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He becomes the powerful protector of an unknown young man much as he picked up Lucien de Rubempre in Illusions Perdues, and attempted to aid Rastignac in Le Pere Goriot and devotes all his sinister craft to his protege's material interests. The playwright is careful to preserve some degree of the young man's self-respect.

From many points of view this region of survivals is full of interest. Till half-way through the present century, village communism existed here in full force, having withstood the shocks of the French Revolution. The last village commune was not broken up till 1848. The ancient industry of wood-floating, or flottage a buches perdues, is still actively carried on.

It is impossible to introduce a long digression at the climax of a narrative already so much prolonged, since its only interest is in so far as it concerns Jacques Collin, the vertebral column, so to speak, which, by its sinister persistency, connects Le Pere Goriot with Illusions perdues, and Illusions perdues with this Study.

As for Balzac, he was a most remarkable combination of the artistic temperament with the scientific spirit. The latter he bequeathed to his disciples. The former was entirely his own. The difference between such a book as M. Zola's L'Assommoir and Balzac's Illusions Perdues is the difference between unimaginative realism and imaginative reality.

Do what he will, his romance remains staringly false in its contrast with his reality; there is an open gap between the wonderful pictures of the town in Illusions Perdues and the theatrical drama of the old convict which they introduce. Yet his method was a right one, though it was perverse of Balzac to be occupied at all with such devices, when he might have rejected his falsity altogether.

'I am afraid I must persist in asserting that you are Miss Melmotte, said the gentleman, 'and that this other person is your servant, Elise Didon. You speak English, Miss Melmotte. Marie declared that she spoke French. 'And English too, said the gentleman. 'I think you had better make up your minds to go back to London. I will accompany you. 'Ah, Didon, nous sommes perdues! exclaimed Marie.

We had discussed the route which it would be well for us to take while we lay perdues in our loft.

In the earlier chapters of Le Rouge et Le Noir, for instance, he is concerned with almost the same subject as Balzac in the opening of Les Illusions Perdues the position of a young man in a provincial town, brought suddenly from the humblest surroundings into the midst of the leading society of the place through his intimate relations with a woman of refinement.

Whatever we might be at other times, when the east wind blew in from the sea we were, every man of us, âmes perdues in very truth, and I marvel sometimes that any of us saw the winter through. The prison was a huge enclosure surrounded by a high wooden stockade. Inside this was another stockade, and between the two armed guards paced day and night.

Darwin lays such great stress, he had no conception; indeed, he doubts whether there really are such things as extinct species, unless they be such large animals as may have met their death at the hands of man; and so little does he dream of there being any other destructive causes at work, that, in discussing the possible existence of fossil shells, he asks, "Pourquoi d'ailleurs seroient-ils perdues dès que l'homme n'a pu opérer leur destruction?"