Self-Destruction and Self-Construction in Balzac’s Illusions perdues

How does one construct an identity as a poet, acquire literary and social recognition in the Parisian literary and journalistic milieu? This is the subject of the novel Illusions perdues in which the hero, victim of a reconfiguration of his being, values and principles, goes from being a poet to being a journalist and then to the hybrid status of journalist-poet. The latter can only construct a degraded and perverted version of his (illusory) dreams to become himself.