A Harlot High and Low
Page 6
‘That love must give you the courage to obey me blindly. If I led you at once to the house where you will be educated, everybody here would tell Lucien that you had gone away, today Sunday, with a priest; that would put him on your path. In a week from now, the caretaker, not seeing me come back, will have taken me for what I am not. So, one evening, say today week, at seven o’ clock, you will go out secretly and enter a cab which will be waiting for you at the end of the rue des Frondeurs. Avoid Lucien all week; find excuses, have him forbidden the door, and, when he comes, go upstairs to a friend’s room; I shall know whether you’ve seen him, and, in that case, everything is over, I shan’t even return. You’ll need a week to put some respectable clothes together and stop looking like a prostitute,’ he said putting a purse on the mantelpiece. ‘There is in your manner, your clothes, that something so well known to Parisians which tells them what you are. Have you never met in the street, on the boulevards, a modest, virtuous young person out with her mother?’
‘Oh, yes, to my cost! The sight of a mother and her daughter is one of our worst tortures, it awakens a remorse hidden in the recesses of our hearts, eating us away!… I know only too well what I lack.’
‘Well, then, you know what you should look like next Sunday,’ said the priest, rising.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘before you go, teach me a real prayer, so that I can pray to God!’
It was a touching sight, that of this priest making the penitent whore repeat the Ava Maria and Paternoster in French.
‘How beautiful they are!’ said Esther when she had once gone without mistake through the two popular and magnificent expressions of Catholic faith.
‘What is your name?’ she asked the priest as he left.
‘Carlos Herrera, I am a Spaniard and banished from my country.’
Esther took his hand and kissed it. She was no longer a harlot, but a fallen angel getting up again.
A portrait Titian would have liked to paint
IN a house famous for the aristocratic and religious education received there, in early March of that year, one Monday morning, the boarders saw their pretty company augmented by a new arrival whose beauty incontestably surpassed not merely that of her companions, but the finest points of each. In France, it is extremely rare, if indeed it is not impossible, to meet the thirty celebrated perfections described in lines of Persian verse and carved, it is said, in the seraglio, which a woman needs in order to be wholly beautiful. In France, if general harmony is uncommon, ravishing details abound. As to that perfect and imposing harmony which statuary seeks to render, and which it has rendered in one or two notable compositions, such as the Diana and the Callipygian Venus, it is the privilege of Greece and Asia Minor. Esther came from this cradle of the human species, the homeland of beauty: her mother was Jewish. The Jews, though so often debased by their contact with other peoples, yet present among their numerous tribes strains in which the sublimest type of Asiatic beauty is preserved. When they are not of repulsive ugliness, they display the magnificent character of Armenian features. Esther would have carried off the prize in a seraglio, she possessed the thirty beauties harmoniously blended. Far from deleteriously affecting the fine edges of her figure, the freshness of her complexion, her odd life had given her an elusively feminine quality: no longer the closely smooth texture of green fruit, nor yet the hot bloom of maturity, the blossom was still there. A little longer spent in dissolution, she would have grown plump. That abundant health, that animal perfection of the creature in whom voluptuousness takes the place of thought must be a salient fact in the eyes of physiologists.
