so taken
aback that she let out she was not his wife at all—only a connexion by
marriage. And I don't believe she's even that, or Mrs. Allonby at all, or Mrs.
Anybody. Miss Nobody-in-particular, I should say. They ought to be more
careful who they take in at these small hotels. Fast? Rather. A regular
Monty harpy; lives on the tables, they say. That poor young Isidore is
infatuated—absolutely. It's the talk of the hotel. She scarcely lets him out of
her sight. One is always stumbling upon the pair—looking unutterable
things at each other. Quite unpleasant for us. Pretty? That sort always are.
But as for manners, and good breeding—well, anything goes down with
foreigners and silly old owls like Welbourne. You know she has broken off
Isidore's engagement."

The fair being who originated these remarks, having her face slightly
turned to her companion, had not observed the presence of the two men
screened by the bend of the bank on which they sat. Nor would the younger
man have given a thought to these two ladies, but for the effect they
produced upon his companion, who started and listened with blazing eyes
and tense interest to every word that rang out on the still air. Not content
with hearing what was said in passing, he rose, as if drawn by the voice,
and followed the quick English steps, quickly outpacing them. Then,
planting himself in front of the two ladies and raising his broad felt hat, he
brought them to a standstill.

"I have heard," he said, addressing the speaker in slow, distinct French,
"every word in the clear and accurate voice of Madame, and venture to
suggest that it is a perilous thing to speak English in this country, unless you
wish to be heard, English being now so generally understood, even when
not spoken."

"Much obliged," returned Dorris sharply, meaning to pass on; "but it's
nothing to me whether people hear what I say or not."

"Pardon me," he replied, barring her progress. "It may be much to you;
it is a serious matter in this country to speak slander in public; it may have
very grave consequences for you."

"Nonsense; I don't understand French—je ne comprends pas," she

muttered hastily and brokenly, looking round as if for protection. Then,
perceiving the younger man, "Mr. Paul," she cried piteously, "Mr. Paul."

"That is my name," he admitted, rising and raising his hat, but not
approaching.

"Mr. Paul fully agrees with me upon the danger of speaking slanderous
things in public," said the Pole coolly, in English.

"It's no slander," she protested; "let me go. We were going to see the
review."

"Let us pass on; you have no right to stop people you don't know,"
shouted the other lady in a shaky voice.

"I happen to know the lady with whose name you were taking such
unwarrantable liberties," continued the Pole, keeping his blazing eyes fixed
on poor Dorris's terrified face. "She is incapable of any such conduct as you
attribute to her. Once more let me warn you that you are in a country in
which strange things happen; in which walls have eyes and trees ears; in
which people sometimes take the law into their own hands with impunity."
 "Mr. Paul," cried Dorris once more, with supplicating hands, "oh, Mr.
Paul!"

"Awfully sorry," he replied, "but it's true. You have to jolly well mind
what you say about people in this country."

"Good gracious! In what country?" cried the distressed damsel. "I

thought we were—— Oh, where on earth are we, Emily?"

"Oh, I don't know, dear; let us go home. Never mind the review—never
mind anything—only let us go home."

"You are practically, though not politically, in Italy, the land of hired
avengers. But I will detain you no longer, ladies. I have sufficiently warned
you of the peril in which slander places people," said the Pole, politely
stepping aside with the ceremonious bow seldom seen this side the
Channel. Then he resumed his seat on the rock, while Dorris and her friend,
frightened out of their wits, fled without any ceremony at all at the top of
their speed along the white road till a bend hid them from sight.

"I say, de Konski, you did give that girl beans. So you know Mrs.
Allonby?" asked the young man when they were gone. "Then you must
know the Johnnie they are making such a row about—the 'Storm and Stress'
chap—eh?"

"Yes," the Pole replied absently, his fury not yet appeased. "I know them
both—at least, I used to—especially him—rather well."

"Well! You did land that poor girl a nasty one. And, I say, you can speak
English. You must have English blood in you somehow."

"Ah, yes! My—mother was English."

"Well, you never seemed like a foreigner to me. That's why I took to
you. Why, you must have served under our colours!"

"Why not? But about this fix of yours?"