A Harlot High and Low

by Honoré de Balzac

  ‘It gost dwo tausend vrancs an ell from a milord who prought it pack from de Indies…’

  ‘Very nice. Charming! What a pleasure it will be to drink champagne here!’ said Esther. ‘The froth won’t splash the windows!’

  ‘Oh, Madame!’ said Europe, ‘just look at the carpet!…’

  ‘Es de garpet hed been dessigned vor de Tuke Tolinia, who vount it too dear, I pought id vor you, who are a qveen! ’ said Nucingen.

  By an effect due to chance, this carpet, the work of one of our most ingenious designers, was in perfect keeping with the caprices of the Chinese drapery. The walls painted by Schinner and Leon de Lora portrayed voluptuous scenes, thrown into relief by carved ebony panelling, acquired at huge cost from du Sommerard, narrow fillets of gilt discreetly catching the light. Now you may judge the rest.

  ‘You did well to bring me here,’ said Esther, ‘it will take me a good week to become used to my house, and not to seem like an upstart…’

  ‘My houze!’ the baron joyfully repeated. ‘Den you agsept it?…’

  ‘Indeed, yes, a thousand times yes, you stupid animal,’ she said with a smile.

  ‘Hanimal vould pe enough…’

  ‘Stupid is to stroke you,’ she continued looking at him.

  The poor Shark took Esther’s hand and placed it on his heart: he was animal enough to feel but too stupid to find a word.

  ‘Zee how it peats,… vor a liddle vort of avvection,’ he went on. And he led his gottess into the bedroom.

  ‘Oh, my, Madame,’ said Eugénie, ‘I couldn’t stay in there, I shouldn’t be able to keep out of that bed.’

  ‘Well, my little elephant,’ said Esther, ‘this must be paid for at once…. Look, after dinner, let’s go to the theatre together. I have a craving for theatres.’

  It was exactly five years since Esther had been near a theatre. At the moment, all Paris was going to the Porte Saint Martin, to see one of those plays upon which a gifted cast bestows a powerful sense of reality, Richard d’Arlington. Like all essentially simple natures, Esther loved to be made to tremble with fear no less than to give way to sentimental tears. ‘We’ll go and see Frederick Lemaître,’ she said, ‘he’s an actor I adore!’

  ‘Iss a treatful trama,’ said Nucingen who didn’t at the moment fancy appearing in public.

  The baron sent his man out to book one of the two stage-level boxes. Another peculiarity of Paris! When Success, with its feet of clay, packs a theatre, there is always a stage-level box free ten minutes before the curtain rises; the management keep it for themselves unless some passion of the Nucingen type appears to take it. Like first fruits from Chevet’s, that box is a tax levied on Olympian folly in Paris.

  It is pointless to describe the tableware. Nucingen had brought three sets together: the great, the small and the medium. The finest dessert service was, plates and dishes, all of it carved silver-gilt. In order not to overwhelm the table with investments in gold and silver, the baron had attached delightfully fragile porcelain to each service, Dresden china costing more than silver services. As to the napery, linen from England, Saxony, Flanders and France vied in perfection with their flowered damask.

  At dinner, it was the baron’s turn to be surprised on tasting Asia’s cooking.

  ‘I onnerstend,’ he said, ‘why you coll her Essia: zis iss Essiatic foot.’

  ‘Ah, I am beginning to think he loves me,’ said Esther, ‘he said something I recognized as a word.’

  ‘I know ozzer,’ he said.

  ‘Well, he’s more of a Turcaret than they told me!’ cried the laughing courtesan at this reply worthy of the celebrated ineptitudes of Lesage’s unscrupulous financier.