By a rare circumstance, if indeed it is ever found in very young girls, her hands, incomparably formed, were soft, transparent and white like those of a woman brought to bed of her second child. She had exactly the foot and the hair, so justly renowned, of the Duchesse de Berri, hair no hairdresser’s hand could hold, so abundant was it, and so long, that falling to the ground it coiled there, for Esther was of that medium height which allows a woman to be made a kind of toy, to be taken up, put down, taken up again and carried without fatigue. Her skin as fine as Chinese rice-paper, its amber warmth tinted with pink veins, had a sheen without dryness, softness without moisture. Remarkably vigorous, though delicate in appearance, Esther caught attention suddenly with a characteristic most often remarked in faces which Raphael’s pencil disengaged to perfection, for of all painters Raphael most closely studied and best rendered Jewish beauty. This marvellous feature was effected by the depth of the arch beneath which the eye turned as though liberated from its setting, its curve sharply defined as the groining of a vault. When the pure and diaphanous tints of youth and finely marked eyebrows clothe such an arch; when the light which slips into the hollow circle beneath it is all a bright rose, there are treasures of tenderness to content a lover, beauties of which a painter may despair. Those luminous recesses where the shadows take on tones of gold, this tissue fine as a ligament and flexible as the most sensitive membrane, are nature’s final achievement. The eye is at rest therein like a miraculous egg in a nest of spun silk. But in later life a frightful melancholy may afflict this marvel, when the passions have charred these thin contours, when grief has contracted this network of fibrils. Esther’s origins were betrayed by the oriental formation of her Turkish-lidded eyes, their colour a slate-grey which, in the light, caught the blue tint in the black wings of a raven. Only the extreme tenderness of her gaze dimmed their brilliance. In the eyes of the desert races alone may be seen the power to fascinate everybody, for a woman may always fascinate one or two. No doubt their eyes retain something of the infinitude they have contemplated. Can it be that nature, in her prescience, has provided their retinas with some capacity for reflecting back and thus enduring the mirage of the sands, the torrents of sunlight, the burning cobalt of the ether? or that human beings, like others, derive some quality from the surroundings among which they have been developed, and that its attributes stay with them over centuries! This great solution to the problem of race is perhaps inherent in the question itself. The instincts are living facts whose cause resides in some necessity endured. Animal species result from the exercise of these instincts. To be convinced of this truth so greatly sought, it is enough to extend to the human herd an observation recently made on flocks of Spanish and British sheep which, on lowland pastures where the grass is thick, feed close together, while they scatter on hill pastures where the grass is thin. Remove these two breeds of sheep from their native lands, transport them into Switzerland or France: the mountain sheep continues to feed alone, though in low-lying, close-grassed meadows; the valley sheep will feed close together, though on an Alp. The acquired and transmitted instinct is barely modified after several generations. At a hundred years’ distance, the mountain spirit reappears in a refractory lamb, as, after eighteen hundred years of exile, the East shone through the eyes and in the visage of Esther. This look cast no dread fascination, but rather a gentle warmth, it caused heartstrings to slacken without surprise, it weakened the hardest will by its mild heat. Esther had overcome hatred, she had astounded the rakes of Paris, and in the end that look and the sweetness of her smooth skin had bestowed upon her the dreadful nickname which already provided the inscription for her tomb. In her, everything was harmoniously in character with a peri of the burning sands. Her forehead was strong and proudly designed. Her nose, like that of the Arabs, was fine, narrow, oval-nostrilled, well-placed, turned up at the edges. Her red, fresh mouth was a rose without blemish, orgies had left no mark upon it. The chin, modelled as though by a sculptor in love, was of milky whiteness. One thing which she had not had time to remedy betrayed the courtesan fallen too low: her torn nails had not yet recovered their elegance, so much had they been deformed by common household cares. The young boarders began with jealousy of her miracles of beauty, but ended in admiration. Before a week had passed they had taken the simple Esther to their hearts, interested by the secret misfortunes of a girl of eighteen who could neither
read nor write, to whom all knowledge, all instruction were new, and who was about to bring to the archbishop the glory of the conversion of a Jewess to Catholicism, to the convent the festival of her baptism. They forgave her her beauty, finding themselves her superiors in the matter of education. Esther had quickly taken on the manner, the gentleness of voice, the bearing and attitudes of these daughters of distinction; finally she recovered her first nature. The change was so complete that, at his first visit, Herrera was astonished, he whom nothing in the world seemed able to surprise, and her superiors complimented him on his pupil. These women had never, in their teaching career, met with a nature more amiable, a more Christian gentleness, truer modesty, nor so great a desire to learn. When a girl has suffered the misfortunes which had overwhelmed the poor boarder and expects such a reward as the Spaniard offered Esther, it is almost certain that she will renew those miracles of the first days of the Church which the Jesuits brought about in Paraguay.
