A Harlot High and Low Page 9

  How a shark met the rat, and what ensued

  WHILE things went on thus, on a fine night in the month of August, Baron Nucingen was returning to Paris from the estate of a foreign banker established in France, at whose house he’d been dining. The estate is about twenty-five miles from Paris, in the heart of Brie. Now, as the baron’s coachman had sworn he could take his master out and bring him back with the horses, this coachman was allowed to drive slowly once night had fallen. As they entered the Bois de Vincennes, the situation of the animals, the men and the master was as follows. Well and truly watered in the butler’s pantry at the house of the well-known autocrat of the Stock Exchange, the coachman, completely drunk, slept, still holding the reins, so that passers-by would have suspected nothing. The footman, sitting behind, snored like a humming-top from Germany, land of little figures in carved wood, big Reinganumen and tops. The baron wanted to think; but, ever since they had crossed the bridge at Gournay, the gentle somnolence of digestion had closed his eyes. From the slackness of the reins, the horses understood the state of the coachman, they heard the basso continuo of the footman from his look-out post in the rear, they saw that they were their own masters, and profited from this brief period of liberty to wander at their will. Intelligent slaves, they offered robbers the opportunity of stripping one of the richest capitalists in France, the most profoundly clever of those to whom the name of sharks has been finally attributed. At last, being in charge and drawn by the curiosity which has often been noticed in domestic animals, they stopped, at a crossing, before other horses to whom no doubt they were saying in horse-language: ‘Whose are you? What are you doing? Are you happy?’ When the carriage was no longer moving, the drowsy baron awoke. He thought at first that he had not yet left his colleague’s parkland; then he was surprised by a celestial vision which immediately brought into play his normal armoury of calculation. The moonlight was so magnificent that you could have read anything by it, even an evening newspaper. In the silence of the woods and by this pure light, the baron saw a woman alone, who, as she stepped into a hired carriage, gazed at the unusual spectacle of a sleeping barouche. At the sight of this angel, Baron Nucingen was as it were illuminated by an inner light. Seeing herself admired, the young woman lowered her veil with a movement of fright. A runner uttered a raucous cry whose meaning was understood by the coachman, for the carriage shot off like an arrow. The old banker’s feelings were terribly disturbed: the blood from his feet transported fire into his head, his head sent flames down to his heart; his throat tightened. The unfortunate man feared indigestion, yet, despite this dreadful apprehension, he got to his feet.

  ‘Put zem into a kallop! fast asleep, you pally numskull!’ he called out. ‘Hundert francs if you cadge up wit zat goach! ’

  At the words hundred francs the coachman awoke, the footman behind no doubt heard them in his sleep. The baron repeated his order, the coachman put the horses into a gallop, and at the Trône toll-gate succeeded in overtaking a carriage very like the one in which Nucingen had seen the unknown goddess, but where the head clerk of some big shop was sitting in state, with a proper little woman from the rue Vivienne. This mistake upset the baron.

  ‘If I had prought George, instead of you, pig stupid, he vould eassily haf found zat lady,’ he said to his servant as the toll-collectors came up.

  ‘Ah, your lordship, the devil, I’d say, was behind in the shape of a heyduck, and switched me that carriage for his own.’

  ‘ Ze toffle does not exist,’ said the baron.

