A Harlot High and Low Read online

  ‘Then it doesn’t surprise me to see Lucien looking so solemn; for Madame de Sérisy certainly won’t give him a million to marry Mademoiselle de Grandlieu. He doesn’t know how to get out of that position, I dare say,’ de Marsay replied.

  ‘Yes, but Mademoiselle de Grandlieu adores him,’ said Countess Montcornet, ‘and, with that young person’s help, the conditions may not be so hard.’

  ‘What will he do with his Angoulême sister and brother-in-law?’ inquired the Chevalier d’Espard.

  ‘But,’ replied Rastignac, ‘his sister is rich, and he now calls her Madame Séchard de Marsac.’

  ‘There may be difficulties, but he’s a good-looking boy,’ said Bianchon rising to greet Lucien.

  ‘Good evening, my dear chap,’ said Rastignac exchanging a hearty handshake with Lucien.

  De Marsay acknowledged Lucien’s greeting coldly. Before dinner, Desplein and Bianchon, who, while joking with Baron Nucingen, examined him, realized that his illness was purely temperamental; but neither of them could divine its cause, so impossible did it appear that this deep politician of the Bourse could be in love. When Bianchon, deciding that nothing but love could explain the banker’s pathological condition, mentioned the possibility to Delphine de Nucingen, she smiled in the way of a woman who has long known what to think about her husband. Nevertheless, after dinner, when everybody went out into the garden, the close friends of the household surrounded the banker and wondered whether this extraordinary case might not be illuminated by Bianchon’s notion that Nucingen must be in love.

  ‘Do you know, Baron,’ de Marsay said to him, ‘that you’ve grown considerably thinner? and you’re suspected of having contravened the laws of a financier’s nature.’

  ‘Notatoll!’ said the baron.

  ‘But indeed,’ de Marsay pursued, ‘they are daring to say that you are in love.’

  ‘Iss true,’ Nucingen answered piteously. ‘I am lonking for somezink unkenon.’

  ‘You’re in love, you?… You’re a coxcomb!’ said the Chevalier d’Espard.

  ‘To pee in luf at my aitch, I kenow zat nossing coult pe more follish; but can I help? zat is how!’

  ‘With a woman in society?’ asked Lucien.

  ‘But,’ said de Marsay, ‘the Baron can only grow thin like that from a hopeless love, and he can buy all the women who can and will sell themselves.’

  ‘I ton’t kenow hair,’ answered the baron. ‘And I can tell you zis, since Madame de Nischingen iss in the trawink-room. Ontil now, I haf not kenown what luf iss. Luf?… I sink it moss pee to grow zin.’

  ‘Where did you meet her, this young innocent?’ Rastignac asked.

  ‘Out trifing, at midnight, in ze Pois de Finzennes.’

  ‘How would you describe her?’ said Marsay.

  ‘Eine hat off vite goss, pink tress, vite scarf, vite feil,… eine truly Pippligle fess! Eyess of fire, a skin off Orient.’

  ‘You were dreaming!’ said Lucien with a smile.

  ‘Is true, I vos sleeping like ein teet-pox,… ein pox foll off teets,’ he continued, ‘for I was on my way pack from tinner in ze country wiz mine friend…’

  ‘Was she by herself?’ said du Tillet interrupting the shark.

  ‘ Yo,’ said the baron with an air of grief, ‘except an heyduck behint ze coach and a mate…’

  ‘Lucien looks as though he knew her,’ cried Rastignac, catching a smile on the face of Esther’s lover.

  ‘Who doesn’t know women capable of going out at midnight to meet Nucingen?’ said Lucien gaily.

  ‘At any rate, it isn’t a woman who goes into society?’ queried the Chevalier d’Espard, ‘for the baron would have recognized the heyduck.’

  ‘I haf not seen her any place,’ replied the baron, ‘and is forty tays since I was making ze police seek wizout finding.’

  ‘It would be better for her to cost you a few hundred thousand francs than cost you your life, and at your age, a passion which goes unfed is dangerous,’ said Desplein, ‘one may die of it.’

  ‘Yo, yo,’ Nucingen replied to Desplein, ‘what I eat kifs me no nourishment, air is fatal to me. I am going to ze Pois de Finzennes, to see ze pless where I saw hair!… Ant zat iss mein life! I haf not peen aple to occupy myself wit ze lest lon : I hef esked mine colleaks to look efter it, ent zey hef het biddy on me… For a million, I vish to know zis woman, I should be more rich, for I go no longer to ze Pourse… Ask ti Dilet.’