  The dishes were spiced in such a way as to give the baron indigestion, so that he might go home early; it was therefore all that he gained in the way of pleasure from his first evening with Esther. At the theatre, he was obliged to drink innumerable glasses of sugar and water, leaving Esther alone at the intervals. Too predictably for mere coincidence, Tullia, Mariette and Madame du Val-Noble were at the theatre that evening. Richard d’Arlington was one of those wild and deserved successes to be seen only in Paris. Watching this play, men all felt that it was possible to throw their legitimate wives out of the window, and the women loved seeing themselves unjustly maltreated. The women said to themselves: ‘It’s too much, they only push us,… but how often!…’ Now, a creature of Esther’s beauty, attired as Esther was, couldn’t shine with impunity at stage-level in the Porte Saint Martin. And so, by the second act, the two dancers’ box was the scene of a positive upheaval caused by the recognition that the fair unknown was none other than the Torpedo.

  ‘Well, I never, where’s she come from?’ said Mariette to Madame du Val-Noble, ‘I thought she was drowned…’

  ‘Is it really her? she looks to me thirty-seven times younger and better-looking than six years ago.’

  ‘Perhaps she’s preserved herself like Madame d’Espard and Madame Zayonscheck, in ice,’ said Count Brambourg, who had brought the three women to the theatre, in a stalls box. ‘Isn’t it the rat you were going to send me to work on my uncle?’ he said to Tullia.

  ‘None other,’ replied Tullia to her companion. ‘Du Bruel, run down to the orchestra, and see if it really is she.’

  ‘Does she give herself airs!’ exclaimed Madame du Val-Noble.

  ‘Oh, she has a right to them,’ Count Brambourg commented, ‘since she’s with my friend Baron Nucingen. I’m going along.’

  ‘Can she be the supposed Joan of Arc who conquered Nucingen, the one they’ve bored us with for three months?…’ said Mariette.

  ‘Good evening, my dear Baron,’ said Philippe Bridau entering Nucingen’s box. ‘So there you are married to Mademoiselle Esther?… Mademoiselle, I’m just a poor soldier you got out of trouble, at Issoudun,… Philippe Bridau…’

  ‘Never heard of him,’ said Esther, fixing her opera glasses on the house.

  ‘Matamiselle,’ answered the baron, ‘iss no longer blain Esther; her name iss now Matame de Champy, efter a smoll esdate I pought her…’

  ‘If you really want to know the form,’ said the count, ‘the ladies are saying that Madame de Champy gives herself airs… If you don’t want to know me, you might condescend to remember Mariette, Tullia, Madame du Val-Noble,’ went on the upstart whom the Duc de Maufrigneuse had ingratiated with the Dauphin.

  ‘If the ladies are nice to me, I am disposed to be agreeable to them,’ Madame de Champy said coldly.

  ‘Nice!’ said Philippe, ‘they’re better than that, they call you Joan of Arc.’

  ‘So, if ziz leddies vish to choin you,’ said Nucingen, ‘I vill leaf you alone, I hef eaden doo much. Your garriage vill bick you up mit your pipple… Zot toffle, Essia!…’

  ‘The first time out, and you’d leave me alone!’ said Esther. ‘Really! I shall be stranded. I need my man with me when I leave. If anybody insulted me, I should have nobody to appeal to…’

  The old millionaire’s egoism had to yield to the lover’s obligations. The baron suffered and stayed. Esther had her reasons for keeping her man. If she received her old friends, she wouldn’t be as closely questioned in company as she would been alone. Philippe Bridau hurried back to the dancers’ box and told them how matters stood.

  ‘Ah, she’s the one who’s taking over my house in the rue Saint Georges!’ said Madame du Val-Noble with some bitterness, for she now found herself on foot, as they say.

  ‘Probably,’ answered the colonel. ‘Du Tillet told me the baron had laid out three times as much there as your poor Falleix.’

  ‘Are we going to see her, then?’ said Tullia.

  ‘Not me!’ replied Mariette, ‘she’s too well got up, I’ll call and see her at home.’

  ‘I don’t look too bad, I’ll chance it,’ said Tullia.

  The bold First Subject therefore went along at the interval and renewed acquaintance with Esther who confined herself to generalities.

  ‘Where have you jus
t got back from, child?’ asked the dancer who could not restrain her curiosity.

