‘We came very near to destitution,’ replied Lucien, tears starting to his eyes. ‘That wasn’t calumny, just plain scandal-mongering. Today my sister is more than a millionaire, and my mother died two years ago… These revelations were being kept for the moment at which I seemed likely to succeed here…’
‘But what did you do to Madame d’Espard?’
‘I was imprudent enough to recount, at Madame de Sérisy’s, as an amusing story, before Messieurs de Bauvan and de Granville, the action she brought to obtain an injunction against her husband, the Marquis d’Espard, which Bianchon had told me about. Monsieur de Granville’s opinion, supported by Bauvan and Sérisy, caused the Keeper of the Seals to change his. They were both afraid of the Gazette des Tribunaux, of a scandal, and the marquise was rapped over the knuckles when grounds were delivered for the judgment which put an end to this horrible affair. If Monsieur de Sérisy committed an indiscretion which made the marquise a mortal enemy of mine, I gained his protection, the Attorney General’s and that of Count Octave de Bauvan whom Madame de Sérisy told about the peril they’d put me in by letting the source of their information be guessed. Monsieur le Marquis d’Espard was clumsy enough to call on me, since he regarded me as the cause of him winning this infamous case.’
‘I’m going to rid us of Madame d’Espard,’ said Clotilde.
‘How?’ cried Lucien.
‘My mother will invite d’Espard’s children who are charming and already quite big. The father and his two sons will sing your praises here, we can be sure of never seeing their mother again…’
‘Oh, Clotilde! you’re adorable, if I didn’t love you for yourself, I should love you for your wit.’
‘That isn’t wit,’ she said putting all her love into her smile. ‘Good-bye. Stay away for a few days. When you see me at Saint Thomas Aquinas’s with a pink scarf, my father’s mood will have changed. There’s a reply stuck to the back of the chair you’re sitting on, it may console you for not seeing us. Put the letter you’ve brought me into my handkerchief…’
This young person was clearly older than twenty-seven.
The house of a dutiful daughter
LUCIEN took a cab to the rue de la Planche, got out on the boulevards, took another at the Madeleine and gave the driver the address in the rue Taitbout.
At eleven o’clock, when he reached Esther’s, he found her in tears, but dressed as though he and she had something to celebrate! She waited for Lucien lying on a divan of white satin brocaded with yellow flowers, wearing a delicious wrap of Indian muslin, with cherry-coloured ribbon knots, uncorseted, her hair simply caught up on her head, her feet in pretty velvet slippers lined with cherry satin, all the candles lighted and the hookah ready; but she hadn’t smoked hers, which remained unlighted beside her, like a token of her situation. Hearing the doors open, she wiped away her tears, leaped up like a gazelle and enfolded Lucien in her arms like a tissue which, snatched by the wind, should wind itself round a tree.
‘Separated,’ she said, ‘is it true?…’
‘Oh, for a few days,’ replied Lucien.
Esther let go of Lucien and fell back upon the divan like one dead. In situations of this kind, most women chatter like parrots! Ah! they love you!… After five years, it is still to them the dawn of happiness, they cannot leave you, their indignation, despair, love, anger, regrets, terror, mortification and presentiments are sublime! In short, it is as pretty as a scene in Shakespeare. But, you must understand! women like that aren’t in love. When they are all they say they are, when truly they are in love, they behave as Esther did, as children do, as true love does; Esther didn’t say a word, she lay with her face in the cushions, and wept hot tears. For his part, Lucien made an effort to raise her and spoke to her.
‘But, child, we aren’t to be separated… What, after nearly four years of happiness, that’s how you take a period of absence. Ah, what have I done to all these wenches?…’ he said to himself remembering that he had been loved like that by Coralie.
‘How handsome you are, sir!’ said Europe.
The senses have their ideals. When the so-charming physical ideal is accompanied by the sweetness of character, the poetry which distinguished Lucien, it is not too difficult to imagine the wild passion of these creatures so eminently sensitive to the external gifts of nature, and so ingenuous in their admiration. Esther sobbed gently, and her posture betrayed extreme grief.
