A Harlot High and Low

by Honoré de Balzac

  The poor gipsy, the wounded wild swallow, for the second time aroused Carlos Herrera’s pity. This minister of gloom, whom God seemed likely to use only for the execution of His vengeance, responded to the invalid with a smile which expressed as much bitterness as kindness, as much punishment as charity. Instructed in meditation, in self-containment as a consequence of her almost monastic life, Esther, for the second time, experienced a feeling of distrust at the sight of her protector; but, as on the first occasion, she was immediately reassured by his words.

  ‘Well, now, my dear child,’ he said, ‘why have you never mentioned Lucien to me?’

  ‘I promised you,’ she replied trembling convulsively from head to foot, ‘I swore to you not to pronounce that name.’

  ‘Nevertheless you have not stopped thinking of him.’

  ‘That, sir, is my only fault. I think of him all the time, and when you appeared, I was saying his name to myself.’

  ‘Absence is killing you?’

  Esther’s only reply was to bow her head like a sick person who already feels the breath of the tomb upon her.

  ‘To see him again?…’ he said.

  ‘That would be to live,’ she answered.

  ‘Do you think of him only with your soul?’

  ‘Ah, sir, love is not divided.’

  ‘Daughter of the accursed race! I’ve done everything to save you, I abandon you to your destiny: you shall see him!’

  ‘Why do you insult my happiness? May I not love Lucien and practise virtue, which I love as much as I love him? Am I not ready to die here for that, as I am for him? Am I not at the point of death out of a dual fanaticism, for virtue which made me worthy of him, for him who flung me into the arms of virtue? Yes, ready to die without seeing him again, ready to see him and live. God is my judge.’

  Her colour had returned, her pallor had taken on a tinge of gold. Esther was again a graceful being.

  ‘The day after that on which you are washed in the waters of baptism, you will see Lucien again, and if you think you can live in virtue while living for him, you shall no more be separated.’

  The priest was obliged to raise Esther up, for her knees had given way. The poor creature had fallen as if the earth had given way under her feet, the priest seated her on the bench, and when she had recovered the power of speech, she said to him: ‘Why not today?’

  ‘Do you wish to deny Monsignor the triumph of your baptism and conversion? You are too near Lucien not to be far from God.’

  ‘Yes, I wasn’t thinking of anything any longer!’

  ‘You will never belong to any religion,’ said the priest with a profoundly ironical expression.

  ‘God is good,’ she replied, ‘he reads in my heart.’

  Overcome by the delightful simplicity shining in Esther’s voice, her looks, her gestures, her attitude, Herrera kissed her on the forehead for the first time.

  ‘The libertines gave you the right name: you will charm God the Father. A few days more, it must be, and after that you will both be free.’

  ‘Both!’ she repeated with ecstatic joy.

  This scene, observed at a distance, struck both boarders and their superiors, who thought they were watching some operation of magic, comparing Esther with her own self. She reappeared in her true nature of love, pretty, dainty, provocative, gay; in short, she returned from the dead!

