A Harlot High and Low

by Honoré de Balzac

  ‘Gut, gut, I arrange zet,’ said Nucingen putting on an artful air. ‘Is agreet I look efter ziz tings.’

  ‘Well, you great stupid, it’s up to you to make her fond of you, and there’s no doubt you’ve got the wherewithal to buy what’ll look convincingly like love and perhaps be as good. I place my princess between your hands; she knows she’s got to come along with you, I don’t care what happens after that… But she’s used to luxury and consideration. Ah, my handsome! she’s the right sort of woman, that one… Else would I have given her fifteen thousand francs?’

  ‘Och, so! Till zis efening, zen!’

  The baron once more set about a nuptial beautification of himself; but, this time, the certainty of success made him take twice the quantity of pills. At nine o’clock, he went to the agreed meeting-place and took the dreadful woman into his carriage.

  ‘Vich vay?’ said the baron.

  ‘Which way?’ said Asia, ‘rue de la Perle, in the Marais, an accommodation address, for your pearl is in the mire, but you’ll clean her up!’ Once there, the false Madame Saint-Estève told Nucingen with a fearful leer: ‘We’re going to walk a bit now, I’m not such a fool as to have given the real address.’

  ‘You sink of everysing,’ replied Nucingen.

  ‘I need to,’ said she.

  Asia led Nucingen into the rue Barbette, where, in a lodging house kept by an upholsterer of the neighbourhood, he was taken up to the fourth floor. When, in a meanly furnished room, he saw Esther dressed like a girl of the lower orders working at a piece of embroidery, the millionaire turned pale. Even after a quarter of an hour, during which Asia seemed to be holding a whispered conversation with Esther, the rejuvenated old man could hardly speak.

  ‘Montemisselle,’ he said at length to the poor girl, ‘will you pe so kind es to let me pe your brodector?…’

  ‘I cannot do otherwise, sir,’ said Esther from whose eyes two big tears overflowed.

  ‘Not cry. I vish I mek you ze heppiest off oll women… Let me only lof you, zen you will see.’

  ‘My child, the gentleman will be sensible,’ said Asia, ‘he knows very well that he is sixty-six past, and will be very indulgent. In short, my little angel, it is a father I have found you… Got to say that,’ whispered Asia to the banker who wasn’t looking pleased. ‘You don’t catch swallows by letting off a pistol at them. Come this way!’ said Asia leading Nucingen into the next room. ‘You know the form, my angel?’

  Nucingen drew a wallet out of his pocket and counted out the hundred thousand francs, which Carlos, hidden yet elsewhere, awaited with lively impatience, and which the cook brought him.

  ‘There’s a hundred thousand francs our man’s invested in Asia, now we’ll make him invest some more in Europe,’ said Carlos to his confidante when they were on the landing.

  He vanished after giving his instructions to the Malay, who went back into the apartment where Esther wept hot tears. Like a criminal condemned to death, the child had lived on a fairy-tale of hope, and now the fatal hour had struck.

  ‘Little ones,’ said Asia, ‘where are you going to go?… for Baron Nucingen…’

  Esther looked at the famous banker and made an admirably played apparently spontaneous gesture of surprise.

  ‘Yo, yo, my child, I am Baron te Nuzingen…’

  ‘Baron Nucingen cannot, must not stay in such a kennel. Listen! Your old maid Eugénie…’

  ‘Ougénie! of the roue Daidpoud…’ cried the baron.

  ‘Yes, indeed, the legal trustee of the furniture,’ Asia went on, ‘who rented the apartment to the fair English…’

  ‘Och, I onnerstend!’ said the baron.

  ‘As former personal maid to Madame,’ Asia continued respectfully indicating Esther, ‘she will receive you very comfortably this evening, and the Trade Protection men will never think of coming to look for her in her old apartment, which she left three months ago…’

  ‘Zblentit, zblentit!’ cried the baron. ‘Pesites, I know the Drate Brodection pipple, and I know vot vords to make zem go fast avay…’

  ‘You’ll find Eugénie a sly one,’ said Asia, ‘I ought to know, I found her for Madame…’

  ‘I know her,’ cried the millionaire with a laugh. ‘Ougénie tittled me dirty tausend vrancs…’ Esther’s expression of horror would of itself have led a man of heart to confide his fortune to her. ‘Wass mine own fault,’ the baron continued, ‘I wass jessing you…’ And he recounted the story of the misunderstanding caused by letting the apartment to an Englishwoman.

