Lost Illusions

Ambitious poet Lucien Chardon leaves his provincial home for Paris, seeking fame and fortune in the literary world. However, he soon becomes entangled in the city's cutthroat society, where corruption, vanity, and greed reign supreme. Seduced by luxury and manipulated by influential figures, Lucien compromises his ideals, trading integrity for fleeting success. Balzac's novel exposes the harsh realities of ambition, the commodification of art, and the moral costs of social climbing. With sharp social critique and vivid characters, Lost Illusions paints a timeless portrait of human frailty and the relentless pursuit of power.

1100189419
Lost Illusions

Ambitious poet Lucien Chardon leaves his provincial home for Paris, seeking fame and fortune in the literary world. However, he soon becomes entangled in the city's cutthroat society, where corruption, vanity, and greed reign supreme. Seduced by luxury and manipulated by influential figures, Lucien compromises his ideals, trading integrity for fleeting success. Balzac's novel exposes the harsh realities of ambition, the commodification of art, and the moral costs of social climbing. With sharp social critique and vivid characters, Lost Illusions paints a timeless portrait of human frailty and the relentless pursuit of power.

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Lost Illusions

Lost Illusions

by Honore de Balzac

Narrated by Eloise Fairfax

Unabridged — 23 hours, 51 minutes

Lost Illusions

Lost Illusions

by Honore de Balzac

Narrated by Eloise Fairfax

Unabridged — 23 hours, 51 minutes

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Overview

Ambitious poet Lucien Chardon leaves his provincial home for Paris, seeking fame and fortune in the literary world. However, he soon becomes entangled in the city's cutthroat society, where corruption, vanity, and greed reign supreme. Seduced by luxury and manipulated by influential figures, Lucien compromises his ideals, trading integrity for fleeting success. Balzac's novel exposes the harsh realities of ambition, the commodification of art, and the moral costs of social climbing. With sharp social critique and vivid characters, Lost Illusions paints a timeless portrait of human frailty and the relentless pursuit of power.


Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"Whether or not Lost Illusions counts as the greatest novel ever written, as the literary scholar Franco Moretti claims, it’s a pretty magnificent one. You can read it for its combination of social scope and psychological insight, and for its cinematically vivid portraits of faces . . . and many fine phrases. . . . And then you can read Lost Illusions, as Marx read Balzac, for its account of the double-edged nature of early capitalism."—Benjamin Kunkel, Salon

"Reading Balzac, one can experience that sauntering pace and steady gaze that our forebears gave to their surroundings, speculations, and soul-searching. It's as with reading Hugo and Dumas, Thackeray and Dickens, George Eliot and Flaubert."—Pop Matters

"Among the pleasures of the novel is how neatly it is tied into the times, from some of the events of the times to, especially, the worlds of literature and theater. Balzac bases several of his characters on real figures, too, and MacKenzie's helpful endnotes succinctly place the who and what."—The Complete Review

"Between Lost Illusions and Lost Souls, in two hefty, handsome paperbacks—with scholarly trimmings to help, not impede a reader—we now have both of the novels (technically all seven novels in a trilogy followed by a tetralogy… published between 1837 and 1847 in not entirely chronological order… because Balzac?) tracing the fate of Lucien de Rubempre, in print as though they belong together, on your to-be-read lists and your shelves. They are a remarkable itinerary."—LitHub

"Now we are treated to a handsomely produced, new annotated version by Raymond N. MacKenzie, a prolific translator of 19th century French Literature who knows Balzac well, as his instructive introduction amply shows. "—Metamorphoses

Product Details

BN ID: 2940194103782
Publisher: Interactive Media
Publication date: 03/26/2025
Edition description: Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

At the time when this story opens, the Stanhope press and the ink-distributing roller had not yet come into use in small provincial printing- houses; and, notwithstanding its paper industry, that linked Angouleme so closely with Paris printing, wooden presses-of the kind to which the figure of speech "to make the press groan" was literally applicable-were still in use in that town. Old-fashioned printing-houses were still using leather ink-balls, with which the printers used to ink the type by hand. The movable tables for the formes of type, set ready for the sheets of paper to be applied, were still made of stone and justly called marbles. The rapid spread of machine presses has swept away all this obsolete gear to which, for all its imperfections, we owe the beautiful books printed by Elzevir, Plantin, Aldus Didot, and the rest; so that some description is necessary of the old tools to which Jerome-Nicolas Sechard was almost superstitiously attached, for they play a part in this great story of small things.
Sechard had been a journeyman printer, a "bear", according to compositor's slang. The movement to and fro, like that of a bear in a cage, of the printers coming and going from the ink-table to the press, from the press to the table, no doubt suggested the name. In revenge, the "bears" used to call the compositors "monkeys keys", because of those gentlemen's constant employment in picking out letters from the hundred and fifty-two compartments of the type cases. In the disastrous year of 1793 Sechard, who was about fifty at the time and a married man, was passed over in the great conscription which swept the bulk of the workmen of Franceinto the army. The old pressman was the only hand left in the printing-house when the master (otherwise known as "the boss") died, leaving a widow but no children, The business seemed on the point of closing down altogether. The single-handed bear could not transform himself into a monkey, for, in his capacity as pressman, he had never learned to read or write. But, regardless of his incapacities, a Representative of the People who was in a hurry to spread the good tidings of the Decrees of the Convention issued a master-printer's licence to Sechard and requistioned the press. Citizen Sechard accepted this dangerous patent, compensated his master's widow by giving her his wife's savings, and bought up the press at half its value. But that was only the beginning; he was faced with the problem of printing, quickly and without mistakes, the Decrees of the Republic. In this dilemma, Jerome-Nicolas Sechard had the good luck to meet a nobleman from Marseilles who did not want to emigrate and lose his estate, nor, on the other hand, to be discovered and lose his head, and who in consequence had no alternative but to earn a living in in some kind of manual work. M. le Comte de Maucombe accordingly donned the jacket of a provicincial prtiner and set up read, and corrected, single-handed, he decrees that forbade citizens to harbour nobles, on pain of death. The "ber:, now "the boss", printed them off and had them posted up, so that both of them were safe and sound. By 1795 the mad fit of the Terror was over, and Nicolas Secahrd had to look for another jack-of-all trades for the job of compositor, proofreader, and foreman; and an Abbe (he became a bishop after the Restoration),who refused to take the Oath, succeeded M. Le Comte de Maucombe until the day when the First consul restored the Catholic religion. The Count and the Bishop met later when both were sitting on the same bench in the House of Peers.
Jerome-Nicolas Sechard could read no better in 1802 than he could in 1793; but by allowing a god margin for "materials" in his estimates he was able to pay a foreman. Their onetime easy-going mate had become a terror to his monkeys and bears. For avarice beings where poverty ends. From the day the printer saw the possibility of making a fortune sulfites brought out in him a covetous, suspicious, keen-eyed practical aptitude for business. His methods disdained theory. He had learned by experience to estimate at a glance the cost per page of per sheet, in every kind of type. He used to prove to his illiterate customers that big letters cost more to move than small; or if they wanted small type, that small letters were more difficult to handle. Compositing was the process in printing about which he knew nothing, and he was so frightened of cheating himself over that item that he always piled on the price. If his compositors were paid by the hour, he never took his eyes off them. If he knew that a manufacturer was in difficulties, he would buy up his paper stocks cheap and store them. He owned, besides, by this time, the premises in which the printing office had been housed from time immemorial.

Copyright© 2001 by Honoré de Balzac

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