Paris est un étrange gouffre

Paris est un étrange gouffre is Lucien de Rubempré’s image for a city that seems to swallow both money and certainty. In a letter to his sister Ève Séchard, he uses it to explain how Paris’s costs have overwhelmed him after Madame de Bargeton rejected him and he had spent 1,760 of the 2,000 francs brought from Angoulême.

The Image and Its Occasion

The phrase appears amid Lucien’s attempt to reassure his family while confessing how precarious his position has become. He describes Paris as an “étrange gouffre”: a strange abyss whose scale is difficult to grasp from the provinces. The metaphor gives a shape to his rapid fall from the social world he expected to enter into anxiety about how to pay for life in the city.

A City Measured in Costs

Lucien makes the image concrete through sharply opposed prices. A meal can be found for eighteen sous, he says, while the simplest dinner at an elegant restaurant costs fifty francs; inexpensive clothes contrast with garments from fashionable tailors costing at least a hundred francs. Even a short carriage ride and the small charge for crossing street gutters in the rain join the tally. Paris’s abyss is therefore not only a figure of speech: it is a landscape of expenses that can turn ordinary needs into a drain on a newcomer’s limited funds.

Hope at the Edge

The surrounding letter holds the metaphor against Lucien’s confidence that his manuscripts, The Archer of Charles IX and The Daisies, will soon sell. He presents present poverty as a trial that great writers have endured, and insists that literary recognition will eventually bring wealth. The phrase thus marks the tension between his immediate experience of Paris as financially consuming and his continuing belief that the city may yet deliver the success for which he came.