A Harlot High and Low

by Honoré de Balzac

  The Prefect at that time was a former magistrate. Former magistrates become prefects of police at too early an age. Imbued with the idea of Justice, concerned all the time with legality, they are too slow to adopt the Arbitrary which critical circumstances quite often call for, when the action of the Prefecture must be like that of a fireman called to put out a fire. In the presence of the Deputy Prime Minister, the Prefect invoked more difficulties than there really are in police work, deplored abuses, then remembered the visit he’d had from Baron Nucingen and the information he’d been asked for about Peyrade. The Prefect undertook to damp down the excesses of his agents, thanked Lucien for coming to him directly, promised him secrecy, and in general seemed to understand the intrigue. Fine phrases about the freedom of the individual and the inviolability of the home were exchanged between the Minister of State and the Prefect, to whom M. de Sérisy pointed out that the major interests of the country sometimes required secret illegalities, crime beginning only when State means were applied to private interests. Next day, as Peyrade was on his way to his beloved Café David where he enjoyed watching the citizens as an artist likes watching flowers grow, a constable in plain clothes accosted him in the street.

  ‘I was just going to your house,’ he said in an undertone, ‘I have orders to take you to the Prefecture.’

  Peyrade hailed a cab and got in, without a word, together with the policeman.

  The Prefect of Police treated Peyrade as though he had been the lowest of prison warders, walking up and down the little garden of the Prefecture, which at that time extended along the Quai des Orfèvres.

  ‘It is not without reason, my good fellow, that, ever since 1809, you’ve been kept out of the administration… Don’t you see what you’re exposing us, and exposing yourself, to?…’

  This dressing-down terminated in a crushing blow. The Prefect harshly announced to poor Peyrade that not only would his annual pension be stopped, but that a special watch would be kept on him personally. The old man received this cold shower with the most perfect calm. Nothing is so immobile and impassible as a man who has just been struck by lightning. Peyrade had lost all his money in the game. Lydia’s father had counted on his position, and now he could expect nothing but alms from his friend Corentin.

  ‘I’ve been Prefect of Police myself, and you’re quite right,’ the old man said calmly to the functionary then invested with judicial majesty, who started significantly. ‘But allow me, without wishing to excuse myself in any way, to point out that you don’t know me,’ Peyrade continued with a sly glance in the Prefect’s direction. ‘Your words are either too hard for the former General Commissioner of Police for Holland, or not severe enough for a mere detective. The only thing is, Monsieur le Préfet,’ Peyrade added after a pause on seeing that the Prefect was silent, ‘remember what I shall now have the honour of saying to you. Without wishing to interfere in any way with your police or to justify myself in any way, you will see in due course that, in this matter, someone has been tricked: for the moment, it is your servant; later, you will say: “No, it was me!” ’

  And he bowed to the Prefect, who remained thoughtful in his astonishment. He returned home, weary through all his frame, seized with cold rage against Baron Nucingen. Only that dull-witted financier could have betrayed a secret otherwise concentrated in the heads of Contenson, Peyrade and Corentin. The old man accused the banker of wanting to avoid payment, once his goal had been attained. A single interview had been enough for him to divine the cunning of the most cunning of bankers. ‘He liquidates everybody, including us, but I shall take my revenge,’ said the old fellow to himself. ‘I’ve never asked anything from Corentin, I’ll ask him to help me avenge myself on this absurd moneybags. Accursed baron! you’ll learn what I stoke my fires with, one morning when you find your daughter dishonoured… But does he love his daughter?’

  The evening of the catastrophe which reversed this old man’s hopes, he had aged by ten years. Talking with his friend Corentin, he punctuated his tale of woe with tears, torn from him by the prospect of the sad future he was leaving to his daughter, his idol, his pearl, his offering to God.

