Coralie's death brings her brief life to an explicitly Christian close and leaves Lucien de Rubempré facing grief in its most intimate and humiliating form: he sits beside the woman he loved while trying to find money for her burial, then writes comic songs by the light of the candles around her corpse. The episode makes mourning inseparable from poverty, and turns the work of composing into a grim response to immediate necessity.

Final illness and reconciliation

At the beginning of June, Bianchon tells Lucien that Coralie is dying and has only three or four days to live. Bérénice and Lucien spend those last days in tears, unable to conceal their grief from Coralie, who is herself distressed at dying because of Lucien. Her final request is unexpected: she asks Lucien to bring her a priest. The actress wishes to reconcile with the Church and die in peace, and the narrator presents her repentance as sincere. Her death thus contains a turn toward religious reconciliation, not merely the end of her life.

Lucien remains beside her until the end, seated at the foot of her bed and watching her without interruption. At five in the morning, he sees death turn her eyes. Outside the window, a bird lands on the flowerpots and sings. The small, ordinary sounds of morning occur beside the stillness of the room, while Bérénice kneels to kiss Coralie’s hand as it cools beneath her tears. The scene gives the death a precise hour and physical particulars, resisting any easy separation between private sorrow and the material world around it.

Poverty at the deathbed

There are only eleven sous on the mantelpiece. With no money for a funeral, Lucien leaves driven by the thought of begging for his mistress’s burial or pleading with people who might help him. He considers approaching the Marquise d'Espard, Sixte du Châtelet, Madame de Bargeton, Camille Maupin, or Henri de Marsay; in his despair, even his pride and strength have fallen away, and he thinks he would enlist as a soldier to obtain money. He walks to Camille Maupin’s hotel and asks to see her, but her valet says that she has gone to bed late and no one will enter before she rings.

When Lucien returns, Coralie lies rigid on a narrow bed, covered with a poor sheet that Bérénice is sewing as she weeps. Four candles burn at the bed’s corners. Although the household has so little, Lucien directs Bérénice to order a funeral procession costing no more than two hundred francs, including the service at the modest church of Bonne-Nouvelle. The particulars make the cost of burial an immediate, painful constraint: even the farewell must be planned within a sum he can scarcely raise.

Songs beside the body

Once Bérénice has gone to arrange the funeral, Lucien sits at his table beside Coralie’s body and writes ten songs. They are meant to be cheerful, popular pieces for a cheap street-song collection, a task that offers him two hundred francs. The work does not come easily. He suffers intensely before he can make himself write, but necessity eventually brings his intelligence into the service of the commission, as though he were not grieving. The episode sets the separation of heart and brain against the physical evidence of his loss: he is composing for money in the same room where a priest prays for Coralie.

By the next morning, Lucien has finished the last song and tries to fit it to a popular tune. Its refrain urges laughter and drinking. The levity is not presented as relief from the funeral but as the paid material he has had to produce while mourning. When Bianchon and Daniel d'Arthez arrive, they find him overwhelmed, weeping so violently that he can no longer make a clean copy of the songs. After hearing his circumstances, they respond with tears. Daniel d'Arthez says that what he has witnessed effaces many of Lucien’s faults; the priest speaks of those who find hell in this life. Their reactions register the suffering behind the work, without undoing the compromise necessity has imposed on it.

Funeral and immediate aftermath

The scene of the funeral is assembled from contrasts: Coralie’s beautiful, peaceful face; the grave Lucien has bought with engravings; a coffin paid for by Barbet; and the four candles around the actress who once stirred an audience in her theatrical costume. The priest who reconciled her with God returns to the church to say a Mass for her. These images leave Bianchon and Daniel d'Arthez unable to speak. Camille Maupin arrives, understands what has happened, takes Lucien’s hand, and slips two thousand francs into it. He tells her that it is too late, underscoring that money has arrived only after the loss it might have eased.

At noon, members of Le Cénacle gather at the church of Bonne-Nouvelle, with Bérénice, Camille Maupin, two performers from the Gymnase, Coralie’s dresser, and Camusot. Michel Chrestien is absent, though he has been cleared of believing Lucien guilty. The men accompany Coralie to Cimetière du Père-Lachaise. Camusot weeps openly and solemnly promises Lucien that he will buy a perpetual burial plot and erect a small column bearing Coralie’s name and the inscription that she died at nineteen.

Lucien remains alone on the hill until sunset, looking out over Paris and thinking of the people who might still love him. He believes his true friends despise him and thinks only of his sister, David, and his mother. Returning to rue de la Lune, he cannot bear to see the now-empty apartment and moves into a poor hotel on the same street. Camille Maupin’s two thousand francs, together with the proceeds from the furniture, pay the debts; Lucien and Bérénice are left with ten francs, enough to live on for ten days. For those days he is physically and emotionally prostrate, unable either to write or to think, while Bérénice pities him. Coralie’s death therefore ends not with a recovery but with Lucien’s grief, exhaustion, and material destitution.