Les Illusions perdues Reading Order

Les Illusions perdues (1837–1843) by Honoré de Balzac is the masterpiece of the Comédie humaine — a three-volume novel (Les Deux Poètes, Un Grand Homme de province à Paris, Ève et David) following Lucien de Rubempré, a beautiful young poet from Angoulême, through his rise and fall in Paris journalism and literature, and back to the province, where his failure has destroyed his brother-in-law David Séchard's printing business. The novel is the most devastating account of the French literary world ever written: Balzac understood the 1820s newspaper industry as a machine for manufacturing false values, selling influence, and destroying talent — he had lived it himself — and his portrait of the feuilletoniste, the theatrical critic, the publisher, and the political journalist is so precise and so corrosive that it amounts to an anatomy of ideological corruption. Lucien is Rastignac with talent rather than ambition, a romantic nature rather than a calculating one, and the disaster is correspondingly greater. The novel ends with Lucien about to shoot himself when he is saved by Vautrin disguised as a Spanish abbé, whose offer launches the sequel Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes. Proust considered Illusions perdues the greatest French novel and it was one of the primary models for À la recherche du temps perdu.