Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics)
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Authors: Honore de Balzac
PENGUIN
CLASSICS
LOST ILLUSIONS
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
was born at Tours in 1799, the son of a civil servant. He spent nearly six years as a boarder in a Vendôme school, then went to live in Paris, working as a lawyer’s clerk then as a hack-writer. Between 1820 and 1824 he wrote a number of novels under various pseudonyms, many of them in collaboration, after which he unsuccessfully tried his luck at publishing, printing and type-founding. At the age of thirty, heavily in debt, he returned to literature with a dedicated fury and wrote the first novel to appear under his own name,
The Chouans.
During the next twenty years he wrote about ninety novels and shorter stories, among them many masterpieces, to which he gave the comprehensive title
The Human Comedy.
As Balzac himself put it: ‘What he [Napoleon] was unable to finish with the sword, I shall accomplish with the pen.’ He died in 1850, a few months after his marriage to Evelina Hanska, the Polish countess with whom he had maintained amorous relations for eighteen years.
HERBERT J. HUNT
was educated at Lichfield Cathedral Choir School, the Lichfield Grammar School and Magdalen College, Oxford. He was a Tutor and Fellow at St Edmund Hall from 1927 to 1944, then until 1966 he was Professor of French Literature and Language at London University and from 1966 to 1970 was Senior Fellow of Warwick University. He published books on literature and thought in nineteenth-century France; he was also the author of a biography of Balzac, and a comprehensive study of Balzac’s writings:
Balzac’s ‘Comédie Humaine’
(1959, paperback 1964). His translation of Balzac’s
Cousin Pons
appeared in the Penguin Classics in 1968. He died in 1973.
OLIVIA M
c
CANNON
studied languages at the Queen’s College, Oxford. She has been based in Paris since 1998, working as a writer and translator. She has translated French plays for the Royal Court Theatre, and is currently working on a new edition of Balzac’s
Old Goriot
for Penguin Classics.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Translated and introduced by
HERBERT J. HUNT
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Lost Illusions
originally published in three parts 1837–43
This translation published 1971
Reprinted with a new Chronology and Further Reading 2004
22
Translation and Introduction copyright © Herbert J. Hunt, 1971
Chronology and Further Reading copyright © Olivia McCannon, 2004
All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-193602-4
P
ART
III: AN INVENTOR’S TRIBULATIONS
10 A free lecture on dishonoured bills for those unable to meet them
32 A history lecture for the ambitious – by a disciple of Machiavelli
Introduction
H
ONORÉ DE
B
ALZAC
(born at Tours, 1799, died in Paris, 1850) was just past the middle of his writing career when he gave
Lost Illusions
to the world
(The Two Poets,
1837,
A Great Man in Embryo,
1839,
An Inventor’s Tribulations,
1843). After ten uneasy years (1819–1829) of initial efforts, interrupted between 1826 and 1828 by an abortive attempt to make his fortune as publisher, printer and type-founder, he had achieved his first relative success by producing the novel since known as
The Chouans
(1829), the first one he signed with his own name. By about 1830 he had already conceived the idea of presenting the social and moral history of his own times in a complex series of novels and short stories: he also intended it to be an interpretation of life and society as he saw it, and it was therefore backed by a certain number of ‘philosophical novels’, the most conspicuous of these being
The Skin
(1831),
Louis Lambert
(1832–1835) and
Seraphita
(1834–1835). He made a first collection of his works between 1834 and 1837, dividing them into three categories:
Studies of Manners, Philosophical Studies
and
Analytical Studies.
The
Studies of Manners
were sub-divided into various kinds of ‘Scenes’ – of Private, Provincial, Parisian, Political, Military and Country Life. But of course, as he went on writing, new novels had to be inserted into these compartments. After finding a general title for them in 1840
(The Human Comedy)
he collected them again between 1842 and 1846. He continued to write with feverish energy until as late as 1847, and by 1850, when he died, the time was ripe for yet another collection; hence the appearance, between 1869 and 1876, of the so-called ‘Definitive Edition’.