A Harlot High and Low

by Honoré de Balzac

  ‘Hi, you others, he’s as English as I am!… My uncle’s a Gascon! he’d have to be, of course! ’

  Bixiou and Peyrade were sitting away from the others, and nobody heard. Peyrade fell off his chair and lay on the floor. At once Paccard picked him up and carried him to an attic where Peyrade fell into a deep sleep. It was six o’ clock in the evening before the Nabob awoke to find that his face was being wiped with a wet cloth and that he lay on a shaky trestle bed, face to face, beside Asia masked and wearing a black domino.

  ‘Hello, Papa Peyrade, are there two of us, then?’ said she.

  ‘Where am I?…’ he said looking about him.

  ‘Listen to me, this’ll sober you up,’ replied Asia. ‘If you don’t love Madame du Val-Noble, you love your daughter, don’t you?’

  ‘My daughter?’ howled Peyrade.

  ‘Yes, Miss Lydia…’

  ‘Well?…’

  ‘Well, she isn’t in the rue des Moineaux any longer, they’ve taken her away.’

  Peyrade uttered a gasping sigh like that of a soldier dying of an open wound on the battlefield.

  ‘While you played at being an Englishman, somebody else played at being Peyrade. Your little Lydia thought she was going with her father, she’s in a safe place… Oh, you’ll never find her! not unless you make good the harm you’ve caused.’

  ‘What harm?’

  ‘Yesterday, at the Duc de Grandlieu’s, entry was refused to Monsieur Lucien de Rubempré. This result was due to your intrigues and to the man you took away from us. Not a word. Listen!’ said Asia seeing Peyrade open his mouth. ‘You won’t get your daughter back, pure and without stain,’ Asia went on driving each point home by the stress she placed on each word, ‘till the day after Monsieur Lucien de Rubempré comes out of Saint Thomas Aquinas’s, married to Mademoiselle Clotilde. If, ten days from now, Lucien de Rubempré isn’t received back at the Grandlieu house, you to begin with will die a violent death, without any possibility of warding off the blow which threatens you… And then, just as you feel death coming, you’ll be given time in your last moments to think this thought: “My daughter will be a prostitute to the end of her days!…” Although you’ve been stupid enough to let us get our claws into the prey, you’ve got wit enough left to ponder this communication from our government. Don’t bark, don’t say a word, just go and change your clothes at Contenson’s, go home, and Katt will tell you that, on receiving a message from you, little Lydia went out and hasn’t returned. If you make any complaint, or go and see anyone, we shall begin where I told you we should finish with your daughter, she’s been promised to de Marsay. With Papa Canquoëlle, we don’t mince our words, or wear mittens, do we?… Off you go now and remember not to meddle with our affairs again.’

  Asia left Peyrade in a pitiable state, each word fell like a bludgeon stroke. The spy had two tears in his eyes and two tears at the bottom of his cheeks joined by two trails of moisture.

  ‘Mr Johnson is awaited for dinner,’ said Europe poking her head in a moment later.

  Peyrade didn’t answer, he went down the stairs, walked along the streets till he came to a cab stand, he hurried to Contenson’s to undress, without saying a word to Contenson he got himself up as Papa Canquoëlle again, and was home by eight o’clock. He climbed the stairs with beating heart. When the Flemish servant heard her master, she thoughtlessly asked him: ‘Well, where is Mademoiselle?’ so that the old spy was forced to lean against the wall. The blow was too great for his strength. He went into his daughter’s room, in the end fainted with grief on finding the apartment empty and hearing Katt’s account of a kidnapping as cleverly contrived as though he had invented it himself. ‘Come,’ he said to himself, ‘we shall have to give way, I’ll avenge myself later, I must see Corentin… For the first time, we’ve met our match. Corentin shall leave this pretty lad free to marry empresses if he chooses!… Ah! I understand now how my daughter came to love him at first sight… Oh! the Spanish priest knows what he’s doing… Courage, Papa Peyrade, disgorge your prey!’ The poor father did not foresee the dreadful blow which awaited him.

  When he reached Corentin’s the confidential, servant, who knew Peyrade, told him: ‘Monsieur has gone away…’

  ‘For long?’

  ‘For ten days!…’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I don’t know!…’

  ‘Oh, my God! I’m becoming stupid! I ask him where?… as if we ever told them,’ he thought.

