A Harlot High and Low

by Honoré de Balzac

  When this woman, forgetful of everything, was a pace away from the group, Bixiou called out: ‘Esther?’ The unfortunate creature turned quickly on hearing the name, saw the malicious individual, and lowered her head like a dying person who has just yielded up her last breath. A strident laugh broke out, and the group melted into the crowd like so many startled field-mice darting into their holes at the roadside. Rastignac alone moved no farther away than he needed to in order not to seem to be avoiding the blaze of Lucien’s eyes; he was able to gaze in wonder upon two griefs equally deep though veiled: first the wretched Torpedo stricken as though by lightning, then the incomprehensible masker, the only one standing nearby who had not moved. Esther spoke a word in Lucien’s ear just as her knees were giving way, and the two disappeared, Lucien bearing her weight. Rastignac followed the charming couple with his eyes, remaining sunk in his reflections.

  ‘How did she come by this name of Torpedo?’ said a gloomy voice which struck home to the depths of his soul, for it was no longer disguised.

  ‘It is really he who has escaped again…,’ said Rastignac aside.

  ‘Quiet, or I cut your throat,’ replied the masker adopting another voice. ‘I am pleased with you, you kept your word, and there are one or two on your side. Henceforward be silent as the tomb; but first, answer my question.’

  ‘Why, then, this electric ray, this cramp-fish, is so attractive she’d have benumbed the Emperor Napoleon, and she’d numb a man harder to charm: you!’ Rastignac answered moving away.

  ‘One moment,’ said the masker. ‘I am going to show you that you can never have seen me anywhere.’

  The man unmasked, Rastignac was at first taken aback to discover nothing of the hideous personage he had formerly known at the Maison Vauquer.

  ‘The devil has allowed you to change yourself completely, except your eyes which could never be forgotten,’ he said at last.

  The grip of steel tightened on his arm to enjoin perpetual silence.

  At three o‘ clock in the morning, des Lupeaulx and Finot found the elegant Rastignac in the same place, leaning against the pillar where the terrible masker had left him. Rastignac had been to confession with himself: he had been priest and penitent, judge and accused. He allowed himself to be led away to breakfast, and returned home decidedly tipsy, but taciturn.

  Α Parisian landscape

  THE rue de Langlade, like the adjacent streets, runs between the Palais Royal and the rue de Rivoli. This part of one of the smartest districts of Paris will long preserve the contamination it received from those hillocks that were the middens of old Paris, topped with windmills. These narrow streets, dark and muddy, where trades are carried on which do not care about external appearance, take on at night a mysterious physiognomy and one full of contrasts. Coming from the bright lights of the rue Saint Honoré, the rue Neuve des Petits Champs and the rue de Richelieu, where there are always crowds and where are displayed the masterpieces of Industry, Fashion and the Arts, any man to whom Paris at night is unknown would be seized with gloom and terror as he plunged into the network of little streets which surround that brightness reflected in the sky itself. Thick shadow succeeds upon a torrent of gaslight. At wide intervals, a pale street-lamp casts its smoky and uncertain gleam, not seen at all in some of the blind alleys. Passers-by walk quickly and are uncommon. The shops are shut, those still open are of unsavoury character: a dirty wine-shop without lights, a linen-draper’s selling eau de Cologne. An unwholesome chill folds its damp mantle about your shoulders. Few carriages pass. Notable among these sinister spots are the rue de Langlade, the opening of the Passage Saint Guillaume and various street turnings elsewhere. The municipal Council has never yet found means to cleanse this great leper-house, for prostitution long ago established its headquarters there. Perhaps it is fortunate for Parisian society that these alleys should retain their foul aspect. Passing that way in the day-time, nobody could imagine what all those streets become at night; they are scoured by singular creatures who belong to no world; white, half-naked forms line the walls, the darkness is alive. Female garments slink by walking and talking. Half-open doors suddenly shout with laughter. Upon the ear fall those words which Rabelais claimed to have frozen and which now melt. Strumming music comes up between the flagstones. The sound is not vague, it means something: when it is raucous, that is a human voice; but if it contains notes of music, there is no longer anything human about it, only a whistling sound. Blasts on a whistle are indeed frequently heard. Provocative, mocking, the click of heels approaches and recedes. All these things together make the mind reel. Atmospheric conditions are changed in this region: it is hot in winter and cold in summer. But, whatever the weather, nature there offers the same curious spectacle: this is the fantastic world of the Berliner Hoffmann. Sent to inspect it, the meticulous clerk would no longer credit his senses once he had returned by the same turnings to decent streets in which there were passers-by, shops and light to see by. More disdainful or more easily shamed than the kings and queens of earlier times, who were not afraid to concern themselves with the courtesans in their cities, modern administration and politics dare no longer look this plague in the face. True, what is done must change with time and place, and measures which affect individual liberty are always a delicate matter; but a degree of breadth and boldness might be displayed in purely material schemes to do with air, light and building. The moralist, the artist and the wise administrator will regret the old Wooden Galleries of the Palais Royal where the sheep were folded which appear wherever strollers go by; and is it not better for strollers to loiter where they are? What happened? Today the most brilliant stretches of the boulevards cannot be enjoyed in the evening by families for what should have been enchanted outings. The Police have failed to make a proper use of what are nevertheless called Passages, to spare the public way.