  M. le Baron de Nucingen then admitted to the age of sixty, women had become totally indifferent to him, more particularly his own wife, of course. He boasted of never having known the kind of love which drives men to folly. He regarded it as lucky to have finished with women, of whom he said, without making any bones about it, that the most angelic among them was not worth what she cost, even if she gave herself for nothing. He was understood to be so utterly surfeited that he no longer so much as paid out a couple of thousand francs a month for the pleasure of being deceived. From his box at the Opera, his cold eyes undisturbedly took in the corps de ballet. No meaningful glance darted to the capitalist from that redoubtable swarm of elderly girls and youthful old women, the fine flower of Parisian pleasures. Natural love, artificial and self-regarding love, vain and decorous love; casual love, decent, conjugal love, love on the fringes, the baron had paid for them all, known them all, except true love. This love had just swooped down upon him like an eagle on its prey, as it had swooped on Gentz, adviser to H. H. Prince Metternich. It is well known what follies that aged diplomatist performed on behalf of Fanny Elssler whose rehearsals occupied him far more than the pattern of European interests. The woman who had just overturned the double-locked strong-box called Nucingen, appeared to him like one unique in her generation. It is not indeed certain that Titian’s mistress, or the Mona Lisa of Leonardo da Vinci, or Raphael’s Fornarina was as beautiful as the sublime Esther, in whom the practised eye of the most observant Parisian could not have detected the least sign betokening a harlot. What particularly stupefied the baron was the noble air of a great lady which Esther, loved, surrounded by luxury, elegance and love, had in the highest degree. Contented love is womankind’s holy ampulla, it makes them all as proud as empresses. Every night for a week, the baron went to the Bois de Vincennes, then to the Bois de Boulogne, then to the woods at Ville d’Avray, then to those at Meudon, finally round all the outskirts of Paris, without meeting Esther. That sublime Jewish face which he described as ein fess off ze Pipple, was ever before his eyes. At the end of a fortnight, he had lost his appetite. Delphine de Nucingen and her daughter Augusta, whom the baroness had started to bring out, did not at first notice the change in the baron. Mother and daughter saw Monsieur de Nucingen only in the morning at luncheon and in the evening at dinner, when they were all dining at home, which only happened on the days when Delphine had guests. But, at the end of two months, in a fever of impatience and a state not unlike that of nostalgia, the baron, astonished at the powerlessness of his millions, grew thin and appeared so profoundly affected, that Delphine secretly hoped to become a widow. She began hypocritically to pity her husband, and again kept her daughter upstairs. She overwhelmed her husband with questions; he answered as the English answer when suffering from spleen, he barely answered at all. Delphine de Nucingen gave big dinners on Sundays. She’d chosen that as her day, after having noticed that, in high society, nobody then went to the theatre, so that on Sunday there was generally nothing to do. The invasion of the commercial middle class makes Sunday as silly in Paris as it is boring in London. The baroness therefore asked the celebrated Desplein to dinner in order to be able to have a consultation in spite of the invalid, for Nucingen insisted that he’d never felt better. Keller, Rastignac, de Marsay, du Tillet, all the friends of the house had made the baroness understand that a man like Nucingen must not die unexpectedly. These gentlemen were invited to the same dinner, and so were Count Gondreville, François Keller’s father-in-law, the Chevalier d’Espard, des Lupeaulx, Doctor Bianchon, Desplein’s favourite pupil, Beaudenord and his wife, Count and Countess Montcornet, Blondet, Mademoiselle des Touches and Conti; finally, Lucien de Rubempré for whom, for the past five years, Rastignac had conceived the liveliest friendship; but by order, as they say in advertisements.

  Moneybags in despair

  ‘WE shan’t easily get rid of that one,’ said Blondet to Rastignac, when he saw Lucien enter the drawing-room, handsomer than ever and ravishingly got up.

  ‘It’s better to make a friend of him, he’s formidable,’ said Rastignac.

  ‘Him?’ said de Marsay. ‘The only people I regard as formidable are those whose position is clear, and his is not so much unattacked as unattackable! Look! what does he live on? Where does his fortune come from? he has debts of sixty thousand francs, I know.’

  ‘He’s found a rich protector in a Spanish priest, who wishes him well,’ replied Rastignac.

  ‘He�
�s marrying the eldest Mademoiselle Grandlieu,’ said Mademoiselle des Touches.

  ‘Yes, but,’ said the Chevalier d’Espard, ‘they’re asking him to buy an estate which brings in thirty thousand francs to assure the fortune he’ll owe his intended, and that needs a million, which is not to be found under any Spaniard’s foot.’

  ‘It’s a lot of money, for Clotilde is very ugly,’ said the baroness. Madame de Nucingen made a point of referring to Mademoiselle de Grandlieu by her Christian name, -as though she, née Goriot, were of that society.

  ‘No,’ replied du Tillet, ‘a duchess’s daughter is never ugly for the likes of us, especially when she has in her gift the title of marquis and a diplomatic post; but the greatest obstacle in the way of this marriage is Madame de Sérisy’s insensate passion for Lucien, she must pay him a great deal.’