A Harlot High and Low

by Honoré de Balzac

  ‘Ah! Papa Peyrade, you still love women enough to…? But I’m not so simple; me, I’m sixty, and I get along very well without… However, if things are as you say, I do see that, in order to enjoy your little fling, you must pass yourself off as a foreigner.’

  ‘You can understand that neither Peyrade nor Father Canquoëlle of the rue des Moineaux…’

  ‘Indeed, neither one nor the other would have suited Madame du Val-Noble,’ Carlos continued, delighted to have Father Canquoëlle’s address confirmed. ‘Before the Revolution I had a mistress,’ he said, ‘who’d been kept by the high executioner or Tormenter as he was then called. One day, at the theatre, she pricked herself on a pin, and, as people did then, she exclaimed: “Oh, the torment” “Is that what it reminds you of?” said her neighbour. Well, my dear Peyrade, for that witticism she left her man. I can see that you don’t want to expose yourself to a snub of that kind… Madame du Val-Noble is a woman for the best kind of man, I saw her one day at the Opera, I thought her very beautiful… Tell the driver to turn back to the rue de la Paix, my dear Peyrade, I’ll go up with you to your rooms and see for myself. No doubt the Prefect will be satisfied with a verbal report.’

  Carlos took out of his pocket a snuff-box of black card lined with silver-gilt, he opened it, and offered it to Peyrade with the most engaging air of friendliness. Peyrade said to himself: ‘That’s the sort of agents they have now!… good Lord! if Monsieur Lenoir or Monsieur de Sartine were to come back, what would they say?’

  ‘That, I dare say, is part of the truth, but it isn’t the whole, my dear friend,’ said the false justice of the peace as he finished sniffing up his pinch. ‘You’ve been interesting yourself in the affairs of the heart of Baron Nucingen, and no doubt you’re hoping to catch him with a slip-knot; you missed your aim with a pistol, and now you’re going to try the big guns on him. Madame du Val-Noble is a friend of Madame de Champy…’

  ‘The devil! I must watch out!’ said Peyrade to himself. ‘He’s cleverer than I thought. He’s playing with me: he speaks of letting me go, but he’s still making me talk.’

  ‘Well?’ said Carlos with an air of authority.

  ‘Sir, it is true that I made the mistake of trying to find Monsieur de Nucingen a woman over whom he’d lost his head. That’s how I come to be in my present disfavour; for it appears that, without knowing it,’ I brushed against important interests.’ (The petty magistrate remained impassive.) ‘But I know enough about police work after fifty-two years of practice,' Peyrade continued, ‘to leave that matter alone after the dressing-down I got from the Prefect, who was certainly right…’

  ‘So you would give up your little fling if the Prefect asked you to? That, I’m sure, would be the best way of proving the sincerity of what you say.’

  ‘He’s pressing hard! he’s pressing me hard now!’ said Peyrade to himself. ‘Confound it! agents today are as good as Monsieur Lenoir’s.’

  ‘Give it up?’ said Peyrade… ‘I shall await the Prefect’s orders… But if you wish to come up, here we are at the hotel.’

  ‘Where do you find the money?’ Carlos asked him with a close and penetrating look.

  ‘Sir, I have a friend,…’ said Peyrade.

  ‘Try telling that to an examining magistrate,’ Carlos added.

  This boldly conceived scene had resulted from Carlos’s putting two and two together with the simplicity characteristic of a man of his temper. He had sent Lucien, very early in the day, to Countess Sérisy’s. Lucien begged the count’s private secretary to go, on the count’s behalf, to ask the Prefect for information about the agent employed by Baron Nucingen. The secretary had come back with a note on Peyrade, copied from the summary in his file:

  In the police since 1778, arrived in Paris from Avignon, two years previously.

  Without fortune and without morality, repository of State secrets.

  Domiciled rue des Moineaux, under the name of Canquoëlle, that of a small estate on which his family lives, in the department of Vaucluse, family of good repute.

  Recently sought by one of his great-nephews, named Théodose de la Peyrade. (See agent’s report, document No. 37.)

  ‘He must be the Englishman Contenson is serving as a mulatto,’ Carlos exclaimed when Lucien reported what he had been given to understand verbally, outside the note.

  Within three hours, this man, whose range of action was that of a general in command, had found through Paccard an innocent accomplice capable of playing the part of a constable in plain clothes, and had disguised himself as a justice of the peace. He had hesitated three times about killing Peyrade in the cab; but as he had forbidden himself ever to commit a murder in person, he resolved to get rid of Peyrade in due course by pointing him out as a millionaire to one or two former convicts.