  ‘There, you see, Madame?’ said Asia. ‘Eugénie told you nothing about that, the minx! However, Madame is accustomed to that girl,’ she said to the baron, ‘keep her all the same.’ Asia took Nucingen on one side and said to him: ‘With five hundred francs a month to Eugénie, who’s feathering her nest very nicely, you shall know everything Madame does, keep her on as lady’s maid. Eugénie’ll be all the nicer to you for having gypped you once. Nothing so attaches a woman to a man as gypping him. But keep Eugénie on a tight rein: she’ll do anything for money, that baggage, she’s a horror!…’

  ‘ Und yourself?…’

  ‘Me, I’m just reimbursing myself,’ said Asia.

  Nucingen, a man of such depth, was as though blindfold; he let himself be led like a child. To see, the candid and adorable Esther drying her eyes and making her embroidery stitches with the modesty of a young virgin, renewed in the infatuated old man the sensations he had experienced in the Bois de Vincennes; he would have given her the key to his safe! he felt young, his heart was full of adoration, he waited for Asia’s departure so that he might fling himself on his knees before this Raphael Madonna. Such a flowering of sudden youth in the heart of a Shark, an old man, is one of those social phenomena which Physiology can best explain. Weighed down by business cares, constricted by ceaseless calculations, by the unending preoccupations of the hunt for millions, adolescence and its sublime illusions reappear, spring up and burgeon, like a prime cause, like a buried seed whose effects, whose magnificent flowering obey the chance of a sun which unexpectedly shines late. A clerk at twelve in the ancient house of Aldrigger in Strasbourg, the baron had never set foot in the world of feeling. Thus he stood before his idol with a thousand phrases whirling in his brain, but finding none on his lips yielded to a brutal desire in which the man of sixty-six was visible.

  ‘Will you come zen to the rue Daidbout?…’ he said.

  ‘Wherever you wish, sir,’ replied Esther rising.

  ‘ “Vairefer you vish!” ’ he repeated with rapture. ‘You are ein Engelein tescented vom Himmel, whom J lof es if I wass a young man zo I hef grey hair…’

  ‘Oh, you might as well say white! for it’s too fine a black now to be grey underneath,’ said Asia.

  ‘Go hereout, file trafficker in human flesh! You hef your money, dribble no more upon zis flower of lof!’ cried the banker repaying himself with this vicious apostrophe for all the insolence he had had to endure.

  ‘You old scoundrel! you’ll pay for that expression!…’ said Asia threatening the banker with a Billingsgate gesture which made him raise his shoulders. ‘Between the cup and the lip there is room for a viper, and you’ll find me there!…’ she said roused by Nucingen’s disdain.

  Millionaires, whose money is kept by the Bank of France, whose houses are guarded by numerous footmen, whose person is protected, in the street, by the rampart of a carriage with English horses, fear no misfortune; and so the baron stared coldly at Asia, like a man who had just given her a hundred thousand francs. This air of majesty produced its effect. Asia made her way out muttering in the staircase and, her language excessively revolutionary in tone, spoke of the scaffold!

  ‘Whatever did you say to her?…’ asked the virgin at her embroidery, ‘she’s a good-hearted woman.’

  ‘She has zolt you, she has ropped you…’

  ‘When we are in misfortune,’ she answered with a look to rend the heart of a diplomat, ‘who will show us consideration or
give us money?…’

  ‘Poor child!’ said Nucingen, ‘stay not a minute longer here!’

  A first night

  NUCINGEN gave Esther his arm, he led her away as she was, and installed her in his carriage with perhaps more respect than he would have showed the fair Duchesse de Maufrigneuse.

  ‘You will hef a fine equipage, ze priddiest of Paris,’ said Nucingen during their journey. ‘ Everysing vhich luxury hes of most sharming vill surrount you. Eine qveen soll nit be richer zan you. You soll be respect like Cherman prite : I will you are vree… Do not veep. Listen to me… I lof you druly viz a pure lof. Each tear of you breks my heart…’

  ‘Can one truly love a woman one has bought?…’ asked the poor creature in an enchanting voice.

  ‘ Yoseph wass solt by his prothers because he wass goot. Iss in ze Piple. Also in ze East iss legal vife bought.’

