A Harlot High and Low

by Honoré de Balzac

  The goal of passion

  ‘LEAF us,’ said Nucingen dismissing his secretary with a movement of the hand.

  ‘Why does this man live in a mansion while I’m in a furnished room…?’ Contenson said to himself. ‘He’s ruined his creditors three times, he’s stolen money, I’ve never taken a penny… I am more highly gifted than he is…’

  ‘Gontenson, my luf’, said the baron, ‘you tittled me a note off tausend francs…’

  ‘My mistress was in debt up to the eyes…’

  ‘You hef a mistress?’ cried Nucingen eyeing Contenson with mingled admiration and envy.

  ‘I’m only sixty-six,’ replied Contenson, a man whom Vice had kept young, as a fatal example.

  ‘End what does she?’

  ‘Helps me,’ said Contenson. ‘If you’re a thief and an honest woman loves you, either she becomes a thief, or you go straight. Me, I’m still an investigator, semi-private.’

  ‘Hallways you hef need of money?’ asked Nucingen.

  ‘Always,’ replied Contenson with a smile, ‘it’s my natural condition to want money, the way it’s yours to make it; we ought to suit each other: you give me the stuff, I spend it. You’re the well, me the bucket…’

  ‘Do you wish earn note of fife hundert francs?’

  ‘That’s a fine question! but do I look stupid?… You’re not offering it by way of repairing fortune’s injustice in my favour.’

  ‘Not at oil, I add it to ze tausand franc note you hef olready cheat me off; also fifteen hundert francs I gif you.’

  ‘Good, you give me the thousand francs I took, and you add five hundred francs…’

  ‘Yo, yo, is gut,’ said Nucingen nodding his head.

  ‘It’s only five hundred francs,’ said Contenson imperturbably.

  ‘To gif?…’ replied the baron.

  ‘To take. Ah, well, what does Monsieur le Baron propose to buy with that?’

  ‘I hef been dolt zet in Baris is a man gapable of discover ze woman I lof, end zet you know hiss eddress… Shortly, he iss master spy?’

  ‘That’s right…’

  ‘Well, gif me z’ eddress, end I gif you five hundert franc.’

  ‘No kidding?’ replied Contenson briskly.

  ‘Here are,’ the baron continued, taking a note from his pocket.

  ‘Well, then, give,’ said Contenson, holding out his hand.

  ‘Gif I am, let us go see zis man, und you hef ze money, for you could sell me many eddress at zat price.’

  Contenson began to laugh.

  ‘As a matter of fact, you’ve got every right to think that of me,’ said he with an air of greed. ‘The more dastardly our condition, the more need we have of probity. But, look, Monsieur le Baron, make it six hundred francs, and I’ll give you a piece of advice.’

  ‘ Gif it, end trust to my chenerosity…’

  ‘I’ll chance it,’ said Contenson; ‘but it’s a big risk I’m taking. In police work, you know, you’ve got to keep your feet on the ground. You say: Come on, let’s be off!… You’re rich, you think everything gives way before money. Money counts, that’s certain. But with money, in the opinion of one or two leading thinkers in our lot, you’ve only got men. There are things maybe you never think of, and they can’t be bought!… You can’t nobble good luck. So, in police work, you don’t do things that way. Do you want to be seen with me in a carriage? we’d be met. Luck can be on your side, or it can be against you.’

  ‘So?’ said the baron.

  ‘Lord! yes, sir. It was a horseshoe picked up in the street which led the Prefect of Police to the discovery of the infernal machine. Well! if we was to go at night in a four-wheeler to see M. de Saint-Germain, he’d no more care to see you walk in than you would to be seen going there.’

  ‘Is true,’ said the baron.

  ‘Ah! he’s the man all right, the famous Corentin’s right hand, Fouché’s strong arm, some say his natural son, he must have had one being a priest; but that’s all rubbish: Fouché knew how to be a priest, same as he knew how to be Minister. Well, now, look, you won’t get him on the job, see, for less than ten thousand franc notes… think about it… But the job will be done, and done well. And nobody the wiser, as they say. I shall have to warn Monsieur de Saint-Germain, and he’ll arrange a meeting with you in some place where nobody’ll either hear nor see, for it’s risky for him to do police work for private individuals. But, there, what d’you expect?… he’s a fine fellow, the king of men, and one who’s had to put up with persecution on a big scale, all for being the saviour of France, what’s more!… like me, like all the saviours of their country!’