  ‘We’ll follow the matter up,’ Corentin told him. ‘First we must know if it is the baron who has given you away. Was it wise of us to keep Gondreville?… Old Malin owes us too much not to want to sink us; so I’m keeping an eye on his son-in-law Keller, a ninny in politics, who might easily get mixed up with some conspiracy against the older branch in favour of the younger… Tomorrow I shall know what is going on at Nucingen’s, whether he’s seen his mistress, who tightened the halter on us like this… Don’t worry. To begin with, the Prefect won’t always be there… The times are ripe for revolution, and revolutions stir the water up nicely’

  A whistled signal sounded from the street.

  ‘That’s Contenson,’ said Peyrade who put a light in the window, ‘and he’s got something to tell me.’

  A moment later, the faithful Contenson appeared before the two Police gnomes revered by him as geniuses.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ said Corentin.

  ‘Something new! I was coming out of 113, where I’d lost badly. Who do I see under the galleries?… Georges! the boy’s been sacked by the baron, who suspects him of giving information away.’

  ‘Well, there’s the effect of a smile I let somebody see,’ said Peyrade.

  ‘Oh, the disasters I’ve seen caused by a smile!…’ said Corentin.

  ‘Not to mention riding crops,’ said Peyrade alluding to the Simeuse affair. ‘But, come on, Contenson, what happened?’

  ‘This is what happened,’ Contenson went on. ‘I got Georges talking by standing him little glasses all the colours of the rainbow, he’s still drunk; as for me, I must be like an alembic! Our baron went to the rue Taitbout, stuffed with seraglio lozenges. He found the lady you know of. But, here’s the joke, that Englishwoman isn’t his fair unknown!… And he’d spent thirty thousand francs getting on the right side of her maid. Talk about stupid. That one thinks he’s a great man because he can put big capital to little use; turn the phrase round, and you’ve got the problem it takes a genius to solve. The baron came back in a pitiable state. Next morning Georges, pretending to be an honest man, said to his master: “Why does Monsieur hire scoundrels like that? If Monsieur had asked me, I’d find his fair unknown for him, the description Monsieur gave me was quite enough. I’ll turn Paris upside down.” “Right,” said the baron, “I’ll pay you well!” Georges told me all that, together with a lot of ridiculous detail. But… rain falls on the just and the unjust! Next day, the baron received an anonymous letter which said something like “Monsieur de Nucingen is desperately in love with an unknown woman, he has already spent a lot of money for nothing; if he cares to be at the far end of the Neuilly bridge at midnight, and get into the carriage at the back of which he will find the lackey he saw in the Bois de Vincennes, allowing himself to be blindfolded, he will see the one he loves… As his fortune may cause him to mistrust the intentions of those who proceed in this way, Monsieur le Baron will be permitted to take his faithful Georges with him. There will be nobody else in the carriage.” Without telling Georges anything about it, the baron goes, with Georges. The two of them let themselves be blindfolded and have their heads veiled. The baron recognizes the lackey. Two hours later, the carriage, travelling like one of Louis XVIII’s (God rest his soul! there was. a king who knew about police work!), stops in the middle of a wood. The baron’s eyes are unbandaged, he sees in a stationary carriage his fair unknown, who… psst!… at once disappears. And the carriage (same caper as Louis XVIII) takes him back to the bridge at Neuilly where his own is still standing. Into Georges’s hand had been thrust a scribble thus: “How many thousand-franc notes will Monsieur le Baron drop to be put in touch with the lady? ” Georges gives this to his master, and the baron, convinced that Georges is hand-in-glove either with me or with you, Monsieur Peyrade, to exploit him, has put Georges out. That’s a right simpkin of a bank
er! he shouldn’t have sacked Georges till he’d slept with the fair unknown.’

  ‘Did Georges see the woman?…’ said Corentin.

  ‘Yes,’ said Contenson.

  ‘Well,’ cried Peyrade, ‘what’s she like?’

  ‘Oh,’ replied Contenson, ‘he only had one thing to say: as beautiful as the sun!…’

  ‘We’ve been fooled by rogues stronger than we are,’ cried Peyrade. ‘Those dogs are going to sell their woman to the baron at a high price.’

  ‘Ja, mein Herr!’ answered Contenson. ‘So, as I learned you’d received a lot of flowery compliments at the Prefecture, I pumped Georges.’