  When they reached the rue Taitbout, Esther could not without pain behold the scene of her former happiness. She stayed motionless on a divan, checking each tear as it started, without hearing a word of the baron’s senseless jabbering, he fell on his knees; she left him there without speaking, allowing him to take her hands as he pleased, barely conscious of what sex the creature was who chafed her feet, which Nucingen found cold. This scene of hot tears now and then falling on the baron’s head and of icy feet warmed by him, lasted from midnight until two o’clock in the morning.

  ‘Ougénie,’ the baron at last called to Europe, ‘zee if your misdress will not go to ped…’

  ‘No,’ cried Esther springing to her feet like a frightened mare, ‘not here, never!…’

  ‘No, look, sir, I know Madame, she is gentle and kind as a lamb,’ said Europe to the banker; ‘only, she mustn’t be rushed, you’ve got to approach indirectly… She had so much to put up with here! See?… how worn the furniture is! Give her her own way. Set her up, somewhere, nicely, in a pretty house. When she sees everything round her new, she’ll feel a bit lost like, and she might think you nicer than you are, and behave like an angel. Oh, Madame has no equal! and you really could boast of acquiring a bargain: kind heart, beautiful manners, bit of a devil when she feels like it, skin like a rose… Ah!… And wit enough to make man laugh on the scaffold… Madame is most affectionate, really… And the way she knows how to dress!… Ah, well, it may cost a bit, a man’s got, as you might say, his money’s worth. Here, all her clothes have been seized, her wardrobe is three months out of date. But Madame is so kind, you see, that even I’m fond of her, and her my mistress! So, let’s be fair, a woman like that to find herself in a place where the bailiffs have been!… And for who? for a scamp who ruined her… Poor little woman! no longer herself she isn‘t.’

  ‘Ezder,… Ezder…’ said the baron, ‘go to bet, my enchel? Och! if iss me vrightens you, I zday on ze sofa…’ cried the baron inflamed by the purest love on seeing Esther still weep.

  ‘Well, then,’ replied Esther taking the baron’s hand and kissing it with a feeling of gratitude which brought something resembling a tear to the Shark’s eye, ‘I shall thank you for it.’

  And she ran into her bedroom and shut herself in.

  ‘Is in zis somezing strendge,’ Nucingen said to himself, feeling the effect of his pills. ‘Vot vill zey say at hom’?’

  He got up, looked out of the window: ‘My garritch iss still zere… Soon iss taylight!…’

  He walked about the room: ‘How Matame te Nouzingen vill laugh at me, if efer she knows how I spend zis night!…’

  He placed his ear against the bedroom door feeling that it was too foolish to be accommodated as he was. ‘Ezder!…’

  No reply.

  ‘Gottes Himmell she still veeps!…’ he said to himself as he stretched out on the sofa.

  Ten minutes or so after sunrise, Baron Nucingen, who had slept as badly as one must in a cramped position on a divan, was awakened with a start by Europe in the middle of one of the sorts of dream one has in such positions and whose disordered sequence is a phenomenon still unexplained by medical physiology.

  ‘Oh, my goodness, Madame!’ she was crying. ‘Madame! soldiers, police!… the Law. They want to arrest you…’

  Just as Esther appeared at the door of her room, barely covered by a dressing-gown, her bare feet in slippers, her hair loose, beautiful enough to damn the archangel Raphael, the drawing-room door disgorged a wave of human mud, trampling on ten feet towards the celestial creature, posed like an angel in a Flemish religious painting. A man stepped forward. Contenson, the frightful Contenson, placed his hand on Esther’s moist shoulder.

  ‘You are Mademoiselle Esther van…?’ said he.

  Europe, with a back-hander across his face, sent Contenson flying to measure as much carpet as he needed to lie on, all the more readily in that she followed the blow up with a sharp kick in the legs of a kind known to those who practise the art which foreigners call French boxing, but which is more correctly known as savate.

  ‘Get back!’ she cried, ‘nobody lays hands on my mistress!’

  ‘She’s broken my leg!’ Contenson was complaining loudly as he got up, ‘somebody’ll pay for that…’

  Against the background of five minions of justice dressed as such minions are, keeping their frightful hats on their yet more frightful heads, displaying faces of veined mahogany in which eyes squinted, a nose here and there missing and mouths grimacing, stood out the figure of Louchard, attired more decently than his men, but hat on head, face at once sugary and mocking.

  ‘I am arresting you, Mademoiselle,’ he said to Esther. ‘As to you, my girl,’ he said to Europe, ‘resistance is useless, and all contumacy will be punished.’

