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One of the greatest tragedies of my life," wrote Oscar Wilde, "is the death of Lucien de Rubempré. It is a grief from which I have never been able completely to rid myself. It haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember it when I laugh." The last phrase might suggest ambivalence. Proust, in Contre Sainte-Beuve, is interested in the way Wilde's "attendrissement" in the days of his brilliance prefigured his own imprisonment and fall. Proust assumed that "il s'attendrissait sur elle [la mort de Lucien] comme tous les lecteurs, en se plaçant au point de vue de Vautrin, qui est le point de vue de Balzac...." [he felt moved by Lucien's death, like all readers, by seeing it from Vautrin's point of view, which is Balzac's own....]
I was surprised when I first read the scene to find tears rising in my eyes, partly at least because until that moment I had intensely disliked Lucien, in a way I dislike few fictional characters. Indeed, as Lucien writes his self-satisfied farewell messages, he remains small-minded, self-regarding, and distasteful. What is moving is the one moment of selflessness he experiences as he prepares to hang himself, and sees from his window the unexpected revelation of the "primitive beauty" of the medieval architecture of the Palais de Justice. "En prenant ses mesures pour mourir, il se demandait comment cette merveille existait inconnue dans Paris." [Making his preparations for death, he asked himself how this marvel could exist, unknown, in Paris.] He sees the colonnade "svelte, jeune, fraîche" [slender, young, fresh]. They are unexpected adjectives for architecture, adjectives which would serve just as well to describe a beautiful woman. Seeing the "demeure de St Louis" with its Babylonian proportions and its oriental fantasies, Lucien becomes two Luciens-"un Lucien poète en promenade dans le Moyen Âge, sous les arcades et les tourelles de St Louis, et un Lucien apprêtant son suicide." [One Lucien, a poet walking about under the arches and the turrets of St Louis, and one Lucien preparing his suicide.] He moves into the eternal present of art and history; this is the last we see of him or his consciousness.
What moves and startles me about this vision in the end is the courage-even foolhardiness-of...