‘Little stupid,’ said Lucien, ‘haven’t they told you that my life is in question!…’
At this calculated utterance of Lucien’s, Esther stood up like a wild creature, her unknotted hair framed her sublime face like the leaves of a tree. She stared at Lucien with a fixed gaze.
‘Your life!…’ she cried raising her arms and then letting them fall with a gesture which belongs to imperilled women of that sort. It is a moment of truth with them, and must not be disregarded.
She drew from her girdle a wretched scrap of paper, then noticed Europe, and said to her: ‘Leave us, girl.’ When the door had closed behind Europe: ‘Look, he wrote this to me,’ she went on handing Lucien a letter which Carlos had just sent and which Lucien read aloud.
You will leave tomorrow morning at five o’clock, you will be taken to a keeper’s house in the depths of the forest of Saint Germain, you will occupy a room on the first floor. Do not leave this room until I say so, everything will be provided. The forester and his wife may be trusted. Do not write to Lucien. Do not stand at the window during the day; but you may walk out at night under the care of the forester, if you need exercise. Keep the blinds down on the way out: Lucien’s life is at stake.
Lucien will come this evening to take leave of you, burn this in front of him…
Lucien at once burned this letter with the flame of a candle.
‘Listen, my Lucien,’ said Esther after hearing the note read as a criminal may listen to his death sentence, ‘I won’t tell you that I love you, that would be stupid… For almost five years now, loving you has seemed as natural as breathing, as living… The very day on which my happiness began under the tutelage of that inexplicable being, who put me here as one puts a curious little animal in a cage, I knew that you’d have to be married. Marriage is a necessary part of your destiny, and God keep me from impeding the development of your fortune. This marriage is my death. But I shan’t cause you any annoyance; I shan’t act like one of those seamstresses who kill themselves with the aid of a little coal-stove, once was enough; the second time, it disgusts you, as Mariette said. No: I shall go far away, out of France. Asia knows secrets from her own country, she’s promised to show me how to die without trouble. You prick yourself, paf! it’s all over. I ask only one thing, my angel darling, not to be told lies. My life adds up: from the day I saw you in 1824 until today,I 've had more happiness than there is in the existences of ten lucky women. So, take me for what I am: a woman both strong and weak. Say to me: “I’m getting married.” I ask for no more than a very tender farewell, and you won’t hear me spoken of again…’ There was a moment’s silence after this declaration, whose sincerity was evident from the simplicity of the words and the accompanying gestures. ‘Is it a question of your marriage?’ she said plunging one of her brilliant, fascinating glances, like the blade of a dagger into Lucien’s blue eyes.
‘We’ve been working at that marriage for eighteen months, and it still isn’t arranged,’ replied Lucien, ‘I don’t know when it will be arranged; but it isn’t a question of that, my little one… it’s a question of the abbé, of me, of you… we’re in serious danger… Nucingen has seen you…’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘at Vincennes, did he recognize me?…’
‘No,’ answered Lucien, ‘but he’s in love with you enough to ruin himself. After dinner, when he was describing you in speaking of your meeting, I involuntarily, imprudently smiled, for in society I’m like a savage amid the traps of a tribe of enemies. Carlos, who spares me the trouble of thinking, finds the situation fraught with peril, he�
�s undertaking to break Nucingen if Nucingen takes it upon himself to spy on us, and the baron is quite capable of that; he spoke to me about the powerlessness of the police. You’ve lighted a fire in an old chimney caked with soot…’
‘What does your Spaniard mean to do?’ said Esther gently.
‘I don’t know, he told me to sleep on both ears,’ replied Lucien without daring to look at Esther.
‘If that’s how it is, I obey with that doglike submission I’m so good at,’ said Esther slipping her arm through Lucien’s and leading him into her bedroom as she said to him: ‘Did my Lulu dine well at the infamous Nucingen’s?’
‘Asia’s cooking makes it impossible to think a dinner good, however celebrated the cook at the house one dines at; but the dinner was prepared by Carême as it is every Sunday.’
