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Rating: Life is difficult; for everyone, without exception, in any situation, at any age. I remember the inner turbulence of adolescence: the blooming of bright expectations, the childish feeling of being different, the laughable faith in others, in art, in the years to come. All swept away in a flash. One of the most violent things that happened to me in life was the realization of my inadequacy, my superfluity; mine and the world's. Illusions withered one after another, giving way to a deep-rooted, and often grotesque, sense of rebellion mixed with a suspicious fatalism and an even more suspicious apparent calm. More and more, I cannot disagree with Tolstoy when he stated: “To live with honor, one must strive, disturb oneself, fight, make mistakes, start over and throw everything away, and once again start over and fight and lose eternally”.
In the gigantic cathedral of the “Human Comedy”, the central and vital pillar holding up the entire structure is represented, according to Balzac himself, by “Lost Illusions”. It is here that the author, at the height of his artistic maturity, manages to merge the revival of the sparkle of youthful hopes with the relentless ferocity of the world that chews up and spits out every poetic impulse. It is here that the play of echoes and references (with characters “migrating” from one novel to another, for example) which permeates the entire “Human Comedy” finds its most harmonious completeness. It is also here, narrating the events of Lucien de Rubempré, a young man full of hope seeking his fortune in the lush Paris, that Balzac comes to terms with himself, with his aspirations, with his failures.
Although the novel itself, with the typical rise and fall of the nineteenth-century hero and with the description of the “customs and habits” of metropolis and province, is among the works that most champion the cause of a proto-Realist Balzac, we must not forget that “Lost Illusions” should be set within the mammoth framework of the “Human Comedy”; it is “only” another chapter, albeit, perhaps, the most captivating.
I strongly reject this thesis; Balzac certainly influenced Realism, but this label does not truly fit him (just as later it would not fit Flaubert). Like all truly great artists, it is impossible to attach a label to him without falling into superficiality. In his work, symbolic and mystical references are not lacking (“Seraphita” and “The Wild Ass's Skin” for example) and even in the “The Unknown Masterpiece” he seems to foreshadow Abstract art with eighty years' advance.
It is not surprising, therefore, that one of Balzac's greatest admirers was Baudelaire, who, in some of his lyrics, seems to have inherited from him the sordid and muddy symbol, the filthy and amoral characters of a Paris seen as a circle of hell. The same immersion by Proust in the “In Search of Lost Time” is a close relative, albeit stylistically very different, of the “Human Comedy”; almost a “personal comedy” of its own. As can be seen, authors far beyond the “simple” Realism.
Regarding Balzac's working method, Baudelaire wrote that “He tended to overload his manuscripts and drafts with fantastic and disorderly corrections. A novel then underwent a series of births, in which not only the unity of the sentence, but also that of the work, was dispersed”, considering this as his only flaw. However, we must not forget that Balzac's very existence was disorderly, bewildered, and novelistic, and perhaps, in the end, he did nothing but write his life and live his novels.
“Lost Illusions” should be experienced as a splendid stage of the Balzacian journey and, to fully understand the fate of Lucien, we must pair it with reading its sequel “Scenes from a Courtesan's Life”, with which it forms a diptych of rare expressive power.
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