  At the Belle Etoile

  SEVERAL hours before Peyrade was to be awakened in his attic at the rue Saint Georges, Corentin, driving in from Passy, appeared at the Duc de Grandlieu’s residence, dressed as a private servant in some good family. In the buttonhole of his black coat might be seen the ribbon of the Legion of Honour. He had given himself a little old man’s face, with powdered hair, full of wrinkles, pallid. His eyes were veiled by shell-rimmed spectacles. He looked like some old senior clerk. When he’d given his name (Monsieur de Saint Denis) he was conducted to the Duc de Grandlieu’s study, where he found Derville, reading the letter he had himself dictated to one of his agents, the handwriting expert. The duke took Corentin on one side to explain to him all that Corentin knew. Monsieur de Saint Denis listened coldly, respectfully, amused to be studying this great lord, penetrating to the bedrock under the velvet, seeing in the cold light of day a life given over, then and forever, to whist and the position of the house of Grandlieu. Great lords are so simple-minded with their inferiors, that Corentin didn’t need to put many questions humbly to Monsieur de Grandlieu before he received the kind of impertinence he expected.

  ‘Believe me, sir,’ said Corentin to Derville after being duly introduced to the solicitor, ‘it will be best for us to leave this very evening for Angoulême by the Bordeaux diligence, which travels just as fast as the mail-coach, we shall only need to stay there six hours to pick up the information Monsieur le Duc wants. It is sufficient, if I have understood Your Lordship, to discover whether the sister and brother-in-law of Monsieur de Rubempré could have given him twelve hundred thousand francs?…’ said he with a look at the duke.

  ‘Exactly,’ replied the peer of France.

  ‘We should be back in four days,’ Corentin went on looking at Derville, ‘and neither of us will have left his business alone long enough for it to have suffered.’

  ‘That was the only objection I had to make to His Lordship,’ said Derville. ‘It is four o’ clock, I’m going back to say a word or two to my head clerk, pack my things; and when I’ve dined, say by eight o’ clock… But will there be seats?’ he said to Monsieur de Saint Denis interrupting himself.

  ‘I‘ll see to that,’ said Corentin, ‘be in the yard at the Mes-sageries du Grand Bureau at eight o’clock. If there weren’t any places, I shall see to it that they are made, that is the kind of service Monseigneur le Duc de Grandlieu has a right to expect.’

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said the duke with great affability, ‘I shall not express my gratitude just yet…’

  Corentin and the solicitor, taking this as a sign of dismissal took their leave and departed. At the moment at which Peyrade was questioning Corentin’s servant, Monsieur de Saint Denis and Derville, seated in the half-compartment of the Bordeaux diligence, studied each other in silence as this vehicle left Paris. The following morning, from Orléans to Tours, Derville, who was bored, became talkative, and Corentin deigned to amuse him, while keeping his distance; allowing him to believe that he belonged to the diplomatic corps, and expected to become a consul general through the protection of the Duc de Grandlieu. Two days after their departure from Paris, Corentin and Derville stopped at Mansle, to the great astonishment of Derville who had expected to go on to Angoulême.

  ‘In this little town,’ said Corentin to Derville, ‘we shall pick up definite particulars about Madame Séchard.’

  ‘You know her then?’ asked Derville surprised to find Corentin so well informed.

  ‘I got the driver to talk when I discovered he came fr
om Angoulême, he told me that Madame Séchard lives at Marsac, and Marsac is only a league away from Mansle. I thought we should be better placed here than in Angoulême to unmask the truth.’

  ‘In any case,’ thought Derville, ‘I’m only here, as Monsieur le Duc said, as a witness to this confidential agent’s inquiries…’

  The landlord of the inn at Mansle, called the Belle Étoile, was one of those big, fat men whom one barely expects to see at a second visit, but who are still there, ten years later, standing at the door, with the same quantity of flesh, the same cotton bonnet, the same apron, the same big kitchen knife, the same greasy hair, the same three chins, and whose stereotype we find in all the novelists, from the immortal Cervantes to the immortal Sir Walter Scott. Are they not all full of culinary pretensions, haven’t they all got everything you could desire and don’t they all end by serving you a skinny chicken and vegetables warmed up in rancid butter? They all boast of their fine wines, and compel you to drink the local stuff. But from his earliest years Corentin had learnt to draw out of innkeepers things more essential than dubious dishes and apocryphal wines. So he gave himself out for a man easily pleased and perfectly happy to leave all to the discretion of the best cook in Mansle, as he said to the fat man.