Lucien involuntarily compared Esther with Clotilde. His mistress was so beautiful, so constantly charming that she had kept far away that monster which devours the strongest loves: satiety! – ‘What a pity it is,’ he said to himself, ‘to light on a wife in two volumes! in one, poetry, pleasure, love, devotion, beauty, gentleness…’ Esther was ferreting about as women do before going to bed, she darted here and there, fluttered and sang. You would have thought she was a humming-bird.
‘… In the other, name and nobility, race, honours, rank, knowledge of the world!… And no means of uniting them in a single person!’ cried Lucien inwardly.
Next morning, waking at seven o’clock in that delightful pink and white room, the poet found himself alone. When he rang, it was the fantastic Europe who bustled in.
‘What is it you want, sir?’
‘Esther!’
‘My lady left at a quarter to five. In accordance with the orders of the good father, I received a new face carriage paid.’
‘A woman?…’
‘No, sir, she’s English… one of those creatures who go out scrubbing at night, and our orders are to treat her as if it were my lady: what are you going to do, sir, with that big gawk?… My poor lady, how she wept as she climbed into the carriage… “However, I must!…” she cried. “I left that poor lamb sleeping,” she said wiping her tears; “Europe, if he had looked at me or if he had spoken my name, I should have stayed, ready to die with him…” Look, sir, I’m so fond of my lady, I didn’t let her see her substitute; plenty of ladies’ maids’d never have thought of that and broken their hearts.’
‘The Unknown is here, then?…’
‘She was in the carriage, sir, that took my lady away, and I hid her in my room, according to his instructions…’
‘What is she like?’
‘Oh, as good as you can expect in a bargain lot, but she’ll manage her part without trouble, if you put your mind to it, sir,’ said Europe and went off to fetch the replacement for Esther.
Monsiur de Nucingen at work
THE previous evening, before going to bed, the all-powerful banker had given orders to his personal manservant who, at seven o’clock already, introduced the famous Louchard, cleverest of the Trade Protection men, into a small reception-room to which the baron came in dressing-gown and slippers…
‘You hef been making fun with me!’ said he in reply to the security guard’s salutations.
‘It couldn’t be otherwise, baron. I do what I’m supposed to do, and I had the honour of telling you that I couldn’t be mixed up in an affair outside my functions. What did I promise you? that I’d put you in contact with that one of our agents who seemed to me likely to serve your turn best. But the baron knows about the demarcations which exist between men of different occupations… When you’re building a house, you don’t get a joiner to do a locksmith’s job. Well, there are two kinds of police: the Political Police, the Judicial Police. The judicial don’t do the work of the politicals, and vice versa. If you applied to the head of the Political Police, he’d need authorization from the minister to take on your business, and you wouldn’t dare explain it to the Director General of the Police of the Kingdom. A policeman who worked on his own account would be sacked. Now, the Judicial Police is just as careful as the Political Police. So nobody, either at the Ministry of the Interior or at the Prefecture, makes a move except in the interests of the State or in the interests of the Law.
If it’s a matter of a plot or a crime, well! my goodness, the top men will do what you want; but you must understand, baron, they’ve got other fish to fry than occupying themselves with the fifty thousand love affairs of Paris. For them like me, we’re only supposed to concern ourselves with arresting debtors; and as soon as anything else arises, we take an enormous risk if we disturb the peace of anybody else. I sent you one of my men, but I wouldn’t take responsibility; you told him to find you a woman somewhere in Paris, Contenson relieved you of a thousand francs and did nothing. Might as well look for a needle in a haystack as search Paris for a woman suspected of frequenting the Bois de Vincennes, whose description was like that of all the pretty women in Paris.’
‘Your Gontenson,’ said the baron, ‘goot he nit hef tolt me ze truce, instead of tittle me out of a tausend francs?’
‘Listen, Monsieur le Baron,’ said Louchard, ‘will you give me a thousand crowns, I’m going to give you… sell you, some advice.’
‘Must I pay tausend crowns for advice?’ asked Nucingen.
‘I’m not letting myself be caught, baron,’ replied Louchard. ‘You’re in love, see, you want to find the object of your passion, you’re withering like a lettuce without water. Only yesterday, your manservant told me, two doctors who came to the house found your condition dangerous; there’s only me can put you into the hands of a man clever enough… Ah, well, so! if your life isn’t worth a thousand crowns…’
‘Tell me ze name of zis so clever man, u nd count on my tschenerosidy!’