  ‘Yes,’ replied du Tillet, ‘he no longer cares for business, he’s changed, it’s a sign of approaching death.’

  ‘Sign of dess,’ Nucingen went on, ‘for me iss dess, sem sing!’

  The simplicity of the old man, a shark no longer, who, for the first time in his life, thought something holier, more sacred than gold, greatly affected this company of old hands at the game: some exchanged smiles, others looked at Nucingen mutely expressing the thought: ‘So strong a man come to this!…’ Then each returned to the drawing-room talking about the event. It was indeed a work of nature to speculate about. Madame de Nucingen started to laugh when Lucien discovered the banker’s secret to her; but at the sound of his wife’s mockery, the baron took her by the arm and led her to a window recess.

  ‘Madame,’ he said to her in a low voice, ‘hef I efer said a wort of mockery about your bassions, zet you should mock at mine? A goot vife would help hair husbant in soch matter, not mock et him es you vos doing…’

  From the old banker’s description, Lucien had recognized his Esther. Already annoyed at having seen his smile noted, he took advantage of the moment of general chatter while coffee was being served to disappear.

  ‘What’s become of Monsieur de Rubempré, then?’ said Baroness Nucingen.

  ‘He’s faithful to his motto: Quid me continebit?’ replied Rastignac.

  ‘Which means: “Who can detain me?” or: “I can’t be trained,” whichever you please,’ added de Marsay.

  ‘While Monsieur le Baron was speaking of his fair unknown, Lucien smiled in a manner which suggested to me that he knew her,’ said Horace Bianchon without perceiving any peril in so natural an observation.

  ‘Gut!’ the shark said to himself. Like all men who are desperately ill, he accepted anything which held out hope, and he promised himself to have Lucien watched, by other minions than those of Louchard, the cleverest Commercial Guard in Paris, to whom, during the past fortnight, he’d had recourse.

  An abyss beneath Esther’s happiness

  BEFORE going on to Esther’s, Lucien had to call at the Grandlieu house to spend the two hours which made Mademoiselle Clotilde-Frédérique de Grandlieu the happiest girl in the Faubourg Saint Germain. That prudence which characterized the conduct of the ambitious young man advised him to let Carlos Herrera know immediately of the effect of the smile which Baron Nucingen’s portrait of Esther had brought to his face. The baron’s love for Esther, and the idea he’d had of setting the police to look for his fair unknown, were anyway happenings important enough to communicate to the man who had taken under a cassock the asylum which formerly criminals had found in churches. And, from the rue Saint Lazare, where the banker lived at that time, to the rue Saint Dominique, where the hôtel de Grandlieu stands, Lucien’s way led past his own dwelling on the Quai Malaquais. He found his terrible friend smoking his breviary, that is to say seasoning his pipe before going to bed. More foreign than any foreigner, this man had finally given up Spanish cigars, which he found too mild.

  ‘This is becoming serious,’ the Spaniard answered when Lucien had recounted all. ‘The baron, who makes use of Louchard to look for our little lamb, might well think of putting a policeman on your heels, and everything would be known. I shall need my nights and mornings to prepare cards for the game I’m going to play this baron, to whom I must above all demonstrate the powerlessness of the police. When our shark has lost all hope of finding his tender prey, I undertake to sell her to him at what she’s worth to him…’

  ‘Sell Esther?’ cried Lucien, whose first rea
ctions were always admirable.

  ‘Are you forgetting the situation we’re in?’ cried Carlos Herrera.

  Lucien lowered his head.

  ‘No more money,’ the Spaniard continued, ‘and sixty thousand francs of debts to pay! If you want to marry Clotilde de Grandlieu, you have to buy an estate at a million to assure this plain Jane’s jointure. Ah, well, Esther is meat I’m going to make this shark swim for to the tune of a million. That’s my concern…’

  ‘Esther would never…’

  ‘That’s my concern.’

  ‘It’ll be her death.’

