Bérénice

Bérénice, Coralie’s childhood companion and trusted attendant, is the practical guardian of the actress’s household and, in moments of crisis, of Lucien de Rubempré as well. She nurses him through drunkenness, helps establish his home with Coralie, and stands by the couple as their success gives way to debt and illness. Her devotion is measured not by declarations but by the rooms she arranges, the possessions she saves, and the money she puts into Lucien’s hand when he has almost given up.

Identity and Place in Coralie’s Life

Bérénice is introduced as Coralie’s companion from childhood. The narrator first describes her as a stout Norman, an emphatic contrast to Coralie’s beauty; later, when she frees Lucien from the room where he has been left, her wit and delicacy of mind are set against her corpulence. The contrast helps define her presence: she is no ornamental shadow beside the actress, but an alert, shrewd participant in the life around her.

Her bond with Coralie is described in maternal terms. Bérénice says Coralie’s mother beat and sold her, and that she has made the girl her own child. She is also close enough to speak for Coralie’s private wishes. When Lucien is awake after a night out, Bérénice tells him that Coralie is prepared to give up her comfortable life and live with him in his attic room; she even offers to follow and keep house for them. This report is both affectionate and practical: she presents Coralie’s love as real while worrying that Lucien’s poverty could ruin her.

Care for Lucien and the New Household

Bérénice’s care of Lucien begins in physical distress. After a Parisian supper, he becomes violently ill on the stairs of Coralie’s house on Rue de Vendôme. Coralie calls for tea, and Bérénice helps attend to him. When he is put, without realizing it, into Coralie’s bed, the two women have undressed and settled him with the careful tenderness of a mother tending a child. His drunken insistence that he is merely affected by the air does not alter their practical response.

When Coralie decides to take Lucien to the newspaper office on Rue Saint-Fiacre, she orders Bérénice to oversee his move and installation. The new home is modest, and Bérénice helps make it habitable. In the couple’s room, she has spent her own money on a secondhand carpet to cover the bare, cold floor, despite Coralie’s instructions. She has also rescued a clock, two porcelain vases, four silver place settings, and six teaspoons from the household’s earlier losses. The domestic inventory is small, but it shows the kind of work through which she protects the couple: preserving what remains and making a rented room feel like a home.

The accommodation is in a crowded, shabby house on Rue de la Lune, with a rent of no more than a hundred crowns. Bérénice sleeps in the attic above the couple. Her own room and the saved household objects mark the limits of their means, while her presence makes the household less precarious. When Lucien wakes to the sight of the room and its few furnishings, the gaiety of Bérénice and Coralie helps displace his immediate anxiety.

Loyalty Through Debt and Illness

As Lucien’s finances collapse, Bérénice remains involved in the couple’s survival. After he tells Coralie and Bérénice of his troubles, Coralie embraces him and relies on Bérénice to negotiate his bills with Braulard. When the failure of Fendant and Cavalier makes Lucien’s notes immediately collectible, debt officers come to take him. Camusot arrives at the house, and Coralie returns upstairs with documents from the proceedings; she says nothing about what she has promised or done. Bérénice later believes that Coralie agreed to return to Camusot in order to save Lucien. The account presents this as Bérénice’s belief, not as a confirmed fact.

Coralie’s illness deepens the household’s hardship. After playing her role at the Gymnase through the twentieth performance, she falls sick; Lucien, himself still unable to work, tends her, while Bérénice helps care for both of them. Their furniture is seized, and the household loses access to ordinary credit. For about a week, the three survive on pork bought from the charcutier, and the food worsens Coralie’s illness. Bianchon helps by providing medical care and obtaining credit for them at a pharmacist. In this crisis, Bérénice’s continuing presence is part of the household’s limited support, even as illness and poverty strip away its remaining security.

The Money That Keeps Lucien Alive

At the lowest point, Lucien sells his clothes and fine linen to Samanon for fifty francs, but cannot obtain enough to pay for a coach journey. He goes to Frascati, gambles, and returns with nothing. Back in his room on Rue de la Lune, he asks Bérénice for Coralie’s shawl. She recognizes that he intends to hang himself and sends him to walk on the boulevards, explicitly warning him not to go toward the quays.

Bérénice then finds the money he needs to leave. Lucien sees her dressed up and speaking with a man on the muddy Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle. She slips four five-franc coins into his hand and tells him that the twenty francs may cost dearly, but will let him depart. She disappears before he can discover where she has gone. Lucien wants to return the money, but is forced to keep it, regarding it as a final mark of Parisian life. The source leaves the cost of Bérénice’s intervention unstated; what it establishes is that she obtains the money, recognizes the danger Lucien is in, and acts before he can carry out his plan.

Bérénice’s role in the story is therefore inseparable from the material consequences of loyalty. She offers domestic labor, protects possessions, nurses the people she loves, and intervenes when Lucien’s despair becomes immediate danger. Her final gift does not resolve the troubles that brought him to the brink, but it gives him the means to leave Paris alive.