Louchard picked up his hat, bowed, took his leave.
‘Teufel man!’ cried Nucingen, ‘what is?… wait.’
‘Note carefully,’ said Louchard before taking the money, ‘that I am selling you information pure and simple. I will give you the name and address of the only man who can help you, but he is a master…’
‘Ton’t pee riticulous!’ cried Nucingen, ‘only Rothschild’s name iss vort tausend crowns, and only when it iss signed at ze bottom of a bill… I give you tausend francs?’
‘You’d haggle over a gold mine!’ said Louchard departing with a wave of the hand.
‘I’ll hef ze address for a note of five hundred francs,’ cried the baron who told his manservant to send his secretary in.
Lesage’s Turcaret no longer exists. The greatest, like the smallest, banker has since learnt to exercise his acumen over details: he haggles over the arts, good works, love, he’d haggle with the Pope over an absolution. Thus Nucingen, listening to Louchard, had rapidly calculated that Contenson, being the Commercial Guard’s right-hand man, must know the address of this Master Spy. Contenson would let him have for five hundred francs what Louchard hoped to sell for a thousand crowns. His speed of thought showed that if the man’s heart was infused with love, his brain was still that of a shark.
‘Yourself go, sir,’ said the baron to his secretary, ‘to Gontenson, the spy of Luchard, ze Commerzial Cart, but take a cabriolet, go quick, and prink him fast here, I await!… Return by ze karten kate. Hier ist ze key, for it is koot zing nobody see zat man at my house. Take him to de sommer-house in ze karten. Try to do what I say mit intelligence.’
There were people wanting to talk business with Nucingen; but he was waiting for Contenson, his mind was full of Esther, he was saying to himself that before long he would again see the woman to whom he owed these unhoped-for feelings. And he sent everybody away with vague words and ambiguous promises. Contenson seemed to him the most important man in Paris, he kept looking out for him in the garden. Finally, after giving orders for the doors to be fastened, he had his luncheon served in the pavilion which stood in a corner of the garden. Among his office staff, the conduct, the hesitation, of the craftiest, most
far-sighted, most politic of the bankers of Paris, seemed inexplicable.
‘What’s the matter with the chief?’ said a stockbroker to one of the senior clerks.
‘We don’t know, it seems that his health is giving rise to uneasiness; yesterday the baroness called in both Doctors Desplein and Bianchon…’
One day, a foreign delegation called on Newton when he was occupied in treating one of his dogs called Beauty, who as is well known, took up a lot of his time, and to whom (Beauty was a bitch) all he said was: ‘Ah, Beauty, you don’t know what you’ve just destroyed!…’ The foreigners respected the great man’s labours and went away. In all the lives of great men may be found a little bitch like Beauty. When Marshal Richelieu went to see Louis XV after the taking of Mahon, one of the greatest feats of arms of the eighteenth century, the King said to him: ‘Have you heard the news?… poor Lansmatt is dead!’ Lansmatt was a doorkeeper in the know about the King’s amorous intrigues. The bankers of Paris never knew what they owed to Contenson. Because of this spy, Nucingen allowed a huge deal to be concluded without him, though his part in it was already arranged. The shark’s guns of Speculation were every day trained on fortune, but a promise of Happiness detained the man elsewhere!