  The girl crushed by a jest at the Opera ball had been living, for the past month or two, in the rue de Langlade, in a house of ignoble appearance. Ill-plastered against the wall of a much larger house, this construction without either breadth or depth, lighted only from the street, yet rises to a prodigious height, recalling the stick up which a parrot climbs. Each floor consists of a two-roomed apartment. The house is served by a narrow staircase against the outer wall, whose course may be traced from outside by fixed lights which feebly illuminate it within and on each landing of which stands a sink, one of the most horrible peculiarities of Paris. The shop and the living quarters immediately above it then belonged to a tinsmith, the owner lived on the first floor, the four floors above were occupied by well-behaved seamstresses to whom the owner and caretaker were indulgent because of the difficulty of letting a house so oddly constructed and situated. The neighbourhood had become what it was by reason of the fact that it contained so many just such houses, of no use to serious Commerce and thus able to be exploited only by unacknowledged, precarious or undignified trades.

  Interior as familiar to some as unknown by others

  AT three o’clock in the afternoon, the caretaker, who had seen Mademoiselle Esther brought back half-dead by a young man at two o’clock in the morning, had just been holding counsel with the grisette on the top floor, who, before taking a carriage to some party of pleasure, had evidenced disquietude about Esther, from whom she had heard no movement. No doubt Esther was still asleep, but she ought not to have been. Alone in her lodge, the caretaker wished she had been able to go up to the fourth floor,. where Mademoiselle Esther lodged. Just as she decided to leave her lodge in charge of the tinsmith’s son, the said lodge being a mere recess in the wall off the tinsmith’s landing, a cab arrived. A man enveloped from head to foot in a cloak, with the evident intention of concealing his costume and station, got out and asked for Mademoiselle Esther. This wholly reassured the caretaker, to whom it fully explained the silence and tranquillity of the recluse. As the visitor climbed the steps above her lodge, the caretaker noticed silver buckles on his shoes and fancied she had glimpsed the black fringe o
f the sash about a cassock; she went down and asked the cabman, who replied without speaking, in a manner the caretaker understood. The priest knocked, received no answer, heard a quiet sighing from within, and shouldered the door open with a vigour doubtless to be attributed to the power of Christian charity, though in another man it might have seemed mere habit. He hurried through to the second room, and there saw, before a Virgin in coloured plaster, poor Esther not so much kneeling as collapsed in a heap with hands together. The ‘little milliner’ was dying. Cinders in the grate told the story of that dreadful morning. The hood and mantle of the domino lay on the floor. The bed had not been slept in. The poor creature, stricken to the heart with a mortal wound, had without doubt arranged all on her return from the Opera. The wick of a candle, set hard in the sconce of a candlestick, showed how completely Esther had been absorbed in her last reflections. A handkerchief soaked with tears proved the sincerity of the despair of this Mary Magdalene, whose classic pose was that of the harlot without religion. This final repentance made the priest smile. Inexpert at dying, Esther had left the inner door open without calculating that the air in the two rooms needed a greater quantity of coal to make it unbreathable; the fumes had merely dazed her; colder air from the staircase now brought her slowly back to an appreciation of her woes. The priest remained standing, lost in gloomy meditation, untouched by the divine beauty of the young prostitute, watching her first movements as though it had been some animal. His eyes travelled from the barely animate