  ‘It isn’t difficult for me to be the best, I’m the only one,’ replied mine host.

  ‘Serve us in the side room,’ said Corentin winking at Derville, ‘and above all don’t be afraid to light a fire, we’re numb with cold.’

  ‘It wasn’t very warm in the back of the coach,’ said Derville.

  ‘Is it far from here to Marsac?’ Corentin asked the innkeeper’s wife who descended from the upper regions’ on learning that the diligence had brought her travellers who would be staying the night.

  ‘Are you going to Marsac, Monsieur?’ the landlady asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he replied with a certain abruptness. ‘What sort of distance is it from here to Marsac?’ he asked again after giving the mistress of the house time to see his red ribbon.

  ‘By carriage, it’s a matter of a short half hour,’ said the innkeeper’s wife.

  ‘Do you suppose that Monsieur and Madame Séchard are there in winter?…’

  ‘Oh, certainly, they stay there all the year round…’

  ‘It’s five o’clock, should we find them still up at nine?’

  ‘Oh, till ten, they have company every evening, the curé, Monsieur Marron, the doctor.’

  ‘They must be excellent people!’ said Derville.

  ‘‘Oh, sir, the very best,’ replied the innkeeper’s wife, ‘ honest, straightforward folk… and not ambitious, what’s more! Monsieur Séchard, although his circumstances are comfortable, could have had millions, by what people say, if he had’t let himself be robbed of an invention he’d made in papermaking, so that all the profit goes to the Cointet brothers…’

  ‘Ah, yes! the Cointet brothers!’ said Corentin.

  ‘Hold your tongue now,’ said the innkeeper. ‘What does it matter to these gentlemen whether Monsieur Séchard does or does not possess the right to letters patent in papermaking? these gentlemen aren’t paper-dealers… If you mean to spend the night here at the Belle Étoile, under the stars, as you might say,’ went on the innkeeper addressing the two travellers, ‘here is the book, and I shall ask you to sign yourselves in. We have a local policeman who has nothing to do and who spends his time plaguing us…’

  ‘Confound it, confound it, I thought the Séchards were very rich,’ said Corentin while Derville wrote out his name and his qualifications as a solicitor attached to the Court of First Instance of the Seine department.

  ‘There are some folk,’ replied the innkeeper, ‘who say they’re millionaires; but to try to stop tongues clacking is like undertaking to stop the river flowing. Old Mr Séchard left property worth two hundred thousand francs in broad daylight, as they say, and that in itself isn’t bad for one who started as a workman. Well, he may have had as much again in savings,… for towards the end he was drawing a thousand or twelve hundred francs a year on his property. So, then, suppose he was stupid enough to do nothing with his money for ten years, that would be the lot! But reckon three hundred thousand francs, if it was put out at interest, as people think, then you can see for yourself. Five hundred thousand francs, that’s a long way short of a million. If I had the difference, I shouldn’t be here at the Belle Étoile.’

  ‘You mean,’ said Corentin, ‘that Monsieur David Séchard and his wife haven’t got a fortune of two or three millions…’

  ‘That,’ cried the innkeeper’s wife, ‘is what they reckon Messrs Cointet have, who robbed him of his invention, and all he got from them was twenty thousand francs… So where do you expect these honest folk to have got millions from? they were hard put to it in their father’s lifetime. Without Kolb, their manager, and Madame Kolb, who’s as devoted to them as her husband, they’d have found it difficult to live. What had they then, apart from the house, the Verberie?… a thousand crowns a year!…’

  Corentin took Derville aside and said to him: ‘In vino veritas! you find the truth under a bush. For my purposes, I regard an inn as the civic centre of a countryside, the notary knows far less than the innkeeper about what goes on in a small place… Look! we’re now understood to know the Cointets, the Kolbs and so on… An innkeeper is the living register of every incident, he polices the neighbourhood without knowing it. A government needs two hundred spies at most; for, in a country like France, there are ten million honest informers. But still we mustn’t trust everything we hear, though in this little town you can be sure something is known about the twelve hundred thousand francs laid out on the Rubempré estate… We shan’t stay here long…’

  ‘I hope not,’ said Derville.

  ‘That is why,’ Corentin continued, ‘I’ve hit on the most natural way of extracting the truth from the Séchards themselves. I count on you, with your authority as a solicitor, to back up the little ruse I shall employ to make you hear a clear and exact account of their fortune. After dinner, we shall be setting off for Monsieur Séchard’s,’ said Corentin to the innkeeper’s wife, ‘you can see to making up our beds, we want separate rooms. There must be plenty of space à la Belle Étoile.’

