A Harlot High and Low

by Honoré de Balzac

  ‘Can we talk here without fear of being overheard?’ said the Spaniard rapidly transformed into an Englishman with red hair and blue spectacles, as clean and prim as a Puritan on his way to the meeting-house.

  ‘Why, sir?’ said Cérizet. ‘And who are you?’

  ‘Mister William Barker, a creditor of Monsieur d’Estourny’s; but, since you wish me to do so, I shall demonstrate to you the need for keeping your doors well-closed. We know, sir, what your relations were with the Petit-Clauds, the Cointets and the Séchards of Angoulême…’

  At these words, Cérizet hurried to the door and shut it, turned to another door leading to a bedroom and locked it; then said to his unknown visitor: ‘Softly, sir!’ And he examined the sham Englishman and asked him: ‘What do you want with me?…’

  ‘Dear me!’ continued William Barker, ‘it’s everyone for himself, in this world. You hold that rascal d’Estourny’s funds… Don’t worry, I haven’t come to ask you for them; but, at my pressing request, that rogue who deserves hanging, between ourselves, gave me these securities telling me that there might be some chance of realizing them; and, as I don’t wish to act in my own name, he told me that you wouldn’t refuse me yours.’

  Cérizet glanced at the bill of exchange, and said: ‘He’s not in Frankfurt now…’

  ‘I know,’ replied Barker, ‘but he might still have been when he made out these drafts…’

  ‘I don’t wish to be answerable,’ said Cérizet…

  ‘I’m not asking you for anything,’ Barker went on; ‘you could be forced to accept them, receipt them, and I’ll see they’re discharged.’

  ‘I’m astonished to see d’Estourny show this distrust of me,’ said Cérizet.

  ‘In his position,’ replied Barker, ‘he can hardly be blamed for putting his eggs into more than one basket.’

  ‘Are you under the impression?…’ asked the petty financier giving the bills of exchange duly acknowledged back to the Englishman.

  ‘… I am under the impression, indeed I know,’ said Barker, ‘that his cash reserves will remain in your hands, they are already green-carpeted at the Stock Exchange!’

  ‘It is in the interest of my business to…’

  ‘To show a loss on them,’ said Barker.

  ‘Sir!…’ ejaculated Cérizet.

  ‘Look, my dear Monsieur Cérizet,’ Barker said coldly interrupting Cérizet, ‘you would be doing me a favour by facilitating this encashment. Be so kind as to write me a letter in which you say that you are turning these receipted bills over to me on d’Estourny’s account, and that the prosecuting sheriff’s officer should regard the bearer as possessor of the three drafts.’

  ‘What is your full name?’

  ‘No names!’ replied the English capitalist. ‘Put: The bearer of this letter and of the drafts… You will be well paid for obliging me in this way…’

  ‘How!…’ said Cérizet.

  ‘By something I shall tell you. You will be staying in France, will you not?…’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Well, Georges d’Estourny won’t be coming back ever.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There are at least five people, to my knowledge, who would kill him, and he knows it.’

  ‘I’m not surprised, then, that he should want me to help him make up his little private cargo for the Indies!’ cried Cérizet. ‘And unfortunately he’s obliged me to put everything into government holdings. We already owe money to the firm of du Tillet. I live from day to day.’

  ‘ Get well out of it!’

  ‘Ah, if I’d known this sooner!’ cried Cérizet. ‘I’ve missed making a fortune…’

  ‘One last word?…’ said Barker. ‘Be discreet!… you know how; but also, perhaps not so easy, keep your word. We shall meet again, and I’ll see you make your fortune.’

  Having cast into this soul of mud a hope which would assure his discretion for some time to come, Carlos, still in the part of Barker, went to see a bailiff he could count on, and instructed him to take out an injunction against Esther.

  ‘It will be met,’ he told the bailiff, ‘it’s a debt of honour, we just want to be in order.’