body to objects in the room with apparent indifference. He studied the furnishings of this room, whose cold, worn red tiles were barely hidden by a wretched, threadbare carpet. An old-fashioned cot in painted wood, surrounded by curtains of yellow-brown calico with a dull-red rose-pattern; a single armchair and two painted wooden chairs, covered with the same calico, with which also the windows were curtained; a grey wallpaper speckled with flowers, blackened and greasy with age; a mahogany worktable; the fireplace cluttered with kitchen utensils of the cheapest kind, two large bundles of firewood broken apart, a stone mantelpiece on which a few glass ornaments stood, with bits of jewellery and scissors; a card of dirty thread, white, scented gloves, a delicious hat propped on the water jug, a Ternaux shawl stuffing a crack in the window, an elegant dress hanging on a nail, a little, uncomfortable sofa without cushions; broken clogs and pretty shoes, laced half-boots fit for a queen, china plates chipped and cracked, the remains of a meal among cutlery of German nickel, the silverware of the Parisian poor; a basket full of potatoes and dirty linen, a clean gauze bonnet on top; a hideous wardrobe, its glass doors open, empty, on its shelves a selection of pawnshop tickets: such was the array of joyous and dismal, wretched and expensive objects which met the eye. These luxuries among the broken fragments, this household so appropriate to the Bohemian life of the limp, half-dressed wench sunk down like a horse dead in its harness, pinned by a broken shaft, caught in the reins, did this curious spectacle give the priest pause? Did he say to himself that at any rate that lost creature was acting disinterestedly to love a rich young man and at the same time live in such poverty? Did he ascribe the disorder in the room to a disordered life? Was his feeling one of pity, or of fear? Was his charity stirred? Whoever had seen him, arms folded, forehead creased with thought, tight-lipped, eye scathing, would have thought him possessed by contradictory impulses and thoughts in which a gloomy distaste and baleful intentions predominated. He was, certainly, insensible to the pretty, round breasts half-flattened against the knees and the delicious forms of a crouching Venus revealed beneath the black material of the skirt, so tensely was the dying woman coiled upon herself; the abandon of this head, which, seen from behind, displayed its white, supple, vulnerable nape, the beautiful shoulders of a nature boldly developed, did not move him; he did not raise Esther up, he did not seem to hear the heartbreaking inhalations by which the return to life was accomplished: it needed a dreadful sob and the terrifying look which the girl cast upon him before he deigned to raise her and carry her to the bed with an ease which betrayed prodigious strength.

  ‘Lucien!’ she murmured.

  ‘Love returns, the woman is not far behind,’ said the priest with a sort of bitterness.

  The victim of Parisian depravity then perceived her rescuer’s style of dress, and said, with the smile of a child grasping at something long desired: ‘I shan’t die, then, without being reconciled to heaven!’

  ‘You will be able to expiate your faults,’ said the priest, bathing her forehead with water and holding under her nose a vinegar bottle he found in a corner.

  ‘I feel life not leaving but flowing back into me,’ she said after receiving the priest’s attentions and expressing her gratitude to him with expressions of unaffected simplicity.

  This engaging pantomime, which the Graces themselves, bent on pleasing, could scarcely have bettered, might have been thought at least partly to explain the girl’s curious nickname.

  ‘Do you feel better?’ asked the ecclesiastic, giving her a glass of sugar and water to drink.

  The man seemed to know his way about households of this kind, he knew where everything was. He had made himself at home. This gift of being everywhere at home belongs only to kings, light women and thieves.

