Lost Souls

by Honoré de Balzac, Raymond N. MacKenzie (Translator)

The first new translation of Balzac’s 1847 novel Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes in half a century, fully annotated and with an extensive introduction

In Lost Souls , Honoré de Balzac’s brilliant evocation of nineteenth-century Paris, we enter a world of glittering wealth and grinding poverty, teeming with strivers, poseurs, and pleasure seekers along with those who struggle merely to survive. Between the heights of Parisian society and the criminal world lurking underneath, fate is about to catch up with Lucien de Rubempré, last seen in Lost Illusions , as his literary aspirations, his love for the courtesan Esther van Gobseck, and his scheme to marry the wealthy Clotilde become entangled in the cunning and ultimately disastrous ambitions of the Abbé Herrera, a villain for the ages. 

An extraordinary volume in Balzac’s vast Human Comedy (in which he endeavored to capture all of society), Lost Souls appears here in its first new English translation in half a century. Keenly attuned to the acerbic charm and subtleties of Balzac’s prose, this edition also includes an introduction presenting thorough biographical, literary, and historical context, as well as extensive notes throughout the text—an invaluable resource for today’s readers as they navigate Balzac’s copious allusions to classical and contemporaneous politics and literature.

Genres: Classics

536 pages, Paperback

Published March 9, 2021

About the author

French writer Honoré de Balzac (born Honoré Balzac), a founder of the realist school of fiction, portrayed the panorama of society in a body of works, known collectively as La comédie humaine .

Honoré de Balzac authored 19th-century novels and plays. After the fall of Napoléon in 1815, his magnum opus, a sequence of almost a hundred novels and plays, entitled, presents life in the years.

Due to keen observation of fine detail and unfiltered representation, European literature regards Balzac. He features renowned multifaceted, even complex, morally ambiguous, full lesser characters. Character well imbues inanimate objects; the city of Paris, a backdrop, takes on many qualities. He influenced many famous authors, including the novelists Marcel Proust, Émile Zola, Charles John Huffam Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Henry James, and Jack Kerouac as well as important philosophers, such as Friedrich Engels. Many works of Balzac, made into films, continue to inspire.

An enthusiastic reader and independent thinker as a child, Balzac adapted with trouble to the teaching style of his grammar. His willful nature caused trouble throughout his life and frustrated his ambitions to succeed in the world of business. Balzac finished, and people then apprenticed him as a legal clerk, but after wearying of banal routine, he turned his back on law. He attempted a publisher, printer, businessman, critic, and politician before and during his career. He failed in these efforts From his own experience, he reflects life difficulties and includes scenes.

Possibly due to his intense schedule and from health problems, Balzac suffered throughout his life. Financial and personal drama often strained his relationship with his family, and he lost more than one friend over critical reviews. In 1850, he married Ewelina Hańska, his longtime paramour; five months later, he passed away.

Reviews

[joel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quintessential Balzac: the contradiction of bourgeois heroism with the plain, dull, everyday villainy of capitalist development; the burgeoning subsumption of all facets of love, friendship, art, and family to commodification; the corruption of revolutionary ideals during the Restoration that will give way to the even greater stupidity of the July Monarchy; the obsessive displacement of desire and money; and Paris as the inevitable, phantasmagoric labyrinth for this general crisis. Vautrin's story could only end one possible way—the master criminal given his very own 18th Brumaire as he enshrines himself as head of police.

[Mbuye · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘Lost Souls’ (also known as the ‘Splendours and Miseries of Courtesans’ and occasionally as ‘A Harlot High and Low’) comprises four full-length novels: ‘Esther Happy,' ‘What Love Costs an Old Man,’ ‘The End of Evil Ways,’ and ‘The Last Incarnation of Vautrin.’ Together, these four novels continue the story of Lucien de Rubempré, begun in ‘Lost Illusions,’ in which Lucien’s real degradation only begins when he moves to Paris and ends with his forging bills for a vast amount of money under his brother-in-law's signature. He is rescued from the consequences of this infamous deed by the intercession of ‘Abbe Carlos Herrera,’ a Jesuit priest, who takes a ‘fatherly’ interest in the young man. ‘Lost Illusions’ and ‘Lost Love’ are both part of the ‘Scenes from Provincial Life’ and ‘Scenes from Parisian Life,’ comprising a miniscule portion of ‘The Human Comedy.’

In ‘Lost Souls,’ Lucien’s tale is soon told. He falls in love with a former prostitute, Esther, who dearly loves him. That doesn't stop the young man from seeking a rich wife, so that he can maintain Esther in style. Along the way, of course, he leaves a trail of high society women, including from among the higher nobility, as well the demi-mondaines who loved and lost him. Some of them have become his bitterest enemies. The best book of all is ‘What Love Cost an Old Man,’ where Balzac's irony and satire march hand in hand with a cynicism that grows darker and deeper almost by the page. The last two novels restore the essential humanism that marks the run of Human Comedy series of novels, but they also end on a note of pathos for both Lucien and Esther, as well as in a cynical triumph: the great Abbé Carlos Herrera is a galleys criminal, who had escaped and taken a number of different aliases to protect himself and his proteges from the might of the law as applied in the new Napoleonic Code.

With police spies, savage women, false priests, infatuated old men willing to barter a life’s fortune in exchange for a night with a beautiful young woman, Balzac's depiction of character is devastating, but it is also dispassionate. There is no condemnation here of the vilest (so we might think them) man or woman. Instead, he tries to understand what it is that drives them on: revenge? In exchange for perceived wrong? Or avarice? Or innocence of the ways of the world?

In the last two of the four books, Balzac also treats us to an understanding of the French judicial system under a reformation of the civil and penal code introduced by Napoleon and adopted by most European countries until World War I. In addition, we get a brilliant tour of the new French prison system generally, as well as the gates and points of entry and egress, the stairways, underground passages, the cells themselves and the impossibility of escape therefrom.

With Balzac, unlike in novels of the same time in the United Kingdom, the lengthy descriptions of places or events are not introduced as a matter of local colour, a backdrop to the action; they form part of the action, and so, however great the temptation is to skip these chapters, one always gets back to them to understand what's going on!