Lucien’s Attempted Suicide

Lucien’s attempted suicide follows the exposure of his role in David Séchard’s arrest and brings his self-condemnation to a crisis. He leaves a farewell letter for Ève Séchard, frames himself as the destructive force in his family, and sets out in his fine Paris clothes to die by drowning without being found. The account pauses over both his reasoning and his chosen method, then turns at the roadside: before Lucien reaches the place he has selected, he encounters Carlos Herrera, who offers him a ride.

The arrest and the farewell

When David recognizes Lucien’s forged letter, Ève collapses. Lucien helps lift his sister and sees her carried home, where Marion lays her down; Kolb runs for a doctor. Ève has not regained consciousness when the doctor arrives. Unable to explain the confusion caused by the false letter, Lucien is forced to confess to his mother that he is responsible for David’s arrest. Her condemning look sends him upstairs, where he shuts himself away.

In the letter he writes during the night, Lucien turns the immediate disaster into a verdict on his whole life. He recalls a dinner at the Rocher de Cancale where a diplomat described a person who could ruin a family like a disease within it. Lucien applies that idea to himself: his affection for his family, he says, has repeatedly brought them harm. The latest injury is the cruelest because it has helped bring about David’s arrest.

He contrasts the family’s steady labor with his own pursuit of pleasure and sudden fortune. While Ève and David have followed the difficult but dependable path of work, Lucien has wanted to leap past it. He admits that Parisian companionship was not the same as friendship, and that he abandoned true friends for people who meant to exploit him. In his account, even his earlier return to see his family becomes painful evidence: he had wanted to see them, but now believes that his presence has made their lives worse.

Lucien’s explanation of himself

The letter is not only an apology; it is Lucien’s attempt to explain why he thinks he cannot change. He describes ambition too large for his capacity for sustained effort. His will, he says, comes in brief bursts, and the demands of a career require a steadiness he does not possess. The future frightens him, while the present feels unbearable. He imagines that David and Ève might have guided him, but doubts that even their strength could master his evasions and weakness.

Lucien also sees a painful mismatch between his social desires and his actual means. He claims to have the mind and social ease to succeed, yet not the perseverance needed to carry success through. His image for this imbalance is a slender, elegant shrub that presumes to be a cedar. He fears that, without wealth or consideration, he will age into what he calls a social rag. The language makes his despair inseparable from status: he cannot accept a modest life because the pleasures and ambitions he has known have spoiled the modest satisfactions that might once have been enough.

He names Louise de Bargeton as the partner who might have suited his ambition, and regrets not leaving Coralie for her. He also recognizes that he has just committed harm while intending otherwise. His judgment of himself therefore rests on more than the forgery: he believes that his vanity, intermittent will, and desire for ease will repeatedly turn good intentions into injury. He asks Ève and David not to search for him, and imagines that the happiness of seeing them again may eventually seem worth the pain his visit has caused.

Departure from the family home

At two o’clock, Lucien adds a final farewell and says that he has resolved to die that day. He imagines living on in the hearts of his family as the only tomb he wants. After finishing the letter, he goes downstairs quietly, places it on his nephew’s cradle, and kisses Ève’s sleeping forehead, his own face wet with tears. He then leaves the old house.

Lucien extinguishes his candle at dusk and takes one last look at the house before opening the alley door as softly as he can. His care is not enough to keep him from waking Kolb, who is sleeping on a mattress in the workshop. When Kolb asks who is there, Lucien says he is leaving and tells him to give David a final regret that he could not embrace him. Kolb’s remark that Lucien would have been better never to have come is answered by Lucien’s agreement that he would have been better never to have been born.

Lucien has dressed as if he were going to a celebration. The narrator presents his Paris clothes and dandy’s harness as a shroud made from the outward signs of the life he can no longer bear. Kolb, moved by Lucien’s accent and last words, considers checking whether Ève knows her brother has left or has received his goodbye. Finding the house silent, he assumes the departure must have been arranged and goes back to bed. The farewell therefore takes place without the family waking to stop Lucien or even immediately learning that he has gone.

The chosen method and the encounter

The narrative interrupts Lucien’s journey with a broader reflection on suicide, distinguishing death from the particular motives that lead a person toward it. It describes suicide arising from a long illness, from despair, or from reasoning, while noting that causes can converge. Lucien’s case is presented as a combination of despair and deliberation: he has decided on death, but he is still choosing how to carry it out.

At first he considers throwing himself into the Charente River. As he descends the Beaulieu slopes, however, he imagines the aftermath: his body returned by the water, disfigured and made the object of a judicial inquiry. Even in this crisis, concern about how he will appear to others shapes his choice. He recalls a deep, still pool he noticed during the day near Courtois Mill, its surface like polished steel and its banks bare of the flowers and broad leaves found beside more ordinary stretches of water. He had already thought that a person who filled his pockets with stones there would be certain not to be found.

The memory returns when Lucien reaches L’Houmeau. He walks toward Marsac, intending to keep his death secret and avoid both an investigation and the public spectacle of a drowned body. When the Bordeaux-to-Paris diligence approaches a steep hill, he does not want the passengers to see him. He slips into a sunken lane and picks flowers in a vineyard, emerging with a large bouquet of yellow sedum. The action briefly gives his passage the appearance of a carefully composed scene, even as his purpose is to disappear.

Interruption and significance

On the road, Lucien comes up behind a dark-clothed traveler with powdered hair, silver-buckled shoes, and a face marked by scars. The man appears ecclesiastical and smokes a cigar. He studies Lucien’s melancholy appearance, flower bouquet, and elegant dress, then indicates a small carriage drawn by two horses. Speaking with a marked Spanish accent and exquisite politeness, he offers Lucien a place in it so that he can catch the diligence.

The encounter changes the direction of the scene at the threshold of Lucien’s intended death. The account has followed his private reasoning from the forged letter and his family’s suffering to a specific, concealed method; now another person addresses him and offers a practical alternative to continuing alone toward Marsac. The offer does not undo the harm Lucien has caused, nor does the passage make his despair disappear. It does, however, interrupt his plan before he reaches the pool. The attempted suicide thus ends not with the death Lucien has resolved upon, but with his encounter with Carlos Herrera and the possibility of being carried away from it.