  ‘Well, so, you will write me when is ze ospicious hour,’ said the baron smiling at his own witticism.

  ‘Isn’t Monsieur le Baron going to grease my palm?…’ said Contenson with an air of threatening humility.

  ‘Jean,’ the baron called out to his gardener, ‘go esk Georges twenty francs ent pring zem here…’

  ‘If M. le Baron has no more information than what he has given me, I doubt all the same if the maestro will be able to help him.’

  ‘I hef more!’ replied the baron with a secretive air.

  ‘I have the honour to salute Monsieur le Baron,’ said Contenson taking the twenty-franc piece, ‘I shall have the honour. of coming and telling Georges where Monsieur should betake himself this evening, for on police work you should never put things in writing.’

  ‘Is komisch how witty zese lads are,’ said the baron to himself, ‘in police is altogether much as in business.’

  Father des Canquoëlles

  ON leaving the baron, Contenson walked calmly from the rue Saint Lazare to the rue Saint Honoré, till he came to the Café David; there he looked through the window and perceived an old man by the name of Father Canquoëlle.

  The Café David, situated in the rue de la Monnaie at the corner of the rue Saint Honoré, enjoyed during the first thirty years of the nineteenth century fame of a sort, though limited to the neighbourhood known as that of the Bourdonnais. It was a meeting-place for old, retired merchants or wholesale dealers still in the game: Camusots, Lebas, Pilleraults, Popinots, a few landowners like Little Father Molineux. Every now and then you might see Old Father Guillaume who came there from the rue du Colombier. They talked politics among themselves, but prudently, for the Café David itself was Liberal. They retailed the neighbourhood gossip there, for men so feel the need to jeer at each other!… This café, like cafés elsewhere, had its eccentric character in Father Canquoëlle, who had been going there since the year 1811, and who appeared so perfectly in key with the respectable beings there gathered, that nobody felt embarrassed in talking politics in his presence. Sometimes the old boy, whose simplicity provided the regulars with many anecdotes, had disappeared for a month or two at a time; but his absences, always supposed due to illness and old age, for he had seemed over sixty already in 1811, occasioned no surprise.

  ‘What’s become of Father Canquoëlle?’ people merely asked the lady at the cash desk.

  ‘I dare say,’ she’d reply, ‘that one of these days we shall read of his death in the “Local Notices” column.’