  ‘Oh! I stayed five years in a castle in the Alps with an Englishman as jealous as a tiger, a nabob; my nabot I called him, my dwarf, for he was smaller than the Bailiff of Ferrette. And now I’ve reverted to a banker, from a Caribbee to a syllabub, Florine would have said. And so here I am, back in Paris, so much in need of amusement, life with me will be just a Carnival. I shall keep open house. Ah! after five years of solitude, I need a tonic, and I’m starting on it at once. Five years of English, that’s too long; according to the advertisements, you’re supposed to be able to pick it up in six weeks.’

  ‘Did the baron give you this lace?’

  ‘No, that’s a bit left over from the nabob… Am I unlucky, my dear! he was as green as the smile of a successful man’s friend, I thought he’d be dead in ten months. But, my dear, he was strong as an Alp. Never trust a man with liver trouble… I never want to hear about livers again. I’ve been too much of a believer in proverbs… That nabob robbed me, he died without making a will, and the family put me out as though I had the plague. So I said to the big boy here: “You pay for two!” You might well call me a Joan of Arc, I lost England! and I dare say I shall die in the flames.’

  ‘Of love!’ said Tullia.

  ‘Burnt alive!’ replied Esther suddenly turning thoughtful.

  The baron laughed at all these salacious jokes, but it took him time to see them, so that his laughs went off like forgotten squibs after a firework display.

  We live in our various circles, and curiosity is confined to no one sphere. At the Opera, the news of Esther’s return ran round the corridors in the small hours, so that, by four o’clock in the morning everybody in the Champs-Élysées world had heard about the Torpedo, and finally knew who was the object of Baron Nucingen’s passion.

  ‘Do you realize,’ said Blondet to de Marsay in the Opera lounge, ‘that the Torpedo disappeared the day after we recognized her here as little Rubempré’s mistress?’

  In Paris, as in the provinces, everything gets around. The police in the rue de Jérusalem is not so well organized as that of society, where everyone spies on everybody else without knowing that he is doing it. Carlos had never been in doubt about the danger of Lucien’s position during and after the rue Taitbout.