  ‘I’d like to know who’d tricked me,’ said Peyrade, ‘we’d soon see!’

  ‘Got to hide behind the wallpaper,’ said Contenson.

  ‘He’s right,’ said Peyrade, ‘we’ve got to get into the cracks, to look and listen…’

  ‘That’s a text we must study,’ cried Corentin, ‘for the moment, there’s nothing I can do. And you, behave yourself, Peyrade! Do as Monsieur le Préfet tells you…’

  ‘Monsieur de Nucingen is a good one to bleed,’ observed Contenson, ‘he’s got too many thousand-franc notes in his veins…’

  ‘I thought I had Lydia’s dowry there!’ Peyrade murmured in Corentin’s ear.

  ‘Well, Contenson, we must be off, and let daddy sleep…’

  ‘Ah, sir,’ said Contenson to Corentin as soon as they were outside, ‘a fine bit of dealing on ’change that would have been for the old boy!… Ho! marry off your daughter for the price of!… Ah, yes, you could write a nice play, an improving one, too, on that subject, entitled: A Young Girl’s Dowry.’

  ‘You chaps are well-trained, what ears you’ve got!…’ said Corentin to Contenson. ‘Yes, yes, Social Nature equips all its Species with the apparatus they will need! Yes, Society is another kind of Nature!’

  ‘That’s very deep, very philosophical, what you say,’ cried Contenson, ‘a professor would make a system of it!’

  ‘Keep yourself informed,’ Corentin continued with a smile as he and the spy went along the streets together, ‘of everything that happens at the Nucingen house, about the fair unknown,… in a broad way,… don’t get up to any fancy tricks…’

  ‘I’ll watch if the chimneys are smoking!’ said Contenson.

  ‘A man like Baron Nucingen can’t have a turn of luck without people knowing,’ Corentin went on. ‘And us, well, to us men are supposed to be open books, and we can’t allow ourselves to be taken in by them!’

  ‘Ho, that’s as if the condemned man were to amuse himself by slicing the executioner’s neck!’ cried Contenson.

  ‘You’ve always got a joke,’ replied Corentin whose smile betrayed shallow folds in the plaster mask of his face.

  The matter was of extreme importance in itself, quite apart from its consequences. If it wasn’t the baron who had betrayed Peyrade, in whose interest was it to see the Prefect of Police? Corentin’s problem was to be sure that none of his men was playing a double game. On his way to bed he ruminated the same questions as Peyrade: ‘Who is it who’s complained to the Prefect?… To whom does this woman belong?’ In this way, all in ignorance of each other, Jacques Collin, Peyrade and Corentin were being drawn together without knowing it; and poor Esther, Nucingen, Lucien were to become involved in the battle already begun, to which the special vanity of policemen would add its own terror.

  Mock priest, fake bills, bad debts, feigned love

  THANKS to the cleverness of Europe, the most threatening part of the sixty thousand francs of debts which weighed on Esther and Lucien had been met. The confidence of their creditors was unshaken. Lucien and his corruptor could breathe for a while. Like two hunted beasts lapping a little water at the edge of a marsh, they might continue skirting precipices along which the strong man led the weak one either to the gibbet or to fortune.

  ‘Today,’ said Carlos to his creature, ‘we stake all; luckily the cards have been nicked and the punters are new to the game!’

  For some time, by order of his dreadful Mentor, Lucien had been assiduous in his attendance on Madame de Sérisy. He must not indeed be suspected of having as his mistress a kept woman. He discovered, moreover, in the pleasure of being loved, in the blandishments of society, means to deaden his feelings. It was in obedience to the express wish of Mademoiselle Clotilde de Grandlieu that he saw her only in the Bois or the Champs Élysées.