  Father Canquoëlle’s very pronunciation certified his origins. He said ‘une estatue’, ‘espécialle’, ‘le peuble’ and pronounced the word for a Turk ‘ture’. His name was that of a small property called Les Canquoëlles, a word which signifies cockchafer up and down the provinces, and situated in the county of Vaucluse, from which he came. People had ended by calling him Canquoëlle instead of des Canquoëlles, without annoying the old boy, whose view was that the nobility had come to an end in 1793; in any case the fief of Les Canquoëlles didn’t belong to him, he was the younger son of a junior branch. Today Father Canquoëlle’s garb would seem strange; but between 1811 and 1820 it surprised nobody. The old man wore shoes with buckles of steel cut in facets, silk stockings of alternating white and blue horizontal stripes, breeches in grained taffeta with oval buckles similar to those on his shoes
in the way they were cut. A white embroidered waistcoat, an old, maroon-green coat with metal buttons and a ruffled shirt with frills ironed into flat pleats completed his costume. Upon the shirt-frills gleamed a gold locket in which the hair under glass had been arranged in the form of a little church, one of those adorable sentimentalities which reassure men, just as a scarecrow frightens sparrows. Most men, like animals, are frightened or reassured by trifles. Father Canquoëlle’s breeches were kept up by a buckle which, in the eighteenth-century manner, held him just above the abdomen. From the belt hung two parallel steel chains made up of smaller chains, ending in a bunch of charms and trinkets. His white stock fastened at the back with a little gold clasp. Finally, his snowy, powdered head was still surmounted in 1816 by the kind of three-cornered municipal hat worn also by Monsieur Try, the magistrate. Father Canquoëlle was fond of the hat, but had recently replaced it (the old fellow believed in keeping up with the times at whatever cost) with the kind of miserable round hat which nobody dares take exception to. A short pigtail, tied with a ribbon, traced on the back of his coat a circular trail of which the grease disappeared beneath a fine fall of powder. Contemplating the distinctive cast of these features, the nose covered with gibbosities, red and worthy of its place in a dish of truffles, you would have attributed an easygoing, foolish, meek character to this worthy and essentially simple old man, and you would have been wrong, like everyone at the Café David, where nobody had ever considered the thoughtful and observant forehead, the sardonic mouth and the cold eyes of this old man cradled in vice, calm as a Vitellius from whose imperial womb he had, as it were, reappeared palingenetically. In 1816, a young commercial traveller, called Gaudissart, a regular client at the Café David, got drunk between eleven o’clock and midnight with an officer on half pay. He was imprudent enough to speak of a plot hatched against the Bourbons, of a serious nature and on the point of exploding. The only people to be seen in the café were Father Canquoëlle who seemed to be asleep, two somnolent waiters and the lady at the cash desk. Within twenty-four hours Gaudissart was arrested: the conspiracy had been discovered. Two men perished on the scaffold. Neither Gaudissart nor anybody else ever suspected good old Father Canquoëlle of having let the cat out of the bag. The waiters were dismissed, the clients watched each other for a year, and they lived in fear of the Police, in concert with Father Canquoëlle who spoke of giving up the Café David, so much did policemen upset him.

  Contenson went into the café, ordered a small glass of spirits, didn’t look at Father Canquoëlle busy reading the papers; only when he had gulped down his glass of spirits did he take out the baron’s piece of gold, and call the waiter, sharply thumping the table three times. The lady at the cash-desk and the waiter both examined the coin with a carefulness insulting to Contenson; but their distrust was justified by the surprise which Contenson’s appearance occasioned among the customers. ‘Is this gold the result of a theft or a murder?…’ Such was the thought which crossed the minds of more than one thoughtful and farseeing client, as they looked at Contenson over their spectacles while affecting to read their newspapers. Contenson, who noticed everything and was astonished by nothing, disdainfully wiped his lips with a silk handkerchief only thrice mended, picked up his change, tipped all the coins into a waistcoat pocket whose lining, once white, was as black as the cloth of his breeches, and didn’t leave a penny for the waiter.

  ‘Gallows meat!’ said Father Canquoëlle to M. Pillerault his neighbour.

  ‘Bah!’ M. Camusot, who alone had not shown the least sign of astonishment, announced to the café at large, ‘it’s Contenson, right-hand man of Louchard, the Trade Protection fellow. Those clowns must be wanting to pick up somebody in the neighbourhood…’

  Quarter of an hour later, old Canquoëlle rose, took his umbrella and calmly departed.