  ‘That concerns the undertakers. Besides, what then?…’ cried this untamed figure, putting a stop to Lucien’s elegies by his very stance. ‘How many generals died in their prime of life for the Emperor Napoleon?’ he demanded of Lucien after a brief silence. ‘There is no shortage of women! In 1821, Coralie had no equal, you nevertheless found Esther. After this wench, there will be – do you know who? – the woman unknown! Of all women, that one is the most beautiful, and you will seek her in the princely capital where the Duc de Grandlieu’s son-in-law will be minister representing the King of France… And then, tell me, young master, will Esther die of that? In any case, can Mademoiselle de Grandlieu’s husband keep Esther? But leave it to me, you don’t need to bother yourself with all this: it’s my concern. Just do without Esther for a week or two, and you shall still go to the rue Taitbout. For the moment, be off and warble outside the gilded cage, and play your part well, slip Clotilde the incendiary letter you wrote this morning, and bring me back one that sizzles! The girl compensates herself for her privations by writing: that suits me! You will find Esther a little downcast, but tell her she must obey. It’s a matter of our cloak of virtue, our livery of decorum, of the screen behind which great ones conceal their infamy… It’s a question of my fairer I, of you who must never be under suspicion. Chance has served us better than I thought, working, as I have been these two months, in the void.’

  Throwing off these terrible phrases one by one, like pistol shots, Carlos Herrera dressed and prepared to go out.

  ‘You’re enjoying yourself, that’s clear,’ cried Lucien, ‘you never liked poor Esther, and you look forward with pleasure to the moment when you can be rid of her.’

  ‘You’ve never grown tired of loving her, have you?… well, I’ve never ceased to execrate the wench. But haven’t I always behaved as though I were sincerely attached to her, I who, through Asia, held her life in my hands! A few bad mushrooms in a stew, and everything would have been said… Mademoiselle Esther is still alive, all the same!… she is happy!… do you know why? because you love her! Don’t play the child. We’ve been waiting four years for hick to run for or against us, well! it will take more than talent to clean the vegetable fate throws us today: in this turn of the wheel there is both good and bad, as usual. Do you know what I was wondering when you came in?’

  ‘No…’

  ‘Whether here, as in Barcelona, I could, with the help of Asia, become the heir of an old church hen…’

  ‘By a crime?’

  ‘It was the only means I could think of to make your fortune. The creditors are beginning to stir. Once pursued by bailiffs and driven away from the Grandlieu establishment, what would become of you? The devil’s bill would have fallen due.’

  Carlos Herrera depicted in dumbshow a man’s suicide by jumping in the water, then he fixed on Lucien one of those penetrating gazes by which the will of the strong is made to enter the souls of the weak. This riveting gaze, whose effect was to slacken all resistance, made it clear that there were between Lucien and his counsellor, not only secrets of life and death, but also feelings as superior to the general run of feelings as this man was to the baseness of his situation.

  Constrained to live outside the world into which the law forbade him ever to enter again, drained by vice and by furious, by terrible oppositions, but endowed with a force of soul which devoured him, this ignoble and great, obscure and famous personality, consumed with a fever for life, lived again in the elegant person of Lucien whose soul had become his. He was represented in social life by this poet, to whom he gave his constancy and his iron will. For him, Lucien was more than a son, more than a beloved woman, more than a family, more than his life, Lucien was his revenge; thus, as strong souls hold faster to what they feel than to existence, he had attached the latter to himself by indissoluble bonds.

  Having bought Lucien’s life at the moment when the poet in despair was on the brink of suicide, he had proposed to him one of those infernal pacts which are never shown except in novels, but the dreadful possibility of which has often been brought to light at Courts of Assize by famous legal dramas. Lavishing upon Lucien all the delights of Paris life, proving to him that it was still possible to create a splendid future, he had played his part. Indeed, this strange man counted no sacrifice, once his other self was in question. In the midst of his strength, he was so weak against the caprices of his creature that he had even betrayed his secrets to the latter. Perhaps this purely moral complicity constituted a further bond between them? From the day on which the Torpedo had been carried off, Lucien knew on what horrible foundation his happiness rested.