  The rattle of rifle-butts on the tiles of the dining-room and the ante-chamber added force to his argument. The Guard had a Guard.

  ‘Why do you want to arrest me?’ said Esther innocently.

  ‘What about our little debts?…’ replied Louchard.

  ‘Ah, that’s true!’ cried Esther. ‘Wait while I dress.’

  ‘Unluckily for you, Mademoiselle, I need to make sure that there is no way of escape from your bedroom,’ said Louchard.

  All this took place so quickly that the baron had not yet had time to intervene.

  ‘Now am I a filthy seller of human flesh, Baron Nucingen!…’ called out the terrible Asia as she slipped through the ranks of the minions to the divan where she affected to discover the banker.

  ‘File schtrumpet!’ cried Nucingen rising to his feet in financial majesty.

  And he stepped between Esther and Louchard, who took his hat off at Contenson’s ejaculation:

  ‘Monsieur le Baron de Nucingen!…’

  At a sign from Louchard, his men evacuated the apartment all of them uncovering respectfully. Only Contenson stayed.

  ‘Is Monsieur le Baron paying?…’ asked the Guard now hat in hand.

  ‘I am baying,’ he answered, ‘pud virst I vill know vot iss.’

  ‘Three hundred and twelve thousand francs and a few centimes, ready cash, and that doesn’t cover the cost of this arrest.’

  ‘Tree hundert tausend vrancs!’ cried the baron. ‘Is too costly avakening vor a men who hes spent ze night on a sofa,’ he added in Europe’s ear.

  ‘Is this man really Baron Nucingen?’ Europe asked Louchard accompanying her expression of doubt with a gesture which Mademoiselle Dupont, latest soubrette at the Comédie Française, might have envied.

  ‘Yes, miss,’ said Louchard.

  ‘Yes,’ echoed Contenson.

  ‘I vill enswer for ze lady,’ said the baron whose pride was offended by Europe’s doubt, ‘let me a vort to her say.’

  Esther and her aged suitor went into the bedroom, to whose keyhole Louchard thought it necessary to apply his ear.

  ‘I lof you more zen my life, Esther; but vhy gif your greditors money vhich vould be invinitely petter in your burse? You go prison: I arrange puy up zis hundert tausend crown mit hundert tausend vranc, end you shell hef two hundert tausend vranc yourself…�
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  ‘An arrangement like that,’ Louchard called out, ‘won’t do. The creditor isn’t in love with Mademoiselle, not likely!… Is that clear? he’s even keener on getting every penny, since he gathered you were mad about her.’

  ‘Accursed vool!’ cried Nucingen to Louchard opening the door and pulling him into the room, ‘you ton’t know whad you’re saying! I gif you, bersonally, dwendy ber zent, you fixing zis…’

  ‘Impossible, Monsieur le Baron.’

  ‘What, sir? you’d have the heart,’ said Europe intervening, ‘to let my mistress go to prison!… Do you want my wages, my savings? take them, Madame, I have forty thousand francs…’

  ‘Ah, poor wench, I didn’t know you!’ cried Esther folding Europe in her arms.

  Europe burst into tears.

  ‘I am baying,’ said the baron piteously taking out a notecase from which he drew one of those little squares of printed paper which the Bank gives to bankers, on which all they have to do is fill in the amount in figures and written out in full to turn them into orders payable to the bearer.

  ‘It isn’t worth the trouble, Monsieur le Baron,’ said Louchard, ‘my orders are to take payment only in gold or silver money. As it’s you, I might be content with bank notes.’

  ‘Toffle tek it!’ cried the baron, ‘I see your gretentials?’

  Contenson handed him three documents folded in blue paper, which the baron took with a look at Contenson, to whom he hissed under his breath: ‘You coult have spend ze day better by coming to varn me.’

  ‘How was I to know you were here, Monsieur le Baron?’ answered the spy without caring whether or no Louchard heard him. ‘You lost, you know, by not continuing to place your confidence in me. You were cheated,’ added this profound thinker with a shrug.

  ‘Iss true,’ the baron thought. ‘Och, my chilt,’ he cried on seeing the bills of exchange and addressing Esther, ‘you vere ze fictim off a vamous rog, a svintler!’

  ‘Yes, alas,’ said poor Esther, ‘but he was very fond of me!…’

  ‘If I het known,… I voult hef noted it for protest end so nullified it for you.’