Finished: Lost Illusions (de Balzac). A long book, with some lovely, but depressing, writing, some deep thoughts, and some heartbreaking characters! I do enjoy the depth that de Balzac goes into...and the ideas he forces you to analyze and think about as you read his story. I'm not always along for that ride...much preferring to just read a nice story...but he doesn't get too heavy-handed. He most definitely considers journalists beings who prostitute themselves to the highest bidder for a story, true or not. Anyway....Lost Illusions is the story of two souls, Lucien Chardon and David Sechard, brothers in passion, whimsy, and naivety; brothers-in-law once David marries Lucien's sister, Eve.

Lucien is a gorgeous young poet who has been spoiled and raised above his worthiness in character and means by his sister and his mother. They have done him no service by working their fingers to the bone to give him everything he needs to try and make it in society. Never learning to work hard at anything on his own but being good looking and poetically talented, once Lucien leaves his provincial town for the big city of Paris, he's totally unprepared for the hardships to come. His illusions of a grand, rich life of a successful writer in Paris, with money to spare to send home to his family, are not just lost, but battered, trampled upon, and completely and destructively orchestrated by friends and foes. He ends up back in his provincial town with his tail between his legs...but not before forging his beloved brother-in-law's name to three huge bank notes.

David is a humble, good, educated dreamer. He takes over his father's printing shop, but has no desire to run that business. Instead he wants to focus all his time and energy on developing a new and cheaper kind of paper. He think this will benefit all of France and make him rich and able to provide for his family, including Lucien. He wears pie-in-the-sky blinders the entire story and is completely taken advantage of, and abused by his competitors, his own lawyer, and most especially his own father. His father is one of the most heartless, horrible characters I've ever come across. With no paternal love, he cares only for his money, which is in the hundreds of thousands. He shares not a penny of that with his own son, his wife and baby boy, even grossly overcharging him to buy the family printing shop. Old Sechard, as he's called, is even willing to let David go to prison when Lucien's ill-fated, forged bank notes come due and no one can pay them. David always maintains his love and respect for his father and Lucien, though. He and Eve love each other through thick and thin. Eventually he is freed from jail when he agrees to sell his new paper-making secret to his evil competitor.

In the end, after every one's illusions of a happy life have been shattered, Lucien sells himself to be the secretary of an underhanded character to raise the money needed to free David. Unbeknownst to Lucien, David has already been freed because he sold his new paper method. And, in the very end, Old Sechard dies and leaves David and Eve several hundred thousand francs anyway.

Here are a few snippets of the writing. When David and Lucien meet up again after being college mates:

The ties of this college friendship thus renewed were soon drawn closer by the similarity of their fate and the difference of their natures. Both of them, trained by vicissitudes, possessed that superior intelligence which puts a man on the level of all heights, and yet they were each flung by fate to the lower depths of society. This injustice in their destiny was a powerful bond. Moreover they had both attained to the poetic spirit...

David explaining to Eve that he knows her brother well:

I know him; his is a nature that loves the harvests without the toil. The duties of society will take up his time, and time is the capital of men who have no fortune but their intellect. He loves to shine; the world will excite desires which he will find it hard to satisfy; he will spend money, and earn none....

And, it doesn't help things that all manner of women swoon at his feet:

Every one who came about him assisted in heightening the imaginary pedestal on which he placed himself. Encouraged in his proud beliefs by all, by the jealousy of enemies as much as by the flattery of friends, he walked in an atmosphere of mirage.

As Lucien prepares to follow his older mistress, who has mislead him into thinking she can introduce him into society, to Paris, he is breaking the hearts of his sister and mother...yet they, along with David, scrape together their last francs to send him away in fashion:

When the two friends returned they found Eve and her mother on their knees praying. Though they knew how many hopes this departure might realize, they could only feel at such a moment what they lost in this farewell; happiness to come was dearly paid for by an absence which would break into their lives and fill their minds with perpetual anxiety about Lucien.

   "If you ever forget this scene," said David in Lucien's ear, "you will be the most unworthy of men."

Lucien's illusions about being an "honest" journalist are broken by his fast-talking Parisian "friend", Lousteau, who plans to scam a rich man out of some of his money to support a newspaper:

   "Where to you come from, my lad? That druggist isn't a man, he is only a purse."
   "But your own conscience?"
   "Conscience, my dear fellow, is a stick we take to beat our neighbor with; nobody ever uses it on himself. What the devil are you quarreling with? Chance has done for you in one day a miracle you might have waited years for; and here you are finding fault with its methods!"

After Lucien comes back home to the provincial town, having been responsible for putting David in prison because of the bad bank notes, he sees that he is no longer the light of his sister's eye...her husband is:

   Nevertheless, after the first flow of tenderness had passed, shadows of the truth reappeared. Lucien soon perceived in Eve a difference between her old affection and that she now bore him; David was deeply honored, while Lucien was loved in spite of all. Esteem, the necessary basis of all true sentiments, and the solid material which gives them the security by which they live, was now felt to be wanting between the mother and son, the sister and brother. Lucien felt himself deprived of the perfect confidence they would have had in him but for his lapse in honor. Lucien was pitied; but as to being the glory, the honor of the family, the hero of the hearth, all such fine hopes were gone without recall. 

I do like Honore de Balzac's writing, and I'm sure he'll be on my top author's list when I ever comprise it. I'd like to read at least one more of his books to make sure though. :-)