  Various reflections

  HERRERA lived in the rue Cassette, near Saint Sulpice, the church to which he had attached himself. This church, of a harsh, bare style, suited this Spaniard whose religion was of a Dominican flavour. A forlorn hope of the wily policies of Ferdinand VII, he served the constitutional cause, knowing that his devotion must remain unrewarded until the restoration of the Reynetto. And Carlos Herrera had given himself body and soul to the camarilla at a time when the Cortes seemed unlikely to be dissolved. In the eyes of the world, such conduct proved him to be a superior man. The Duc d’Angoulême’s expedition had taken place, King Ferdinand sat on the throne, and Carlos Herrera did not go to Madrid to claim the reward of his service. Protected against curiosity by diplomatic silence, he gave out as the reason for his stay in Paris his lively affection for Lucien de Rubempré, to which that young man already owed the King’s ordinance respecting his change of name. He lived moreover, as priests employed on secret missions traditionally live, very obscurely. He performed his religious duties at Saint Sulpice, went out only on business, always in the evening and by coach. The day-time was taken up for him with the Spanish siesta, which places sleep between the two meals of the day, and thus occupies the whole of the period during which Paris is busy and tumultuous. The Spanish cigar also played its part and consumed as much time as tobacco. Sloth is as much a mask as gravity, which is a form of sloth. Herrera lived in one wing of the house, on the second floor, and Lucien occupied the other wing. The two apartments were at once separate and combined by a large reception suite whose antique splendour was as well adapted to the grave ecclesiastic as to the young poet. The courtyard of the house was gloomy. Tall, thick trees shaded the garden. Silence and discretion meet in the habitations chosen by priests. Herrera’s lodging will be described in two words: a cell. Lucien’s, all luxury and comfort, brought together everything that a fashionable life may require in a dandy, poet, writer, man of ambition, of vice, at once proud and merely vain, careless but concerned with order, one of those incomplete geniuses who do not lack power to desire, to conceive, which is perhaps the same thing, but in whom the power of execution is lacking. Between them, Lucien and Herrera constituted a politician. That was no doubt the secret of their alliance. Old men in whom the mainspring of action has been deflected to the sphere of personal interests, often feel the need for a piece of fine machinery, for a youthful and passionate actor capable of accomplishing their designs. Richelieu looked too late for a fair, white, mustachioed face to cast to the women it was important he should keep amused. With only stupid and uncomprehending young men about him, he was forced to banish his master’s mother and terrorize the queen, after having tried to make both love him, lacking those gifts which appeal to queens. However one goes about it, in a life of ambition one is certain to come up against a woman just when such an encounter is least to be expected. However powerful a politician may be, he needs a woman to set against a woman, just as the Dutch cut diamond with diamond. At its moment of power, Rome bowed to this necessity. See also how differently the French cardinal and his Italian successor, Mazarin, exercised authority in their time. Richelieu meets with opposition from the great lords, and puts the axe to their roots; he dies at the height of his power, worn out by the duel in which his only second was a Capuchin friar. Mazarin is rejected by the Nobility and the Third Estate together, in arms, sometimes victorious, able to drive royalty into flight; but the servant of Anne of Austria deprives nobody of his head, woos and conquers all France and forms Louis XIV, who completed Richelieu’s work by garrotting them with gold laces in the great seraglio of Versailles. With the death of Madame de Pompadour, Choiseul was lost. Was Herrera penetrated with these high doctrines? Had he taken his own true measure earlier in life than Richelieu? Had he picked Lucien as a Cinq-Mars, but a Cinq-Mars who would be faithful? Nobody was in a position to answer these questions or to assess either the extent or the aim of the Spaniard’s ambition. When such questions were asked by those who had caught a glimpse of the association, till then concealed, the answer they seemed to discover was rather horrifying, and Lucien had only been aware of it for a few days past. Carlos was ambitious enough for two, his conduct proved that to those who knew him, and they all believed that Lucien was the priest’s natural son.