  A woman on foot

  THERE is no more horrible situation than that in which Madame du Val-Noble found herself, and the expression on foot renders it to perfection. The carelessness and prodigality of such women prevents them ever thinking about the future. In that exceptional world, far wittier and more full of comedy than it is commonly given credit for, women who are no longer beautiful with the positive, unchanging beauty so easily recognized, those who are loved capriciously, if at all, are the only ones to think about and save for their old age: the more beautiful they are, the less provident. ‘Are you afraid of growing ugly, then, that you’ve started saving…?’ was a thing Florine had said to Mariette which perhaps indicates one source of this prodigality. Given a financier who kills himself, or a prodigal whose money has run out, in the result these women fall with appalling rapidity from shameless opulence to sheer destitution. Then they fling themselves into the arms of the wardrobe dealer, they sell exquisite jewellery for almost nothing, they run up debts, anything to keep up the appearance of luxury which might help them to regain what they have lost: coffers into which they can dip. The ups and downs of their life sufficiently explain the cost of affairs almost invariably arranged, in reality, as Asia had fixed up that of Nucingen with Esther. Those who know their Paris thus understand the situation perfectly when they see in the Champs Élysées, that busy and tumultuous bazaar, such and such a woman in a hired carriage whom, a year or six months ago, they saw in a scrupulously maintained equipage of stunning elegance. ‘When you come down to Sainte Pélagie, you must know how to bounce back into the Bois de Boulogne,’ said Florine laughing with Blondet over the little Vicomte de Portenduère. Some women are too clever to risk the contrast. They shut themselves away in dreadful boarding houses, where they expiate their former luxury with privations like those suffered by travellers lost in some Sahara; but this doesn’t give them the least taste for economy. They venture out to masked balls, they travel about in the provinces, on fine days they appear in their best clothes on the boulevards. Among each other, too, they find the mutual aid often displayed by the proscribed classes. A little help given to another does not cost a lucky woman much, since she can still say: ‘That’s what I’ll wear on Sunday.’ The most effective help, nevertheless, comes from the wardrobe dealer. When this kind of usurer is owed money, she rouses and digs into old men’s hearts everywhere in aid of her hat and half-boot repository. Unable to foresee the calamity which befell one of the richest and cleverest stockbrokers, Madame du Val-Noble had been caught in utter disarray. She had used Falleix’s money to satisfy her whims, and counted on him directly to see to her real needs and her future. ‘How,’ she said to Mariette, was one to expect that from a man who seemed so good-natured?’ At almost all social levels, good nature belongs to the open-handed man, who lends a few crowns here and there without expecting repayment, who behaves at all times according to a code of some delicacy, beyond common, everyday, constrained morality. Some who are thought virtuous and upright, like Nucingen, have ruined their benefactors, and some who have passed through the hands of the police behave admirably with a woman. All-round virtue, the dream of Molière, in the person of Alceste, is extremely rare; it occurs nevertheless everywhere, even in Paris. Good nature is the product of a certain graciousness of character which proves nothing. A man is like that as a cat is smooth-furred, as a slipper is ready for the foot. And so, as the expression is understood among kept women, good nature required Falleix to warn his mistress of what was coming and leave her something to live on. D’Estourny, the gallant swindler, had been good-natured; he cheated at cards, but he had put thirty thousand francs on one side for his mistress. Thus, wherever an evening celebration was afoot, women always replied to his accusers: ‘THAT’S NOTHING!… whatever you say, Georges was a good-natured fellow, he had nice manners, he deserved better luck!’ Whores don’t care for the law, they adore a certain delicacy of feeling; they may sell themselves, like Esther, for some obscure ideal, which is their religion. After barely saving one or two pieces of jewellery from the shipwreck, Madame du Val-Noble was subjected to the terrible weight of the accusation: ‘She ruined Falleix!’ She was near thirty, and although in the full development of her beauty, she could all the more easily pass for older in that, in such a crisis, all a woman’s rivals turn against her. Mariette, Florine and Tullia still invited their friend to dinner, helped her out with money now and then; but, not knowing what her debts amounted to, dared not sound the depths of that gulf. An interval of six years had caused the Torpedo and Madame du Val-Noble to drift too far apart on the shifting tide of Paris for the woman on foot now to address herself to the one in her carriage; but the Val-Noble knew well that Esther was too generous not to think sometimes that, as she put it, she had inherited from her old friend, and not to show this if they met apparently by chance. In the hope of bringing this chance about, Madame du Val-Noble attired herself very respectably and walked every day in the Champs Élysées, on the arm of Théodore Gaillard, whom she was later to marry and who, at the present sad juncture, was behaving very well to his former mistress, inviting her out and sending her theatre tickets. She counted on running into Esther one fine day. Esther now had Paccard as a coachman, for the household had, within five days, been organized by Asia, Europe and him, on the instructions of Carlos, in such a way as to make its rue Saint Georges headquarters an impregnable fortress. On his side, Peyrade, moved by a deep hatred and a desire for revenge, but above all with the aim of setting up his dear Lydia, also took to walking in the Champs Élysées, once Contenson had told him that Monsieur de Nucingen’s mistress was to be seen there. Peyrade got himself up so perfectly as an Englishman, and
was so effortlessly able to speak French in the twittering English manner; his knowledge of English was faultless, his knowledge of that country’s affairs was so complete, as a result of three police missions on which he had been sent there in 1779 and 1786, that he played the part of an Englishman at embassies or in London, without arousing suspicion. Peyrade, who had much in common with Musson, the famous mystifier, so well understood the art of disguise that even Contenson had been known to fail to recognize him. Accompanied by Contenson, disguised as a mulatto, Peyrade studied Esther and her people with an eye which seemed inattentive but which saw all. It was quite natural, therefore, for him to be on the pavement used by those with carriages in fine, dry weather, the day Esther met Madame du Val-Noble there. Peyrade, followed by his mulatto in livery, strolled unaffectedly, like a true nabob thinking only of himself, in the path of the two women, in such a way as to pick up fragments of their conversation as he passed.

  ‘My dear child,’ said Esther to Madame du Val-Noble, ‘come and see me. Nucingen owes it to himself not to leave his broker’s mistress without a farthing…’