  Barker had Mademoiselle Esther represented by an attorney at the commercial court so that judgement could be after trial. The bailiff, enjoined to act with consideration, procured all the necessary deeds and himself went to seize the furniture, in the rue Taitbout, where he was received by Europe. Notice of committal having been given, Esther was ostensibly liable for something over three hundred thousand francs of undisputed debts. Carlos’s powers of invention were not much taxed by the arrangement. This game of false debts is played every day in Paris. There are sub-Gobsecks and sub-Gigonnets who, for a small fee, lend themselves to this infamous trick, which they regard as a joke. In France, everything is accompanied by a laugh, even crimes. In this way, everybody, whether it be recalcitrant parents or the unwilling object of a passion, can be made to comply, under flagrant necessity or a threat of dishonour. Maxime de Trailles had frequently employed the same method, reviving comedies from a forgotten repertory. Carlos Herrera, however, anxious to save both Lucien’s honour and that of the cloth, had had recourse to a forgery without danger, but latterly so much practised that the Law had been forced to take cognizance of it. It was said that, in the neighbourhood of the Palais Royal, there was a market in sham securities at which you could buy a signature for three francs.

  Before broaching the question of the hundred thousand crowns designed to stand as a sentinel at the bedroom door, Carlos arranged with himself to have another hundred thousand francs paid, provisionally, to Monsieur de Nucingen. This is how.

  Acting on his orders, Asia presented herself to the amorous baron as an old woman fully informed about the fair unknown’s affairs. To date, those who depict the life of society have brought no end of moneylenders on the scene; but they tend to forget the moneylenderess, the Madame la Ressource of the present day, a very strange figure indeed, commonly to be found under the respectable title of wardrobe dealer, and well within the savage Asia’s scope, in view of the two establishments she had, one near the Temple, one in the rue Neuve Saint Marc, both run by women in her pay.

  ‘You will call yourself,’ he said, ‘Madame de Saint-Estéve.’ Herrera wanted to see Asia dressed for the part. The bogus procuress appeared in a robe of flowered damask, made out of the curtains taken down in some distrained lady’s dressing-room, with the sort of worn, faded, unsaleable cashmere shawl which often ends its life round such a woman’s shoulders. She wore a collarette of once-very-fine but frayed lace, and a frightful hat; but she was shod with Irish brogues, above which her flesh bulged smooth and black.

  ‘Just look at this buckle!’ she said showing a piece of very doubtful jewellery on the belt which clutched her kitchen-woman’s belly. ‘What a beauty, eh? And my neck-ribbon,… how delightfully ugly it makes me! Oh, Madame Nourisson has turned me out a treat.’

  ‘Be soft-spoken at first,’ Carlos said to her, ‘almost timid, mistrustful like a cat; and make the baron blush for having used police spies without appearing to have any reason to be afraid of them. Finally let it be known in a clear and businesslike way that you defy all the policemen in the world to discover where the fair one is. Cover your tracks carefully… When the baron has given you the right to prod him in the stomach and say: “You dirty old man!” turn insolent and send him away like a lackey.’

  Threatened with not seeing the procuress again if he had her watched in any way, Nucingen visited Asia on his way to the Bourse, on foot, furtively, in a wretched shop parlour in the rue Neuve Saint Marc. Those muddy footpaths, how often amorous millionaires have trodden them, and with what pleasure! the streets of Paris know. Madame de Saint Estève, by way of alternating hope and despair, brought the baron to the point of wanting to know everything about the fair unknown, at any price!…

  Meanwhile, the bailiff acted, and acted all the more easily in that, meeting with no resistance at Esther
’s address, he was able to do it legally without waiting twenty-four hours.

  Lucien, taken there by his counsellor, five or six times visited the recluse at Saint Germain. His savage guide considered these visits necessary in order to prevent Esther from pining, for her beauty was their main capital. When the moment came for leaving the forester’s house, he led Lucien and the poor harlot to the side of a deserted road, to a spot from which Paris could be seen, and where nobody could hear them. The three of them sat down in the light of the rising sun, beneath the stump of a poplar, before that view, one of the most splendid in the world, which takes in the course of the Seine, Montmartre, Paris, Saint Denis.

  ‘Children,’ said Carlos, ‘your dream is over. You, my dear, will never see Lucien again; or if you see him, you must just have known him, five years ago, very briefly.’

  ‘So that is my sentence of death! ’ said she without shedding a tear.

  ‘Ah, well, you’ve been poorly these five years,’ Herrera continued. ‘Regard yourself as a consumptive, and die without boring us with your elegies. But you will see that you can still live, and very well!… Leave us, Lucien, go pick sonnets,’ he said indicating a field nearby.