  Peyrade and his Mentor heard the voice of Contenson talking with Madame du Val-Noble’s maid. Peyrade then made a sign to Carlos to remain in the first room, with the evident air of adding: ‘Now you shall judge of my sincerity.’

  ‘Madame agrees to everything,’ said Adèle. ‘Madame is at the moment with one of her friends, Madame de Champy, who still has a year’s lease of an apartment fully furnished in the rue Taitbout, and will no doubt let her have it. It will be better for Madame to receive Mr Johnson there, for the furniture is still in very good condition, and Monsieur can buy it for Madame by arrangement with Madame de Champy.’

  ‘Excellent, my child. If that isn’t a carrot, it’s the leaves of one!’ said the mulatto to the stupefied girl; ‘but we’ll share it…’

  ‘Well, that’s a way for a coloured man to speak!’ exclaimed Mademoiselle Adèle. ‘If your nabob really is a nabob, he can afford to provide Madame with furniture. The lease runs out in April 1830, your nabob can renew it, if it suits him.’

  ‘Aoh, yes, that will suit me down to the ground!’ replied Peyrade with a tap on the maid’s shoulder as he entered.

  And he motioned significantly to Carlos, who answered with a nod to show that he understood that the nabob must remain in character. But the scene changed suddenly with the entrance of a player over whom neither Carlos nor the Prefect of police exercised control. Corentin appeared unexpectedly. He was passing and, having found the door open, had looked in to see how his old friend Peyrade was getting along in the part of a nabob.

  Corentin wins the second round

  ‘THE Prefect is after me again!’ said Peyrade in a whisper to Corentin, ‘he’s discovered me as a nabob.’

  ‘We must get a new Prefect,’ Corentin answered his friend in an undertone.

  Then, after bowing to him coldly, he examined the magistrate with deliberation.

  ‘Stay here till I come back; I am going to the Prefecture,’ said Carlos. ‘If you don’t see me, you can carry on with your little game.’

  Having whispered these words to Peyrade so as not to demolish his character before the maid, Carlos went out, not wishing to remain under the gaze of the newcomer, in whom he recognized one of those blond, blue-eyed natures of a frightening coldness.

  ‘He’s the justice the Prefect sent along to me,’ said Peyrade to Corentin.

  ‘Him!’ replied Corentin, ‘you’ve let yourself be taken in. That man has three packs of cards in his shoes, you can tell from the position of the foot in the shoe; besides a justice of the peace has no need to disguise himself!’

  Corentin went down rapidly to confirm his suspicions; Carlos was getting into the cab.

  ‘Hi, Monsieur l’ Abbé?…’ Corentin called out.

  Carlos turned his head, saw Corentin and stepped into his cab. Corentin nevertheless had time to say through the closing door: ‘That’s all I wanted to know.’ Then: ‘Quai Malaquais!’ he called to the driver with devilish mockery in both look and accent.

  ‘Well, well,’ thought Jacques Collin, ‘the game’s up, they’re on to me now, I shall have to move fast, above all I must know what they want with us.’

  Corentin had seen Father Carlos Herrera five or six t
imes, and the man’s eyes were not easily forgotten. The first thing Corentin had noted was the squareness of the shoulders, then the blistered face, and the trick of putting on three inches with a false heel.

  ‘So he pulled you up short, eh?’ said Corentin seeing that only Peyrade and Contenson were now in the bedroom.

  ‘Who?’ cried Peyrade with a metallic vibration in his voice, ‘I’ll spend my last days putting him on a grill and turning him on it.’

  ‘It’s Father Carlos Herrera, probably the Spanish Corentin. Everything is explained. The Spaniard is a high-class procurer who’s set himself to making that little man’s fortune by minting money with a pretty whore as bait… It’s up to you to decide whether you’ll risk a turn with a diplomatist who strikes me as hellish clever.’

  ‘Good Lord!’ exclaimed Contenson, ‘he’s the one who took the three hundred thousand francs the day of Esther’s arrest, it was him in the cab! I remember those eyes, that forehead, those pock marks.’

  ‘Ah! what a dowry my poor Lydia’d have had!’ cried Peyrade.

  ‘Keep up the nabob part,’ said Corentin. ‘To have an eye at Esther’s, we must see that she remains friends with the Val-Noble, she was Lucien de Rubempré’s real mistress.’

  ‘Nucingen’s already been bilked of more than five hundred thousand francs,’ said Contenson.

  ‘They need as much again,’ Corentin went on, ‘the Rubempré estate costs a million. Papa,’ said he with a tap on Peyrade’s shoulder, ‘you shall have a good hundred thousand francs to settle on Lydia.’

