It would be hard for Balzac to sympathize greatly with Lucien. He is too much an embodiment of the century, seeming to start out well, endowed with that lauded “genius” and with a “beauté surhumaine” and then turning shallow and self-seeking, like France after 1815, which, for Balzac (and for Stendhal and Flaubert, too), had been converted into a nation of calculating machines. Les illusions is a critique of the age, of most of its ideas and motives, though, as if to compensate, the author gives us a swift, approving sketch of a group of poor young provincials in Paris that he calls the Cénacle—all selfless men of principle, including a European federalist. And with the figure of David Séchard, the printer who becomes Lucien’s brother-in-law, he is directing the reader’s attention to where the true genius of the century may lie: David is an inventor. His fatal, innocent error is to suppose that Lucien’s lofty gift is superior to his own modest one: as his inferior, he feels himself bound to “stake” Lucien to a career in the capital, at the cost of doing without in his own domestic life, and, ultimately, of signing away his future (the patent), losing his once-thriving printing business, and being imprisoned for debt. Lucien, in fact, is his evil genius; surely the play on words was in Balzac’s mind and was meant to come into the reader’s.
Les illusions perdues, without question, is a novel ruled by ideas, just as its chief characters are. Even David Séchard, it is said, “will be the Jacquard of the paper industry”—Jacquard, the inventor of the improved loom, revolutionized the textile industry, and in this self-inflating Balzacian world, an invention, like a literary work, cannot simply make a contribution; it must be revolutionary and upset the prevailing order of things. Balzac is the great spokesman for the idea-driven slaves of concepts, yet (unlike Victor Hugo) he rarely expresses himself in conceptual terms. That is left to his men of letters, who in dialogue—or, more often, monologue—have the habit of writing critical essays aloud, like Sorbonne lecturers addressing an amphitheatre, though their auditory here consists only of Lucien. Along with the astonished Lucien, we learn, for example, the distinction between la littérature idéée and la littérature imagée, which in practical language is the difference between Voltaire and Walter Scott. Balzac himself (as we know from other sources) had toyed with such a distinction, and this must mean that he regarded it at least half-seriously. But when in Les illusions we hear it expounded by a literary journalist and master charlatan, the effect is one of parody. In other words, Balzac, in assigning a fond idea of his own to a fictional character who is decidedly not himself, has marked a distance separating him from his character. His detachment is, if anything, underlined: that nice distinction, his brain child, was now an orphan, joining all the other ideas à la mode that were floating about the literary world, the flotsam of raw data that will be blended into the story. “Littérature idée, littérature imagée, that’s how they talked, the reviewers. Remember?”
When he does speak in his own voice, Balzac usually limits himself to a kind of factual instructiveness that widens the picture but certainly does not ennoble it. Indeed, the aim appears to be precisely the contrary: to make what is already prose more prosaic by letting the reader see the processes at work behind the fa?ade. A social mechanism or group of mechanisms—say the distribution of first-night theatre tickets to influential persons—is explained, just as in a guided visit to an industrial plant. In this volume the production and reception of literary works, including stage plays, is the theme, and everything is seen in terms of a giant economic process, in which reviewers, publishers, booksellers, actresses, authors are as much a part of the machinery as the paper mill or printing press. We learn how advertising revolutionized the book trade, how the affiches in shop windows and boulevard displays, which were the earliest examples of book advertising, were replaced by ads in newspapers and how this did away with the immense power of critics’ notices and the dependence of publishers on journalists. And we learn a great deal, naturally, about the manufacture of paper and the history of printing processes, as well as many other interesting things, such as the difference between country attorneys and Parisian attorneys and how that affects the jailing of a man for debt.