  This Spanish priest’s cassock concealed Jacques Collin, one of the celebrities of the convict world, who, ten years before, had been living under the respectable name of Vautrin in the Maison Vauquer, where Rastignac and Bianchon then lodged. Jacques Collin, the chief of gallows-dodgers, known as L odgedeath, escaping from Rochefort immediately he had been returned there, profited by the example of the celebrated Count of Saint Helena: but with some modification in the defective part of Coignard’s bold action. To substitute oneself for an honest man and continue with a convict’s life is a proposition of which the terms are too contradictory not to contain the seeds of a fatal conclusion, especially in Paris; for, grafting himself on to a family, a condemned man multiplies the perils of such a substitution tenfold. To shelter from all pursuit, mustn’t you anyway place yourself above the sphere of life’s common interests? A man of the world is subject to hazards which do not weigh on those out of contact with the world. The cassock is therefore the surest of disguises, especially if it can be completed by an exemplary, solitary, inactive life. ‘So I shall be a priest,’ said the man dead to civic life who nevertheless wanted to live again in the world and to satisfy passions as strange as himself. The civil war to which the constitution of 1812 gave rise in Spain, whither this man of energy had betaken himself, provided him with the opportunity of ambushing and secretly killing the real Carlos Herrera. A great lord’s bastard long abandoned by his father, not knowing the woman who had given him birth, that priest was charged with a political mission in France by King Ferdinand VII, to whom the suggestion had been made by a bishop. The bishop, the only man to interest himself in Carlos Herrera, died during the journey of the Church’s lost child from Cadiz to Madrid and from Madrid into France. Fortunate in acquiring a personality so much to be desired, and under such favourable conditions, Jacques Collin cut the flesh of his back deeply enough to efface the fatal letters and changed his face with the help of chemical reagents. Transforming himself thus beside the priest’s cadaver before destroying it, he was able to give himself sóme resemblance to his Sosia. To complete a transmutation almost as marvellous as that in the Arabian tale in which a dervish acquires the power to enter, himself being old, into a youthful body by the use of a magical formula, the convict, who spoke Spanish, learned as much Latin as an Andalusian priest would be likely to know. Banker to all three of the great convict settlements, Collin was rich with the money confided to his known probity, known and compulsory, for between such associates a slip would be paid for with dagger thrusts. To these funds he added what the bishop had deposited with Carlos Herrera. Before leaving Spain, he was able to gain possession of the wealth a guilt-ridden woman had once acquired by murder, promising to see to its restitution. Turned priest, charged with a secret mission which gave him the m
ost powerful recommendations in Paris, Jacques Collin, resolved on doing nothing to compromise his new character, had abandoned himself to the hazards this might bring, when he met Lucien on the road from Angoulême to Paris. This young fellow appeared to the sham priest to be a marvellous instrument of power; he prevented the attempt at suicide, saying: ‘Give yourself to a man of God as one may give oneself to the devil, and your fate will change. You will live as in a dream, and your worst awakening can only be the death you were about to embrace…’ The alliance of these two beings, which made them as one, rested on the force of such reasoning, and was further cemented by Carlos Herrera with complicity cunningly obtained. Endowed with the very genius of corruption, he destroyed Lucien’s honesty by exposing him to cruel necessities and extricating him by gaining his tacit consent to bad or infamous actions which left him still pure, loyal, noble in the eyes of the world. Lucien was the social splendour in the shadow of which the forger wanted to live. ‘I am the author, you will be the play; if you don’t succeed, I am the one to be hissed,’ he said to Lucien the day he confessed the sacrilege of his disguise. Carlos proceeded carefully from confession to confession, regulating their degree of infamy by his own progress and Lucien’s need. Thus Dodgedeath did not yield up his ultimate secret until the moment at which the habit of Parisian pleasures, successes, satisfied vanity had enslaved the weak poet to him body and soul. Where Rastignac, tempted by this demon, had resisted, Lucien succumbed, more carefully handled, more expertly compromised, conquered especially by his own conquest of a position of eminence and the pleasure it gave him. Evil, whose poetic representation is called the Devil, in his dealings with this man half woman employed its most potent charms, at first asking little of him and giving him much. Carlos’s great argument was that eternal secret promised by Tartuffe to Elmire. The reiterated proofs of absolute devotion, like that of Mahomet’s blind henchman in Voltaire’s play, completed the horrible work of Lucien’s conquest by one like Jacques Collin. At that moment, not only had Esther and Lucien used up all the funds confided to the probity of the banker of the convict settlements, who for their sake was thus exposed to the most terrible rendering of accounts, but the dandy, the forger and the harlot were in debt. Just as Lucien was about to triumph, the least pebble under the foot of one of these three beings might bring down the whole fantastic edifice of a fortune so daringly erected. At the Opera ball, Rastignac had recognized the Vautrin of the Maison Vauquer, but he knew himself for a dead man if he were indiscreet, and so Madame de Nucingen’s lover and Lucien exchanged looks in which on both sides the semblance of friendship concealed fear. In the last resort, Rastignac would certainly, with the greatest of pleasure, have provided the carriage which led Dodgedeath to the scaffold. The reader will now perceive with what sombre joy Carlos was seized on learning of Baron Nucingen’s love, apprehending in a single thought all the advantage to which he could turn poor Esther.