  ‘Don’t say that to me, Corentin. If your plan misfired, I don’t know what I might be capable of…’

  ‘You may even get them tomorrow! The abbé, my dear friend, is very cunning, we must give him his due, he’s a superior devil; but I’ve got him, he knows when he’s beaten, he’ll give in. Just be stupid enough for a nabob, and fear nothing.’

  In the evening of this day on which the real adversaries had met face to face in the open, Lucien went to a reception at the Grandlieu house. The company was large. Before all her guests, the duchess kept Lucien by her for some time, and behaved charmingly to him.

  ‘You’ve been away for a while?’ she asked him.

  ‘Yes, Madame la Duchesse. My sister, in the hope of facilitating my marriage, has made great sacrifices, and I’ve been able to buy up the Rubempré estate and bring it all together again. But my solicitor in Paris is a clever man, he’s been able to spare me the claims those in possession of the property would have put in if they’d known the name of the purchaser.’

  ‘Is there a manor-house?’ said Clotilde smiling too broadly.

  ‘There’s something of the kind, but the best thing will be to use it as building material towards a modern house.’

  Clotilde’s eyes added flames of happiness to her smiles of contentment.

  ‘This evening you’ll make up a rubber with my father,’ she said in an undertone. ‘Within a fortnight, I hope you’ll be invited to dinner.’

  ‘Well, my dear sir,' said the Duc de Grandlieu, ‘they tell me you’ve bought up the Rubempré estate; I congratulate you. It answers those who said you had debts. Like France or England, people of our sort can afford to have a Public Debt; but, of course, those without fortune, beginners, mustn’t adopt that style…’

  €˜The fact is, Monsieur le Duc, that I still owe five hundred thousand francs on my estate.’

  ‘Well, you’ll have to marry some girl who can provide them; but I’m afraid you won’t find it easy to make a match on that scale in this neighbourhood, daughters round here don’t get much in the way of dowries.’

  ‘They have their name, and that does instead,’ replied Lucien.

  ‘There are only three of us for whist, Maufrigneuse, d’Espard and myself,’ said the duke; ‘will you make up the four?’ he added to Lucien indicating the card table.

  Clotilde came to the table to watch her father play.

  ‘She wants to bring me luck,’ said the duke patting his daughter’s hands and glancing sideways at Lucien who remained serious.

  Lucien, Monsieur d’Espard’s partner, lost twenty louis.

  ‘Mother dear,’ Clotilde went over and said to the duchess, ‘he’s been clever enough to lose.’

  At eleven o’clock, after exchanging some words of love with Mademoiselle de Grandlieu, Lucien returned home and went to bed thinking of the complete triumph he was bound to enjoy in a month, for he felt certain of being accepted as Clotilde’s suitor, and married before Lent 1830.

  Next day, at the time when Lucien was smoking several cigarettes in company with Carlos who was sunk in thought, Monsieur de Saint Estève (he gave that name!) was announced. He wanted to speak either to the Abbé Carlos Herrera or to Monsieur Lucien de Rubempré.

  ‘Haven’t they told him below that I’ve gone away?’ cried the reverend father.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ replied the groom.

  ‘Well, then, you see this man,’ he said to Lucien; ‘but don’t utter a single compromising word, and don’t show any surprise, this is the enemy.’

  ‘You’ll hear me,’ said Lucien.

  Carlos concealed himself in an adjacent room, and through the crack of the door he saw Corentin enter, recognizing him only by his voice, so expert was this unknown great man at transforming himself! At that moment, Corentin looked like an elderly departmental head from the Ministry of Finance.

  ‘I have not the honour of being known to you, sir,’ said Corentin; ‘but…’

  ‘Forgive me for interrupting you, sir,’ said Lucien; ‘but…’

  ‘But it is a matter of your marriage with Mademoiselle Clotilde de Grandlieu, which will not be taking place,’ Corentin then added briskly.

  Lucien sat down and made no reply.

  ‘You are in the hands of a man with the power, the will, the ability to prove to the Duc de Grandlieu that the Rubempré estate will be paid for with the price a fool gave you for your mistress, Mademoiselle Esther,’ Corentin continued. ‘It won’t be difficult to turn up the record of the court decision under which Mademoiselle Esther was proceeded against, and there are means of getting d’Estourny to talk. The extremely clever manoeuvres used against Baron Nucingen will be brought to light… All this can be done very quickly. Give me a sum of a hundred thousand francs and you will be left in peace… This does not concern me personally. I am acting on behalf of those who have planned this blackmail, that is all.’

  Corentin might have talked for an hour. Lucien puffed at his cigarette with an air of perfect indifference.

  ‘Sir,’ he answered, ‘I don’t want to know who you are, for those who undertake missions of that kind are persons without name, as far as I am concerned. I have allowed you to go on talking without interruption: I am in my own home. You don’t seem to me to be entirely senseless, let me explain my own dilemma to you.’

