Lost Illusions

When David Séchard comes of age, his father wants to sell him his printing press business for three times what it's worth; David, as generous as his father is miserly, agrees to the price because he loves his father. David soon runs across an old school chum, Lucien, and his sister Eve. Lucien is strikingly handsome, with ambitions to be a poet. Both David and Eve become devoted to doing whatever it takes to help Lucien succeed, and, while doing so, they fall in love. With a ruthless competitor in town trashing his reputation and drastically reducing his income, an exorbitant rent and debt payment to his father, and a new wife, David struggles to make ends meet. He soon pins his hopes on inventing a new process to create paper more cheaply. In the meantime, Lucien takes up with a society woman who is twice his age, and they decide to run off together to Paris. Lost Illusions is about just that-David believes he can be a rich and famous inventor, Lucien believes he can be a rich and famous writer, and Eve believes she can help both the men in her life to succeed in their dreams. All three have to discover what is illusion and what is real, and the process will be painful for all of them. Perfect for readers who love sweeping 19th-century literary classics and intricate character studies of ambition and sacrifice. Balzac's masterful portrayal of brotherly devotion, romantic passion, and the corrupting nature of social ambition creates an unforgettable tale that exposes the harsh realities beneath the glittering surface of French society. This timeless exploration of love, loyalty, and the price of dreams will captivate anyone who appreciates richly detailed storytelling and profound psychological insight. The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)