  Must we explain what sort of deep, terrible man lurked beneath Father Canquoëlle’s old-fashioned coat, just as Father Carlos concealed Vautrin? This man from the Midi, born at Les Canquoëlles, his nevertheless respectable family’s sole domain, bore the name of Peyrade. He indeed belonged to the junior branch of the house of La Peyrade, an old but impoverished family of the Comtat, which still owns the small property of Peyrade. A seventh child, he had come to Paris, with two six-livre crowns in his pocket, in 1772, at the age of seventeen, driven by the vices of a fiery nature, by the brutal desire to succeed which draws many meriodionals to the capital, once they have perceived that the paternal establishment will never supply them with the means to their passionate ends. All Peyrade’s youth may be understood if one gathers that in 1782 he was the trusted man, the hero of the Lieutenant-Generalship of police, where he was greatly esteemed by Messieurs Lenoir and d’Albert, the two last lieutenants-general. The Revolution had no police, it needed none. Spying, then very widespread, was called good citizenship. The Directory, a somewhat more regular government than that of the Committee of Public Safety, was obliged to reconstitute a police force, and the First Consul embodied it in a Prefecture of Police and a Ministry of General Police. Peyrade, the man with tradition behind him, found the staff, in concert with a man called Corentin, a more powerful individual than Peyrade, though younger, whose genius was fully recognized only behind the scenes in the police world. In 1808, the immense services rendered by Peyrade were rewarded by his nomination to the leading post of General Superintendent of Police at Antwerp. In Napoleon’s mind, police prefectures of this kind were equivalent to such ministries of police as that set up to supervise Holland. After the campaign of 1809, Peyrade was removed from Antwerp by order of the Emperor’s cabinet, taken by coach to Paris between two constables, and thrown into La Force. Two months later, he left prison under a guarantee from his friend Corentin, after nevertheless having undergone, at the Police Prefecture, three questionings each lasting six hours. Was Contenson’s disgrace due to the great speed with which he had seconded Fouché in the defence of the French coast, attacked in what was known at one time as the Walcheren expedition, a moment at which the Duke of Otranto displayed a strength which worried the Emperor? It seemed probable enough in Fouché’s time; but now that everybody knows what happened during the Council of Ministers called by Cambacérès, there is more certainty about the matter. Taken aback by the news of the British attempt, a retaliation for Napoleon’s Boulogne expedition, and caught in their master’s absence, he having withdrawn to the island of Lobau, where Europe thought he was lost, the ministers did not know what course to pursue. The general view was that a dispatch should be sent to the Emperor; but Fouché alone dared trace out a plan of campaign which, moreover, he subsequently put into effect. ‘Do as you please,’ Cambacérès said to him; ‘but me, I want to keep my head on my shoulders, I’m sending a report to the Emperor.’ It is well known on what absurd pretext the Emperor, on his return, openly in the Council of State, dismissed his minister and punished him for having saved France in his absence. From that day on, the Emperor was faced with the double enmity of Talleyrand and the Duke of Otranto, the only two great politicians to emerge from the Revolution, and the only two who might have saved him in 1813. The excuse for getting rid of Peyrade was misappropriation of public funds, a vulgar excuse: he had encouraged smuggling by sharing the small profits with high finance. It was rough treatment for a man whose General Superintendency in the Police had been awarded him for services rendered on the grand scale. Grown old in the public service, he knew the secrets of every government from the year 1775 onward, that being the date at which he had entered the General Lieutenancy of Police. The Emperor, believing himself to be strong enough to create the men he needed, paid no attention to the representations later made to him on behalf of a man considered one of the soundest, cleverest and most discreet of those unknown geniuses, called to guard the security of States. He thought he could replace Peyrade with Contenson; but just then Contenson’s time was profitably taken up with Corentin. Peyrade was all the more cruelly affected, in that, a libertine and a glutton, his relations with
women were like those of a pastrycook fond of delicacies. His vicious habits had become second nature to him: he could no longer do without dining well, gaming, and generally leading the life of a great lord without ostentation such as all men of powerful gifts pursue, once they have acquired an imperative taste for exorbitant pleasures. Moreover, till then he had lived and banqueted on the grand scale without ever being called to account for his expenditure, any more than Corentin, his friend. Cynically witty, he liked things that way, he was a philosopher. And then, a spy, no matter what stage he has reached in the police machine, can no more return to the sort of profession known as honourable or liberal than a convict can. Once marked, once matriculated, spies and condemned men acquire, like deacons, an indelible character. On some men their Social Condition imprints the fatal signs of their destiny. It was Peyrade’s misfortune to be infatuated with a pretty little girl, a child whom he knew for certain to be his by a celebrated actress, to whom he had rendered service and who was grateful for three months. Peyrade, who brought his child back with him from Antwerp, thus found himself without. resources in Paris, living on an annual pension of twelve hundred francs granted by the Prefecture of Police to Lenoir’s old pupil. He installed himself in the rue des Moineaux, on the fourth floor, in a little apartment with five rooms, at two hundred and fifty francs.