  A pause ensued, during which Lucien icily encountered the cat’s gaze turned upon him by Corentin.

  ‘Either you are basing what you say on facts which are wholly false, in which case I need pay no attention,’ Lucien went on; ‘or you are right, and if that is so, by giving you a hundred thousand francs, I should leave you the right to demand as many similar amounts as your mandatory can find Saint Estèves to send me… In short, to bring your esteemed communication to an end, know that I, Lucien de Rubempré, am afraid of nobody. I have nothing to do with the kind of jobbery you mention. If the house of Grandlieu wishes to be awkward, there are other aristocratic young persons to be married off. Indeed it would be no reproach to me to stay a bachelor, especially if, as you suggest, I conduct my white-slave traffic with so much profit.’

  ‘If Monsieur I’Abbé Carlos Herrera…’

  ‘Sir,’ said Lucien interrupting Corentin, ‘Father Herrera is at the moment on his way to Spain; he has nothing to do with my marriage, nor indeed with any of my concerns. This man of State was kind enough to give me the benefit of his counsel for a long time, but he has accounts to render to
His Majesty the King of Spain; if you want to talk to him, you had better take the road to Madrid.’

  ‘Sir,’ said Corentin sharply, ‘you will never be the husband of Mademoiselle Clotilde de Grandlieu.’

  ‘So much the worse for her,’ replied Lucien impatiently pushing Corentin to the door.

  ‘Have you reflected?’ Corentin asked coldly.

  ‘Sir, I don’t admit your right either to interfere with my affairs or to make me waste a cigarette,’ said Lucien throwing his extinguished cigarette away.

  ‘Good-bye, sir,’ said Corentin. ‘We shan’t meet again,… but there will certainly come a moment in your life when you would give half your fortune to have thought of calling me back on the stairs.’

  In reply to this threat, Carlos made the gesture of chopping a head off.

  The sort of music old men sometimes hear at the Italiens

  ‘AND now to work!’ he cried looking at Lucien who had turned pale at the close of this dreadful conference.

  If, among the somewhat restricted number of readers who care about the moral and philosophical part of a book, a single one could be found who believed in the satisfaction of Baron Nucingen, that single one would prove how difficult it is to subject the heart of a harlot to any set of physiological rules. Esther had decided to make the poor millionaire pay dear for what he called his tay of driumph. Thus, at the beginning of February 1830, no house-warming had yet taken place at the liddle balace.

  ‘But,’ said Esther in confidence to her friends who repeated it to the baron, ‘at the Carnival, I shall open my house, and I mean to make my little man as happy as a fighting cock.’

  This saying became proverbial in the whores’ world. The baron thereupon began to grumble loudly. Like so many husbands, he became quite absurd, he complained to his friends, and his discontentment was known everywhere. Meanwhile Esther conscientiously kept up her part as Pompadour to the prince of Speculation. She had already given one or two little parties in order to introduce Lucien to the new house. Lousteau, Rastignac, du Tillet, Bixiou, Nathan, Count Brambourg, all the pick of the profligate crew, were constantly around. As feminine cast in the play she was putting on, Esther took on Tullia, Florentine, Fanny Beaupré, Florine, two actresses and two dancers, and Madame du Val-Noble. Nothing is gloomier than a harlot’s house without the salt of rivalry, the display of clothes, the changing faces. In the space of six weeks, Esther became the wittiest and the most amusing of women, the prettiest and the most elegant of those female Pariahs who make up the class of kept women. Set upon a pedestal of her own, she savoured all those pleasures of vanity which charm the common run of women, but in her case with a secret knowledge which placed her above others of her kind. In her heart she kept an image of herself which at once made her blush and glorified her, the hour of her abdication was always present to her consciousness; thus she lived as two persons, one pitying the other. Her sarcasms proceeded from that inward division, the contempt borne by the angel of love, within the harlot, for the infamous and hateful part played by the body in presence of the soul. At once spectator and actor, judge and defendant, she personified the myth so often found in Arabian tales, where a sublime being lies hidden beneath a degraded exterior, typified also, under the name of Nebuchadnezzar, in the book of books, the Bible. Having granted herself life until the day after her infidelity, the victim might as well amuse herself a little with the executioner. Besides, the glimpses Esther’d had into the secretly shameful methods to which the baron owed his colossal fortune removed all scruple, she liked to think of herself as the goddess Ate, Vengeance, as Carlos put it. And so, turn and turn about, she behaved charmingly and detestably towards this millionaire who lived only through her. When the baron reached the point of misery at which he determined to leave Esther, she brought him back to her with a tender scene.