‘She is an edification,’ said Mother Superior kissing her on the forehead.
This essentially Catholic word told all.
A form of bomesickness
DURING recreation, Esther discreetly questioned her companions about the simplest things in the world, which to her were like life’s first surprises to á child. When she knew that she would be dressed in white on the day of her baptism and first communion, that she would wear a white satin hair-band, white ribbons, white shoes, white gloves, with a white bow on her head, she burst into tears in the midst of her astonished companions. It was the opposite of the scene of Jephthah’s daughter upon the mountain. The harlot feared to be understood, she attributed her dreadful melancholy to the joy the spectacle caused her in anticipation. As there is certainly as great a distance between the customs she was giving up and those she was adopting as there is between the savage state and civilization, she exhibited the grace and simplicity, the depth, which single out the wonderful heroine of The Prairie. She also, without knowing it herself, was gnawed at by the love in her heart, a strange love, a desire more violent in her who knew all than it is in a virgin who knows nothing, although both desires had the same cause and the same purpose. During the first months, the novelty of a secluded life, the surprises of her instruction, the tasks she was taught to perform, the practices of religion, the fervour of a devout resolution, the sweetness of the affection she inspired, above all the exercise of the faculties of awakened intelligence, all helped to keep her memories in check, even her efforts in creating a new memory; for she had as much to unlearn as to learn. We have more than one memory; the body, the mind, each have their own; and nostalgia, for example, is a sickness of the physical memory. During the third month, the impetus of this virgin spirit, straining with outstretched wings towards paradise, was thus, not tamed, but impeded by a muffled resistance whose origin was unknown to Esther herself. Like the sheep of Scotland, she wanted to feed apart, she could not conquer the instincts developed by debauchery. Was she reminded of it by the muddy streets of Paris which she had abjured? Did the chains of her dreadful broken habits cleave to her by forgotten seals, and did she feel them as, according to doctors, old soldiers still feel pain in the limbs they have lost? Had vice and its excesses so penetrated to her marrow that holy water could not yet reach the demon hidden there? Was the sight of him for whom such angelic efforts were being made necessary to her whom God must forgive for mingling human with divine love? The one had led her to the other. Was a shift of vital force taking place in her, in such a way as to cause suffering? All is doubt and darkness in a situation which science has not deigned to examine, fearing to compromise itself with an immoral subject, as though doctor and writer, priest and statesman were not above suspicion. A doctor stopped by death showed nevertheless the courage to begin studies left incomplete. Perhaps the black melancholy to which Esther was a prey and which darkened her otherwise happy life derived from all these causes; and incapable of guessing what they were, it may be that she .suffered like the sick who know nothing of medicine or surgery. The fact is curious. An abundance of wholesome food did not sustain Esther as well as the detestable, inflaming diet it had replaced. A pure and regular life, shared between periods of recreation and tasks deliberately made light, tired the young boarder. The freshest sleep, the calm nights which had taken the place of crushing fatigue and cruel agitation, produced a fever whose symptoms eluded the nurse’s finger and eye. Good fortune and well-being after evil and misfortune, security after restless disquiet, were as deadly to Esther as her past wretchedness would have been to her young companions. Rooted in corruption, she had grown in it. Her infernal homeland still maintained its empire, in spite of the dictates of sovereign will. What she hated was life to her, what she loved was fatal. She had so ardent a faith that her piety rejoiced the soul. She loved to pray. She had opened her soul to the light of true religion, which she received without doubt or difficulty. The priest who directed her conscience was in raptures, but her body contradicted her soul at every turn. To satisfy a whim of Madame de Maintenon, who fed them with scraps from the royal table, carp were taken from a muddy pond and placed in a marble tank of clear, running water. They died. Animals are capable of devotion, but man cannot infect them with the disease of flattery. A courtier remarked on this mute opposition at Versailles. ‘They are like me,’ said the secret queen, ‘they regret their obscure mud.’ This saying contains the whole of Esther’s story. At times, the poor wench was impelled to run out into the splendid convent gardens, she went busily from tree to tree, she pushed her way into shady corners, seeking what? she did not know it, but she was yielding to the demon, she flirted with the trees, spoke unarticulated words to them. At times, in the late evening, she glided like a snake along the walls, without shawl, her shoulders bare. Often in chapel, she remained with her eyes fixed upon the crucifix, and everybody admired her, overcome with tears; but she was weeping with rage; instead of the holy images she wanted to see, flaming nights in which she conducted the orgy as Habeneck at the Conservatoire conducts a Beethoven symphony, those gay, lascivious nights, with their agitated movements and inextinguishable laughter, rose before her dishevelled, furious, brutal. She was outwardly suave as a virgin earthbound only by her feminine shape, inwardly a raging, imperial Messalina. She alone knew of this combat between the demon and the angel; when Mother Superior chided her for making more show of her hair than the rule intended, she changed her way of doing her hair with adorably prompt obedience, she was ready to cut off her hair if the nun had so ordained. Her nostalgia had a touching grace in this girl who would rather have perished than return to the world of impurity. Mother Superior slackened her instruction, and took the interesting creature aside to question her. Esther was happy, she found her company wholly to her taste; she did not feel attacked in any vital part, but her essential vitality was affected. She regretted nothing, she desired nothing. Mother Superior, puzzled by the answers her boarder made, did not know what to think on seeing her thus a prey to devouring listlessness. The doctor was called when the young boarder’s condition began to look serious, but he knew nothing of Esther’s former life and had no reason to suspect it; there was life everywhere, there was no pain. The invalid responded in a way that discounted all theories. One way remained to clear up the doubts of the learned physician struck by a dreadful thought: Esther obstinately refused to allow herself to be examined by the doctor. At this perilous juncture, Mother Superior had recourse to Father Herrera. The Spaniard came, perceived Esther’s desperate plight, and took the doctor briefly aside. After this confidence, the man of science declared to the man of faith that the only remedy was a trip to Italy. The priest did not wish any such step to be taken before Esther’s baptism and first communion.
‘ How much longer will that take? ’ asked the doctor.
‘A month,’ said Mother Superior.
‘She will be dead by then,’ replied the doctor.
‘Yes, but in a state of grace and saved,’ said the priest.
‘Not a word, sir!’ he said.
The doctor, though a church and monarchy man, cast upon Esther a glance full of tenderness and pity. The wench was as beautiful as a lily drooping upon its stalk.
‘Then God’s will be done!’ he cried as he went out.
The very day of this consultation, Esther was taken by her protector to the Rocher-de-Cancale restaurant in the rue Mont-orgueil, for the desire of saving her had suggested strange expedients to the priest; he tried out two forms of excess; an excellent dinner which might remind the former harlot of her orgies, the Opera which placed images of the world of fashion before her. It needed his sternest authority to persuade the young saint to such profane courses. Herrera so thoroughly disguised himself as a military man that Esther had difficulty in recognizing him; he took the precaution of making his companion wear a veil, and placed her in a box where she could avoid the public gaze. This palliative, without peril to innocence so determinedly reconquered, was promptly given up. The boarder felt nothing but distaste for her protector’s dinners, but spiritual repugnance for the theatre, and retreated into her melancholy. ‘She is dying of love for Lucien,’ Herrera told himself, anxious to sound the depths of this soul and to discover what it could endure. There came, then, a moment at which the poor creature was sustained only by her moral force, and at which the body was near to giving way. The priest calculated this moment with the frightful practical sagacity formerly brought by executioners to their art of putting the question. He found his ward in the garden, sitting on a bench, beside an arbour caressed by the April sun; she appeared to be cold and to be warming herself; her comrades studied with interest her pallor like that of withered grass, her eyes those of a dying gazelle, her melancholy pose. Esther rose to greet the Spaniard with a movement which showed how little life she had, and, let it be said, how little taste for life.