  Fifteen months after his appearance at the Opera, which cast him too soon upon a society in which the priest did not mean to see him until he was fully armed against it, Lucien had three fine horses in his stable, a brougham for the evening, a cabriolet and a gig for the day-time. He ate out. Herrera’s predictions had been justified, and the young man was dissolu
te enough, but the priest had judged it necessary to divert him from the wild love he bore in his heart for Esther. After spending some forty thousand francs, each of his follies only brought Lucien back more vividly to the Torpedo, he sought her obstinately; and, not finding her, she became for him what his game is to the hunter. Could Herrera know the nature of a poet’s love? Once the feeling has gone to the head of one of these little great men, once it has scorched his heart and gained access to his senses, the poet’s superiority to the rest of mankind is made as evident to him by love as it was by the abundance of his imagination. Owing to a freak operation of his intelligence, the poet expresses nature in images to which he attaches both feeling and thought, and the wings of the latter are attached to his love: he feels and depicts, he acts and meditates, he intensifies his sensations with thought, he triples present felicity with aspiration towards the future and memory of the past; with all this he mingles those pleasures of the soul which make him the prince among artists. The passion of a poet thus becomes a great poem in which merely human dimensions are lost. Doesn’t the poet then place his mistress higher than women like to be lodged? Like the sublime knight of la Mancha, he transforms a peasant girl into a princess. He makes his own uses of the wand with which he touches everything to make it marvellous, and sensual pleasure is augmented by the realm of the adorable ideal. His love thus becomes an archetype of passion: it is excessive in every respect, in its hopes and its despairs, its angers, its melancholies, its joys; it flies, it leaps, it crawls, it is quite unlike what agitates the rest of mankind; to bourgeois love it is what the eternal torrent of the Alps is to the stream of the plains. Such fine geniuses are so rarely understood that they expend themselves in false hopes; they consume themselves in a search for the ideal mistress, they almost invariably die like rare insects ostentatiously decked out for love-feasts by an all-too-poetical nature, trodden underfoot still virgin by a passing boot; but, another danger! when they meet the form which corresponds to their thought and which often enough is a baker’s wife, they do what Raphael did, what the rare insects do, they die in the arms of la Fornarina. That was the point Lucien had reached. His poetic nature, of necessity extreme in everything, in good as in evil, had divined the angel in the prostitute, rather brushed by corruption than corrupt: he saw her always white, winged, pure and mysterious, as she had made herself for him, guessing that that was how he wanted her to be.

  A friend

  TOWARDS the end of May 1825, all Lucien’s vivacity had left him; he stopped going out, dined with Herrera, remained pensive, worked, read treatises on diplomacy, sat cross-legged like a Turk on his divan and smoked three or four hookahs a day. His groom was more occupied in cleaning the tubes of this elegant instrument and scenting them, than in sleeking the coats of the horses and decking their manes with roses for a trot in the Bois. The day on which the Spaniard noticed Lucien’s pale brow and detected signs of sickness beneath the wild manifestations of stifled love, he determined to sound the heart of the man on whom his life’s purposes rested.

  One fine evening when Lucien, sitting in an armchair, was mechanically contemplating the sunset through the trees in the garden and through the veil of scented smoke he puffed out with leisurely regularity, as preoccupied smokers do, he was drawn out of his daydream by a deep sigh. He turned and saw the priest standing there, with his arms folded.

  ‘You were there all the time! ‘ said the poet.

  ‘For long enough,’ answered the priest, ‘my thoughts have been following yours as far as they went…’

  Lucien understood what he meant.

  ‘I never pretended to have a nature of bronze like yours. For me life is by turns a heaven and a hell; but when, by chance, it is neither one nor the other, it bores me, I am bored…’

  ‘How can one be bored when one has so many splendid hopes before one…’

  ‘When one doesn’t believe in these hopes, or when they are too heavily veiled…’

  ‘Enough of this nonsense!…’ said the priest. ‘It would be more worthy of you and of me to open your heart to me. There lies between us what there should never be: a secret! This secret has lain there for sixteen months. You are in love with a woman.’

  ‘So…’

  ‘A vile tart, called the Torpedo… ’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘My child, I didn’t mind you taking a mistress, but a lady at court, young, beautiful, with influence, a countess at least. I chose Madame d’Espard for you, meaning quite without scruple that she should be the instrument of your fortune; for she would never have warped your heart, she would have left you free… To fall in love with the lowest kind of prostitute, when you cannot, like a king, raise her to noble rank, is a very great mistake.’

  ‘Am I the first to give up ambition and yield to unbridled love?’

  ‘Good!’ said the priest picking up the bocchettino of the hookah which Lucien had let fall to the floor and returning it to him. ‘I take your meaning. Cannot ambition and love be reconciled? Child, you have in old Herrera a mother absolutely devoted…’

  ‘I know, my dear,’ said Lucien taking his hand and shaking it.