  A rat’s confession

  ‘WHEN you have fully recovered,’ the singular priest went on after a pause, ‘you will tell me the reasons which led you to commit this latest crime, your attempt at suicide.’

  ‘My story is a simple one, father,’ she replied. ‘Three months ago, I was living in the disorder to which I was born. I was the lowest and most infamous of creatures, now I am only the unhappiest. Permit me to say nothing about my poor mother, who died murdered…’

  ‘By a captain, in a house of ill fame,’ said the priest interrupting his penitent… ‘I know your origins, and know that if one of your sex may ever be excused for leading a life of shame, it is you, who lacked good example.’

  ‘Alas! I was not baptised, and haven’t received the teachings of any religion.’

  ‘Then everything can be put right,’ the priest went on, ‘so long as your faith, your repentance, are sincere and without reservation.’

  ‘Lucien and God fill my heart,’ said she with a touching ingenuousness.

  ‘You might have said God and Lucien,’ the priest replied smiling. ‘You remind me of the object of my visit. Omit nothing concerning this young man.’

  ‘You come on his behalf?’ she asked with a loving expression which would have melted the heart of any other priest. ‘Oh, he suspected what I might do!’

  ‘No,’ he replied, ‘it isn’t your death but your life which gives rise to concern. Come, explain what the relations are between you.’

  ‘In one word,’ said she.

  The poor wench trembled at the ecclesiastic’s abrupt tone, but as a woman to whom gross incivility has long been without surprise.

  ‘Lucien is Lucien,’ she continued, ‘the handsomest young man, and the best of living beings; but if you know him, my love must seem to you only natural. I met him by chance, three months ago, at the Porte Saint Martin where I had gone on my day out; for we had a free day a week at Madame Mey-nardie’s where I was. Next day, you will easily understand that I broke away without permission. Love had entered my heart, and had so changed me that, returning from the theatre, I no longer recognized myself: I filled myself with horror. Lucien never knew. Instead of telling him the house I was in, I gave him the address of this lodging where a friend of mine was then living, who was kind enough to give it up to me. I give you my sacred word…’

  ‘You must not swear.’

  ‘Is it swearing to give one’s sacred word? Well, since that day I have worked in this room, like a madwoman, making shirts at twenty-eight sous on order, so as to live by honest work. For a month I lived on nothing but potatoes, to remain good and worthy of Lucien, who loves me and respects me as the most virtuous of the virtuous. I made my declaration in form to the Police, in order to resume my rights
, and I am under supervision for two years. They, who are so prompt to inscribe you on the roll of infamy, show an extreme reluctance to strike your name out. All I asked heaven was to protect my resolution. I shall be nineteen in April: at that age things are easier. To me, it seems that I was only born three months ago… I prayed to God every morning, and begged Him to grant that Lucien should never learn what my life had been. I bought the Virgin you see there; I prayed to her in my own way, seeing that I don’t know any prayers; I can neither read nor write, I have never been into a church, I’ve never seen God except in processions, out of curiosity.’

  ‘‘And what do you say to the Virgin?’

  ‘I speak to her as I speak to Lucien, with those sudden impulses of the soul which make him weep.’

  ‘Ah,he weeps?’

  ‘With joy,’ she added quickly. ‘Poor lamb! we understand each other so well that it is only a single soul we share! He’s so kind, so affectionate, so gentle in heart, mind and manners…! He says he’s a poet, I say he’s God… Forgive me! but, you priests, you don’t know what love is. And then only those like me can know men well enough to appreciate a Lucien. A Lucien, I tell you, is as rare as a woman without sin; when you meet one, you can’t any longer love anybody but him: that’s all. But a man like that needs somebody like him. So I wanted to be worthy to be loved by my Lucien. That led to my downfall. Yesterday, at the Opera, I was recognized by some young men who’ve got no more heart than there is pity in tigers; I could still get on with a tiger! The veil of innocence I was wearing fell; their laughter rent head and heart. Don’t think you have saved me, I shall die of grief.’ ‘Your veil of innocence?…’ said the priest, ‘so you treated Lucien with, shall we say, a degree of severity?’