  ‘Oh, sir,’ said the woman, ‘we didn’t give it that name, the sign was here.’

  ‘The play on words exists in every part of the country,’ said Corentin, ‘making your guests sleep “out under the stars” isn’t a monopoly of yours.’

  ‘Your dinner is now served, gentlemen,’ said the innkeeper.

  ‘So where the devil did that young man find the money?… Is the anonymous letter writer telling the truth? could it be the savings of some fair lady?’ said Derville to Corentin as they seated themselves at table.

  ‘That will be the subject of further inquiries,’ said Corentin. ‘According to what the Duc de Chaulieu tells me, Lucien de Rubempré lived with a converted Jewess, who gave herself out for a Dutchwoman, and used the name Esther van Bogseck.’

  ‘What a singular coincidence! ’ said the lawyer, ‘I’m looking for the heiress of a Dutchman called Gobseck, it’s the same name if you change the consonants round…’

  ‘Well,’ said Corentin, ‘when we get back to Paris, I’ll dig up what you need about the consanguinity question there.’

  An hour later, the two representatives of the house of Grandlieu left for the Verberie, Monsieur and Madame Séchard’s house.

  Corentin lays a trap

  NEVER had Lucien experienced feelings so profound as those with which he was seized at the Verberie when he compared his own destiny with that of his brother-in-law. The two men from Paris would be confronted with the same spectacle as, a few days before, had met Lucien’s eyes. There everything spoke of calm and plenitude. At the time at which the two strangers were due to arrive, the Verberie drawing-room contained a group of five people: the parish priest of Marsac, a young man of twenty-five who, at Madame Séchard’s request, had constitut
ed himself her son Lucien’s tutor; the country doctor, a Monsieur Marron; the mayor of the commune, and an old colonel retired from the service who grew roses on a small piece of land, facing the Verberie, on the other side of the road. Every evening in winter, these four came to play an innocent game of Boston at a centime a trick, pick up newspapers or retail what was in the ones they’d read. When Monsieur and Madame Séchard bought the Verberie, a fine house built of limestone with slated roofs, its outside amenities consisted of a little garden of about two acres. With time, devoting her savings to it, the beautiful Madame Séchard had extended her garden as far as a little watercourse, sacrificing the bits of vineyard she bought and converting them into lawns and rockeries. At that moment, the Verberie, surrounded by a little park of about twenty acres, shut in by walls, was regarded as the most important property in the district. The late Séchard’s house and its outbuildings now served only for the exploitation of twenty odd acres of vineyard left by him, plus five small farms producing about six thousand francs, and ten acres of meadowland, situated on the far side of the watercourse, just opposite the park of the Verberie; thus Madame Séchard hoped to be able to take them in the following year. Already, in the countryside, the Verberie was described as a château, and Madame Séchard was called the lady of Marsac. In gratifying his vanity Lucien did no more than imitate the peasants and wine-growers. Courtois, the owner of a mill situated picturesquely almost within gunshot from the Verberie meadowland, was said to be negotiating with Madame Séchard over the purchase of this mill. Its probable acquisition would finally give the Verberie all the amenity of one of the finest estates in the department. Madame Séchard herself, who performed her good works with as much discernment as generosity, was both esteemed and loved. Her beauty, with its new touch of magnificence, was coming to its finest point of development. Though some twenty-six years old, she had retained the freshness of youth, enjoying the repose and abundance of a country life. Still in love with her husband, what she respected in him was the man of talent modest enough to dispense with the chatter of fame; to complete the portrait, it is thus perhaps enough to add that, in all her life, her heart beat only for her children and her husband. The tax this family paid to misfortune was, as may be guessed, the grief caused by Lucien’s way of life, in which Ève Séchard suspected elements of mystery which she feared the more in that, on his last visit, Lucien had abruptly checked all his sister’s questions by saying that men of ambition owed an account of their means to themselves alone. In six years, Lucien had seen his sister three times, and he had written to her six times in all. His first visit to the Verberie took place at the time of his mother’s death, and the object of the last had been to beg the favour of a lie necessary to his private purposes. Between Monsieur and Madame Séchard and their brother, this had given rise to a painful scene which left grave doubts in the heart of their sweet and noble existence