  Lucien cast upon Esther a begging look, the look of a weak, greedy man, his heart full of tenderness, his character that of a coward. Esther answered with a sign of the head which meant: ‘I must listen to the executioner and learn how to place my head beneath the axe, and I shall die bravely.’ It was so beautiful, and at the same time so full of horror, that the poet wept; Esther ran to him, folded him in her arms, drank the tear and said to him: ‘Don’t worry!’ a thing said with the eyes and with a gesture, and with the voice of madness.

  Carlos explained clearly, without ambiguity, sometimes with words of horrible appropriateness, Lucien’s critical situation, his position at the Grandlieus’ house, the wonderful life he would have if he succeeded, finally the need for Esther to sacrifice herself to this magnificent future.

  ‘What must I do?’ she cried fanatically.

  ‘Obey me blindly,’ said Carlos. ‘And what could you possibly complain of? It is entirely up to you to create for yourself a happy fate. You are going to become what Tullia, Florine, Mariette and the Val-Noble, old friends of yours, were, the mistress of a rich man whom you don’t love. Once our fortunes have been put right, our great lover is rich enough to make you happy…’

  ‘Happy!…’ she said raising her eyes to heaven.

  ‘You’ve had four years in Eden,’ he continued. ‘Can’t you live on memories like those?…’

  ‘I shall obey you,’ she replied, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye. ‘For the rest, you need feel no anxiety! As you once said, my love is a sickness unto death.’

  ‘That isn’t all,’ went on Carlos, ‘you have to remain beautiful. At twenty-two and a half, you are at your highest peak of beauty, thanks to all this happiness. Become what you were, the Torpedo. Be sly, extravagant, devious, pitiless with the millionaire I’m handing to you. Listen!… this man is a thief on the World Market, he’s been without pity for a great many people, he’s grown fat on the fortunes of widows and orphans, you will be their Revenge!… Asia will come to fetch you in a cab, and you will be in Paris this evening. If you were to let your four years’ relations with Lucien be suspected, you might as well shoot him in the head. You’ll be asked what you’ve been doing: you will reply that you have been taken on his travels by an excessively jealous Englishman. You used to have the wit to mislead people in a way that they liked, pick the craft up again.’

  Have you ever seen a shining kite, the giant butterfly of childhood, trimmed with gold, planing in the skies?… The children forget the string for a moment, a passer-by cuts it, the meteor takes, in schoolboy language, a header, and falls with frightening speed. Thus Esther on hearing Carlos.

  PART TWO

  WHAT LOVE MAY COST AN OLD MAN

  A hundred thousand francs invested in Asia

  FOR a week past, Nucingen had been occupied with negotiating the delivery of the one he loved, most days calling at the shop in the rue Neuve Saint Marc. There, sometimes under the name of Saint-Estève, sometimes under that of her creature Madame Nourisson, Asia reigned among fine costumes at that most horrible stage when gowns are no longer gowns but are not yet rags. The setting harmonized with the face this woman put on, for such shops are one of the most sinister peculiarities of Paris. In them may be found cast-off garments flung there by Death’s skinny hand, so that consumptive wheezing may be heard in the folds of a shawl, the agony of destitution in a gown gold-spangled. Fine lace there records the frightful dialogue between Luxury and Hunger. A queen’s physiognomy may be almost exactly reconstructed from the way a plumed turban now stands. Prettiness conceals horror! The lash of Juvenal, wielded by the hands of the official valuer, scatters the threadbare muffs, the soiled furs of hard-pressed whores. It is a dunghill of flowers where, here and there, glow roses cut yesterday, sported for an hour, now sniffed by an old creature who is Usury’s first cousin, bald, toothless Second Hand, eager to sell what the garment had contained as well as itself, the gown without the woman or the woman without the gown! There was Asia, like a warder in the hulks, like a red-beaked vulture among corpses, in her element; yet more appalling than the hags truly what she pretended to be, seen grimacing behind dirty windows in which the astounded passer-by may sometimes see a treasured souvenir of youth displayed.