Contenson
THE famous banker was taking tea, nibbling slices of bread and butter like a man whose teeth had not been sharpened by appetite for a long time, when he heard a carriage stopping at the little door to his garden. Presently Nucingen’s secretary brought in Contenson, whom he had eventually located in a café near Saint Pelagia’s, where the agent was lunching on the tip given him by a debtor incarcerated with certain privileges which have to be paid for. Contenson, you must know, was a real poem, a Parisian poem. From his looks, you would have seen at first glance that the Figaro of Beaumarchais, the Mascarillo of Molière, Marivaux’s Frontins and Dancourt’s Lafleurs, those great exemplars of audacious knavery, of cunning brought to bay, of the setback turned to advantage, were mediocrities by contrast with this colossus of wretchedness and wit. When, in Paris, you meet a type, it is no mere man, it is a spectacle! it is no longer a moment in life, but a whole existence, several existences! Cook a plaster cast three times in a furnace, and you get a sort of bastard appearance of Florentine bronze; in the same way, the crackle of innumerable misfortunes, the grip of intolerable situations had bronzed Contenson’s head as though the light of three furnaces had paled upon his visage. The tight lines could no longer be unwrinkled, they were eternal creases, white at the bottom. His yellow face was all lines. His skull, a bit like Voltaire’s, was as unfeeling as a death’s head, and, but for a little hair at the back, could hardly have been taken for that of a living man. Beneath a motionless brow, expressing nothing, moved the eyes of a Chinaman displayed under glass at the door of a tea-shop, artificial eyes pretending to be alive, their expression unchanging. The nose, flat like death’s, defied Fate, and the mouth, tight-lipped as a miser’s, was at once open and discreet like the rictus of a letter-box. Calm as a man of the wilderness, his hands deeply weathered, Contenson, a small, thin, dry man, had that attitude of Diogenic indifference which never bows to the forms of respect. And what commentary upon his life and customs was written into his dress, for those who know how to decipher a man’s costume!… What breeches, particularly!… a bailiff’s breeches, black and shiny like the stuff called voile of which barristers’ gowns are made!… a waistcoat bought in the Temple, but embroidered and with lapels!… a coat of black turning red!… And all brushed, clean-looking, set off by a watch on a pinchbeck chain. On a pleated shirt-front of yellow cambric shone an artificial diamond pin! Upon the yoke of the velvet collar obtruded the raw folds of flesh like a Carib’s. The silk hat shone like satin, but its lining would have yielded oil for two small lamps if some grocer had bought it and had it boiled. It serves little purpose to enumerate accessories, one should be able to paint the enormous pretentiousness imprinted on them by Contenson. There was something tremendously smart about the coat collar, about the newly polished boots with their gaping soles, which no expression in the language can render. In the end, trying to fit these various pieces together, an intelligent man, studying Contenson, would have seen that, if he had been a thief and not a police-spy, these rags, instead of bringing a smile to the lips, would have aroused horror. About his costume, an observer might have said to himself: ‘There goes a squalid person, he drinks, he gambles, he has vices, but he doesn’t get drunk, he doesn’t cheat, he isn’t a thief or a murderer.’ And Contenson was indeed indefinable until the word ‘spy’ came into one’s mind. The man had professed as many unknown trades as there are known ones. The faint smile on his pale lips, the blink of his greenish eyes, the twitching of his flat nose, showed that he did not lack intelligence. His tin-plate face must conceal a soul of identical substance. The movements of his physiognomy were grimaces drawn out of him by politeness, not the expression of emotions within. He would have aroused fear, if he had not been risible. Contenson, one of the most curious products of the scum which floats upon the waters of the Parisian sink, where everything is in ferment, prided himself above all on being a philosopher. He said without bitterness: ‘I have great talents, but they go for nothing, as though I were an idiot!’ And he condemned himself instead of accusing others. Find many spies with as little gall as Contenson. ‘Circumstances are against us,’ he repeatedly said to his superiors, ‘we might be fine crystal, we are so many grains of sand, that is all.’ His indifference in the matter of costume had a meaning, he cared as little about his everyday wear as actors do about theirs; he excelled in disguise, in make-up; he could have given lessons to Frederick Lemaître, for he could turn himself out stylishly when there was need. In his youth he had forcibly adopted the bohemianism of the back streets. He displayed a lordly contempt for the Judicial Police, for under the Empire he had worked for Fouché, whom he considered a great man. Since the suppression of the Ministry of Police, he had made the best of commercial investigations; but his known ability, his fine touch, made him a useful instrument, and the unknown heads of the Political Police kept his name on their books. Contenson, together with many of the same calibre, played only extras in the drama whose leading parts were allocated elsewhere, when political work was afoot.
A Harlot High and Low Page 12
