L’homme a horreur de la solitude

L’homme a horreur de la solitude names a principle that the priest presents to Lucien de Rubempré as a fundamental force of human life: people seek a companion in their fate, and moral isolation is more frightening than physical solitude. The claim turns companionship into something more complicated than affection. For the priest, the need to escape aloneness becomes a source of devotion, a rationale for remaking another person, and a way to imagine another’s success as one’s own.

The Meaning of Solitude

The priest distinguishes moral isolation from mere separation. Hermits, he argues, were not truly alone because they lived with God in a populous spiritual world. Even the miser inhabits a world of imagined pleasures. His examples widen the principle beyond any respectable or fortunate group: the leper, the convict, the infamous person, and the sick all seek a companion in their destiny. The need is not a social ornament but, in the priest’s account, a primary human impulse that can command a person’s strength and energy.

The argument also gives companionship a dark, collective possibility. The priest invokes Satan finding companions and imagines a poem about corruption that would precede Paradise Lost, recasting the story as an apology for revolt. Lucien responds by calling such a work an Iliad of corruption. Their exchange extends the principle from intimate attachment to shared rebellion: even a destructive cause can gather people together by offering fellowship and a common fate.

The Priest’s Confession

Having stated the principle generally, the priest applies it to himself. He says that he is alone, has no family, and lives as a priest without possessing a priest’s heart. He describes devotion as his vice and says that he lives through giving himself to another. The Church, he explains, is an idea to him; although he has devoted himself to the King of Spain, that ruler offers protection rather than the personal love he wants.

This distinction exposes the personal need beneath the priest’s sweeping account of human nature. He does not merely want company: he wants someone upon whom to lavish devotion. His loneliness becomes an argument for finding a chosen object of attachment, while his professed readiness to serve promises intimacy and power at once.

Making Lucien a Creation

The priest tells Lucien that he wants to shape and mold him for his own use, loving him as a father loves a child. He imagines sharing Lucien’s successes with women and claiming the young man’s beauty and social ascent as his own work. In the future he envisions, Lucien will bear the marquis title of Rubempré, while consulting the priest in everything and speaking or remaining silent at his direction. The project gives the expression its most consequential meaning: the answer to loneliness is not simply another person’s presence, but the creation of a dependent companion whose achievements confirm the creator’s identity.

The priest compares his intended role to that of the Abbé de Vermont in relation to Marie-Antoinette. Lucien immediately points out that the Abbé de Vermont led the queen to the scaffold. The priest answers that the abbé did not love the queen, but loved only himself. The exchange unsettles the priest’s model of devotion: his distinction between genuine attachment and self-love is stated clearly, yet his desire to fashion Lucien for his own use and take possession of Lucien’s distinction makes the boundary between loving another and loving one’s own creation difficult to secure.

Narrative Significance

The expression functions both as a claim about universal human need and as a personal credo that reveals the priest’s method. His examples move from hermits and misers to the outcast and the rebel; his confession then narrows that expansive theory into a plan centered on Lucien. The movement from general maxim to intimate proposal shows how insight into loneliness can become an instrument of influence.

The exchange also makes companionship inseparable from authorship and control. The priest imagines not only giving Lucien support but making him, naming his social future, and treating his success as a reflection of himself. L’homme a horreur de la solitude thus captures the emotional promise behind the priest’s offer while carrying its warning: the bond intended to overcome isolation may bind one person to another’s ambition.