  ‘You wanted a rich man’s baubles, you have them. You want to cut a figure, I open the way to power before you, I kiss the dirtiest hands to help your advancement, and you will advance. A little while yet, and you’ll lack nothing of what appeals to men or women. Effeminate in your waywardness, you have a virile mind: I have thought of everything for you, I forgive you anything. You have only to speak to satisfy your passions of a day. I have set upon your life the seal which makes others adore it, that of political authority. You will be just as great when you are small; but you mustn’t break the press which coins the money. I allow you anything, except weaknesses that would destroy your future. When I open the doors of the Faubourg Saint Germain to you, I forbid you to wallow in the gutter! Lucien! I shall be a rod of iron in your interest, I shall endure all from you, all for you. To begin with, I turned your clumsiness at the game of life into an experienced gambler’s touch… (Lucien raised his head with an abrupt and angry movement.)

  ‘I removed the Torpedo!’

  ‘You?’ cried Lucien.

  In an access of animal fury, the poet stood up, threw the gem-encrusted gold bocchettino at the priest’s face, and pushed him with a violence great enough to throw him down, powerful as he was.

  ‘I,’ said the Spaniard picking himself up, his gravity of manner quite undisturbed.

  His black wig had fallen off. A skull smooth as a death’s head revealed the man’s true physiognomy; it struck terror. Lucien sat down again on his divan, arms hanging, overwhelmed, looking stupidly at the priest, who said again:

  ‘I removed her.’

  ‘What have you done with her? You took her away the day after the masked ball…’

  ‘Yes, the day after I saw one who belonged to you insulted by rascals I wouldn’t lower myself to kick in…’

  ‘You flatter them,’ said Lucien interrupting, ‘call them monsters, beside whom those they guillotine are angels. Do you know what the poor Torpedo did for three of them? One of them was her lover for two months: she was poor, and she picked up her bread in the gutter; he hadn’t a penny, he was like me when you first met me, near jumping in the river; this fellow used to get up in the night, go to the cupboard where the remains of this wench’s dinner were, and eat them: in the end she discovered his little game; she understood how ashamed he must be, she took care to leave plenty for him, and she was glad to do it; she’d never mentioned it, but she told me in the cab on our way from the Opera. The second had stolen money, but before he was found out she was able to lend him the amount, and he put it back, but afterwards forgot to repay the poor child. As to the third, she made his fortune by putting on an act worthy of the genius of a Figaro; she passed for his wife and became the mistress of a very powerful man who believed her the most guileless and respectable of women. One owed her his life, one his honour, the last a fortune which he
still has! And that was how they rewarded her.’

  ‘Shall they die?’ said Herrera who had a tear in his eye.

  ‘Ah, that’s you as I know you!…’

  ‘No, wait, you must know all, mad poet,’ said the priest, ‘the Torpedo no longer exists…’

  Lucien flew at Herrera’s throat with so much force that any other man would have fallen again, but the Spaniard’s arm took hold of the poet.

  ‘Listen,’ he said coldly. ‘I have turned her into a chaste woman, pure, well-bred, religious, a woman who can hold her head up; she is under instruction. She can, she must become, beneath the empire of your love, a Ninon, a Marion de Lorme, a Dubarry, as the journalist at the Opera was saying. You can acknowledge her as your mistress or you can stand in the wings of your creation, which might be wiser! Either arrangement will afford you both profit and pride, pleasure and advancement; but if you are as great a politician as you are a poet, Esther will still be just a whore to you, for later she may stand us in good stead, she is worth her weight in gold. Drink, but don’t get drunk. If I hadn’t picked up the reins of your passion, where would you be today? You would have been rolling with the Torpedo in the mire of wretchedness from which I raised you. Here, read this,’ said Herrera with the simplicity of Talma in Manlius, which he had never seen.

  A paper dropped on to the knees of the poet, and roused him from the ecstasy of surprise into which this awe-inspiring utterance had plunged him. He took up and read the first letter ever written by Mademoiselle Esther.