  The day after Esther had been settled in the gamekeeper’s cottage, the being who was for her so problematical, so terrible, so much a weight on her heart, came to propose that she should sign three stamped forms, blank but for the tormenting words: Accepted for sixty thousand francs, on the first; – Accepted for a hundred and twenty thousand francs, on the second; – Accepted for a hundred and twenty thousand francs, on the third. In all three hundred thousand francs of acceptances. If you put good for, it was simply accommodation paper. The word accepted made it what was known as a bill of exchange, and you became liable to imprisonment for debt. For the word accepted, anybody who signed imprudently might incur five years’ imprisonment, a penalty rarely inflicted in police courts and at Assize only upon hardened criminals. The law concerning imprisonment for debt is a relic of barbarous times which to its stupidity adds the exceptional merit of uselessness, since it never catches rogues.

  ‘It is a question,’ said the Spaniard to Esther, ‘of getting Lucien out of a scrape. We have sixty thousand francs of debts, and with these three hundred thousand francs we may contrive to become solvent again.’

  Having antedated these bills of exchange by six months, Carlos had them drawn on Esther by a man beyond the reach of the courts, whose doings, despite the noise they made at the time, were soon forgotten, lost sight of, drowned by the din of the great symphony of July 1830.

  This young man, one of our boldest financial rogues, son of a bailiff at Boulogne-Billancourt, was called Georges-Marie Destourny. The father, compelled to sell his office under very unfavourable conditions, left his son, about 1824, without resources, having given him a brilliant education, that mania the lower middle class has about its children. At twenty-three, the young and promising law student had already denied his father by inscribing his card:

  GEORGES D’ESTOURNY.

  With this card, his personality took on an aristocratic air. Further equipped with a tilbury and groom, he became a man of fashion and frequented clubs. The explanation was simple: he dealt on the Stock Exchange with the money of kept women in whose confidence he was. Accused of playing with marked cards, he came before a court of summary jurisdiction. He had accomplices, young men corrupted by himself, henchmen of necessity, sharers in his elegance and credit. Obliged to take flight, he neglected to pay his debts at the Bourse. The Parisian world, the Paris of the sharks and their clubs, still trembled over this two-fold affair.

  In the days of his glory, Georges d’Estourny, a good-looking fellow, good-natured, open-handed as a brigand chief, had patronized the Torpedo for several months. The sham Spaniard based his calculations on Esther’s former intimacy with the celebrated swindler, an accident peculiar to women of that class.

  Georges d’Estourny, his ambition emboldened by success, had taken under his protection a man who had come from the depths of the provinces to do business in Paris, and whom the liberal party wished to see released from convictions courageously incurred in the battle of the Press against the government of Charles X, whose persecution had somewhat relented under the Martignac ministry. A pardon had been granted to M. Cérizet, that sound manager, nicknamed Brave Cérizet.

  This Cérizet, still patronized for show by the leading spirits of the Left, started a firm which was at once a general business agency, a commission agency and a banking house. It was the kind of thing which, in the business world, corresponds to the kinds of domestic servant who announce themselves under Small Advertisements as willing and able to undertake all duties. Cérizet had been very happy to be associated with Georges d�
��Estourny who moulded him.

  Esther, seen as a nineteenth-century equivalent of Ninon, could pass for the faithful trustee of a part of the fortune of Georges d’Estourny. A blank acceptance signed Georges d’Estourny made Carlos Herrera master of his total assets. This forgery was without danger from the moment at which either Mademoiselle Esther, or someone acting on her behalf, was able to pay to order. Having informed himself about the firm of Cérizet, Carlos decided that the man was one of those obscure characters bent on making a fortune, but… by legal means.

  Cérizet, d’Estourny’s real trustee, was the security for large sums then committed to a bull market on ‘Change, which allowed him to describe himself as a banker. That sort of thing goes on in Paris; a man may be despised, but not his money.

  Carlos called on Cérizet with the intention of working on him in his own way, for by chance he had come into possession of all the secrets of this worthy associate of d’Estourny’s.

  Brave Cérizet lived on a first floor in the rue du Gros Chenet, and Carlos, having had himself mysteriously announced as calling on behalf of Georges d’Estourny, came upon the so-called banker pale from this announcement. In a modestly furnished office, Carlos saw a little man with thin, fair hair recognizable, from Lucien’s description of him, as the betrayer of David Séchard.