Coralie’s death and burial

Coralie’s death and burial make private grief collide with the material humiliations of poverty. As the actress dies reconciled with the Church, Lucien is left with almost no money to bury her; necessity drives him to compose comic songs beside her body. Friends eventually provide funds and accompany her to the cemetery, but their kindness comes too late to restore Lucien, whose mourning gives way to a collapse of both feeling and creative power.

Final Illness and Death

At the beginning of June, Bianchon tells Lucien that Coralie has only three or four days to live. Lucien and Bérénice spend those days weeping, unable to conceal their grief from Coralie, who is distraught at the thought that she is dying because of Lucien. In an unexpected turn, she asks Lucien to bring her a priest. She wants to reconcile with the Church and die in peace; her repentance is sincere, and she dies a Christian death.

Lucien remains seated in a chair at the foot of her bed, watching her without moving until death turns her eyes. It is five in the morning. A bird settles on the flowerpots outside the window and sings, while Bérénice kneels to kiss Coralie’s hand as it cools beneath her tears. On the mantelpiece there are only eleven sous. That small sum makes the practical cost of death impossible to ignore: Lucien leaves in despair, considering asking alms to bury his mistress or pleading with people who might help him. He reaches Camille Maupin’s house in disordered clothes, but her servant says she has gone to bed and cannot be disturbed before she rings.

A Burial Bought by Necessity

When Lucien returns, Coralie lies rigid on a cot, wrapped in a poor sheet that Bérénice is sewing as she weeps. Bérénice has lit four candles at the corners of the bed. The account lingers on the serenity of Coralie’s face, whose beauty seems almost to suggest that she might still speak Lucien’s name, the word that, joined to the name of God, preceded her last breath. Lucien asks Bérénice to order a funeral costing no more than two hundred francs, including the service at the small church of Bonne-Nouvelle.

The need to pay for that modest burial does not give Lucien time to grieve. As soon as Bérénice goes out to arrange it, he sits at his table beside Coralie’s body and writes ten songs for a bookseller, who wants drinking or bawdy verses to mix with songs by other authors and sell as a cheap street collection. The work demands cheerful ideas and popular tunes. Lucien struggles to begin, then finds his intelligence serving necessity as if he were not suffering. He writes by candlelight beside the corpse while a priest prays for Coralie. In the morning, after finishing the last song, he tries to fit it to a popular air. Bérénice and the priest fear for his sanity when they hear him singing.

Friends Arrive and the Funeral Takes Place

Bianchon and Daniel d’Arthez enter while Lucien is in a paroxysm of despair, weeping so violently that he cannot make a clean copy of the songs. Through his sobs, he explains his situation. Daniel d’Arthez responds that what Lucien has endured effaces many faults; the priest reflects that those who find Hell on earth are fortunate. The scene forces Lucien’s companions to witness the gulf between Coralie’s former life as an actress and the poor, candlelit room in which she lies dead: her lover has to buy her a grave with comic songs, Barbet pays for a coffin, and the priest who reconciled her with God returns to the church to say a Mass for her.

Camille Maupin arrives and understands the situation without needing it explained. She goes to Lucien and slips him two thousand francs. He says it is already too late, and Daniel d’Arthez, Bianchon, and Camille Maupin stay to comfort him, though his strength is spent. At noon, members of the Cénacle gather at the church of Bonne-Nouvelle, together with Bérénice, Camille Maupin, two performers from the Gymnase, Coralie’s dresser, and Camusot. The men accompany Coralie to Cimetière du Père-Lachaise. Camusot weeps openly and solemnly promises to buy a perpetual plot and erect a small column bearing Coralie’s name and recording that she died at nineteen.

Aftermath and Significance

Lucien remains alone on the hill until sunset, looking out over Paris. The burial has brought together people who cared for Coralie, but it does not dispel his sense that he is now isolated: he believes his true friends despise him and thinks only of his sister, David, and his mother back home. The funeral therefore closes one loss without resolving the shame and estrangement surrounding Lucien’s life.

He returns to rue de la Lune, but the empty apartment intensifies his impressions so sharply that he moves into a shabby hotel on the same street. Camille Maupin’s two thousand francs pay his debts, supplemented by the proceeds from the furniture. After these obligations are met, Lucien and Bérénice have only ten francs to live on for ten days. He spends that time in a sickly stupor, unable to write or think, while Bérénice pities him. The contrast with his forced work beside Coralie’s body is stark: necessity had made him produce songs when burial money was needed, but after the funeral his grief leaves him unable to create at all.