« Rions ! buvons ! Et moquons-nous du reste »

The refrain “Rions ! buvons ! Et moquons-nous du reste” belongs to a drinking song Lucien de Rubempré composes under desperate circumstances: Coralie has died, yet he must produce cheerful popular verses for a bookseller who will pay him for them. Its apparent invitation to laugh, drink, and disregard everything else is therefore inseparable from the grief and poverty surrounding its composition. The song’s gaiety is a work assignment; the scene makes that gaiety painfully at odds with the singer’s condition.

Commission and Commercial Purpose

The bookseller asks Lucien for ten good drinking or ribald songs, explaining that he wants to mix them with songs taken from various authors and sell the collection in the streets for ten sous. The mixture, he says, would help him avoid being prosecuted for counterfeiting. He offers Lucien two hundred francs for the verses, presenting the commission as a way for the poet to make him money after the failure of Fendant and Cavalier has cost him money. Lucien shudders at the request, but the offer sets the price and purpose of the work: these are not verses composed freely for an audience gathered in celebration, but saleable copy demanded by a bookseller.

The payment has an immediate, grim parallel. After returning home, Lucien finds Coralie laid out on a narrow bed, wrapped in a poor sheet that Bérénice is sewing as she weeps. Four candles burn at the bed’s corners. Lucien sends Bérénice to arrange a funeral procession costing no more than two hundred francs, including the service at the small church of Bonne-Nouvelle. The same sum that the bookseller has offered for ten songs is thus also the limit Lucien sets for Coralie’s funeral. The juxtaposition ties his labor directly to the cost of mourning: necessity gives his verses a price even as he tries to give the dead woman a burial.

The Refrain in Context

While Bérénice is away, Lucien sits at his table beside Coralie’s body and struggles to write the requested songs. They require cheerful ideas and popular tunes, a demand that runs against the scene around him. The narrative describes the effort as almost unbearable; only eventually does his intelligence come to serve necessity, “as if he had not suffered.” The phrase captures the division made visible by the episode: the mind can be made to produce what the market requires even while the heart remains in grief.

The surviving lines set the refrain up as the answer to a rejection of moralizing song: “Amis, la morale en chanson / Me fatigue et m'ennuie”. The closing injunction, “Rions ! buvons ! / Et moquons-nous du reste,” supplies the jaunty, carefree posture the commission calls for. In isolation, the refrain sounds like a simple toast and an exhortation to forget one’s cares. Here, that sound is turned against the circumstances of its performance. Lucien is writing beside a body, by candlelight, while a priest prays for Coralie; cheerfulness is not evidence that sorrow has passed, but the product he has been hired to supply.

Performance and Reception

By the following morning Lucien has finished the last song and is trying to fit it to a tune then in fashion. Bérénice and the priest fear that he has gone mad when they hear him singing the verses. The response arises from the collision between the song’s buoyant manner and the room in which it is sung. The refrain is not presented as a private credo: it is part of the required popular entertainment, delivered at a moment when laughter and drinking are especially remote from the visible facts of his life.

Bianchon and Daniel d’Arthez arrive as Lucien sings the final couplet. They find him in extreme dejection, pouring out tears and no longer able to copy the songs neatly. Once he has explained his situation through his sobs, his listeners are moved to tears too. Daniel d’Arthez says that this suffering effaces many faults; the priest remarks gravely that those who find Hell on earth are fortunate. Their words redirect the scene from the song’s manufactured unconcern to the grief and distress its performance has failed to conceal.

Meaning in the Episode

The refrain’s force comes from dramatic dissonance rather than from any claim that Lucien has become indifferent. A bookseller needs cheerful verses, and Lucien, pressed by necessity, writes them; the deathbed setting makes the language of merriment sound almost unbearable. The song also gives concrete form to the separation between artistic intelligence and feeling: Lucien can produce the required work, but he cannot finish preparing it once grief overwhelms him. Its memorable command to disregard everything else is thus surrounded by what cannot be disregarded—the dead Coralie, the expense of her funeral, Lucien’s tears, and the compassion of those who arrive. The episode turns a disposable street-song commission into an image of art made for money under pressure, and of cheerfulness that reveals, by contrast, the sorrow it cannot erase.