  After countless irritations and seeing the price go up by ten thousand francs on each occasion, the banker had finally offered sixty thousand francs to Madame de Saint-Estève, only to be met with an ape-like grimace of refusal. After a restless night, after realizing what disorder of mind Esther had brought upon him, after unexpected gains on the stock market, he appeared one morning with the clear intention of paying out the hundred thousand francs which Asia demanded, though determined on extracting a great deal of information from her.

  ‘Made up your mind, have you, then, old flighty?’ Asia said to him with a slap on the back.

  Humiliating familiarity is the first imposition women of that kind levy on the unbridled passions or desperate needs confided to them; they never meet their client on his own level, but make him sit down beside them on the heap of mud where they squat. Asia, as we may see, obeyed her master admirably.

  ‘Iss no aldernadif,’ said Nucingen.

  ‘And a bargain at the price,’ replied Asia. ‘Women have been sold for more than you’ll be paying for that one, relatively. There are women and women! De Marsay gave sixty thousand francs for the late Coralie. The one you want cost a hundred thousand francs new; of course, as far as I’m concerned, you old monster, it’s just a matter of arrangement.’

  ‘Pud where iss she?’

  ‘Oh, you’ll see her all right. I’m like you: nothing for nothing!… Look at the trouble you’ve stirred up with your passion. These young things, you can’t expect them to be reasonable. At present the princess is what we call a pretty-by-night…’

  ‘Briddy pie…’

  ‘Come on, now, don’t be a muggins!… She’s got Louchard on her tracks, I had to lend her fifty thousand francs myself…’

  ‘Fooftsy tausend! Iss nit bozziple,’ cried the banker.

  ‘Lord bless you, twenty-five on account of fifty, goes without saying,’ replied Asia. ‘That woman, you’ve got to do her credit, she’s as honest as daylight! All she had was herself, she said to me, she said: “Dearest Madame Saint-Estève, they’re after me, there’s nobody but you that can oblige me, give me twenty thousand francs, and you can take my heart as security…” Oh, it’s a very-nice heart!… There’s only me knows where she is. If I let on, it might cost me twenty thousand francs… Once upon a time, she lived in the rue Taitbout. Before she did a flit… (her furnishings was seized!… more expense. Bailiff’s men are all rogues! As you well know, a big noise on ‘Change like you!) Well, she’s not stupid, she rented the place for two months to an English woman, a fine-looking woman who ha
d that bit of a thing, Rubempré, for a lover,… and he was that jealous he made her go out at night… But, now that the furniture’s going to be sold, this English woman has hopped it, specially as she was too expensive for a little shrimp like Lucien…’

  ‘Also you too are panker,’ said Nucingen.

  ‘By the light of nature,’ said Asia. ‘I can always lend a bit to pretty women; it pays, because then you’, ve got two kinds of assets to call in.’

  It amused Asia to ham the part of these women who are sour enough, but mealier-mouthed, more carneying than the Malay, and who justify their traffic by all kinds of high-sounding arguments. Asia pretended to have lost her illusions, five lovers, children, and claimed she was bilked by everybody in spite of her experience. Every now and then she produced a pawnshop ticket, to show how much bad luck there was in her trade. She gave herself out to be harassed, in debt. She was, moreover, so unmistakably hideous that in the end the baron believed in the part she was playing.

  ‘Well, so, ven I hend ofer ze hundert tausend vrancs, where I see her?’ he said with the gesture of a man ready to make any sacrifice.

  ‘Oh, you could come this evening, if you liked, by carriage naturally, opposite the Gymnase theatre. It’s on the way,’ said Asia. ‘Stop at the corner of the rue Sainte Barbe. I’ll be on sentry-go there, we’ll go and find my raven-haired asset together… Oh, she has got lovely hair, my asset! When she takes the comb out, it covers her like a tent. But you know, clever you may be at figures, but you strike me as pretty stupid at everything else; I advise you to keep the child concealed, else they’ll stow her away in Sainte Pélagie, and quickly, next day, if they find her,… and… they’re looking for her.’

  ‘Bozzible berhaps puy pack ze pills?’ said the incorrigible Shark.

  ‘The bailiff has them,… but there’s nothing doing. The child flew into a passion and swallowed a deposit they’re asking for. But there you are, girls of twenty-two will have their little joke.’