A Harlot High and Low

by Honoré de Balzac

  In which the dandy and the poet are reunited

  WHILE pretty women, ministers, magistrates all conspired to save Lucien, this was his behaviour at the Conciergerie. Passing through the wicket, the poet had said at the record-office that Monsieur Camusot allowed him to write, and he asked for pens, ink and paper, which a warder was at once ordered to take to him on a whispered word from Camusot’s usher to the governor. During the short time the warder spent in procuring and conveying to Lucien’s quarters what he was waiting for, the poor young man, to whom the idea of a confrontation with Jacques Collin was insupportable, fell into one of those fits of fateful meditation in which the idea of suicide, to which he had once already yielded without being able to accomplish it, reach manic proportions. According to certain medical alienists, suicide, in some constitutions, is the culminating point of a mental alienation; since his arrest, it had become a fixed idea with Lucien. Esther’s letter, read through several times again, augmented the intensity of his wish to die, reminding him of the tragedy of Romeo uniting himself with Juliet. Here is what he wrote.

  THIS IS MY LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT

  At the Conciergerie, this fifteenth of May 1830.

  I the undersigned give and bequeath to the children of my sister, Madame Ève Chardon, wife of David Séchard, former printer in Angoulême, and of Monsieur David Séchard, the totality of goods and lands belonging to me on the day of my death, after deduction of the payments and bequests which I beg the executor of this will and testament to make.

  I request Monsieur de Sérisy to act as the executor of this will.

  Shall be paid, first, to Monsieur l’ Abbé Carlos Herrera the sum of three hundred thousand francs and, second, to Monsieur le Baron de Nucingen, that of fourteen hundred thousand francs which shall be reduced by seven hundred and fifty thousand francs, if the amounts removed from Mademoiselle Esther’s premises are recovered.

  I give and bequeath, as heir to Mademoiselle Esther Gobseck, the sum of seven hundred and fifty thousand francs to the charitable institutions of Paris to found a home specifically devoted to registered prostitutes who wish to give up their career of vice and perdition.

  I further bequeath to these institutions the sum necessary for the purchase of annual income to the amount of thirty thousand francs at five per cent. The annual interest to be employed, at the end of each half year, to freeing those imprisoned for debt, whose indebtedness shall amount to two thousand francs at most. The governing bodies of these charities shall select the most deserving of those imprisoned for debt.

  I beg Monsieur de Sérisy to devote a sum of forty thousand francs to the erection of a monument to Esther in the Eastern cemetery, and I wish to be buried with her. This tomb shall be constructed like the tombs of earlier days, it shall be square; our two effigies in white marble shall lie on top, the heads resting on cushions, the hands joined and raised to heaven. This tomb shall bear no inscription.

  I further beg Monsieur le Comte de Sérisy to convey to Monsieur Eugene de Rastignac the gold toilet service at my abode, to remember me by.

  Finally, for the same purpose, I beg the executor of my last will to accept the gift I make him of my library.

  LUCIEN CHARDON DE RUBEMPRÉ.

  This will was enclosed with a letter addressed to Monsieur le Comte de Granville, Attorney General of the Royal Court of Paris, thus conceived:

  MONSIEUR LE COMTE,

  I entrust my last will to you. When you open this letter, I shall no longer be numbered among the living. From a desire to regain my liberty, I answered Monsieur Camusot’s captious questions in so cowardly a fashion, that, despite my innocence, I should be implicated in a degrading court case. Even if I were acquitted, without censure, life would still be made impossible for me, by the susceptibilities of society.

  Convey, I beg you, the letter enclosed herewith to Father Carlos Herrera unopened, and to Monsieur Camusot the formal retractation also enclosed.

  I do not suppose that anybody would dare break the seal of a packet addressed to you. Confident that this is so, I say farewell to you, paying you herewith my last respects and begging you to believe that in writing to you I testify to my gratitude for all the kindness you have shown your defunct servant.

  LUCIEN DE R.

  TO THE ABBÉ CARLOS HERRERA

  My dear abbé, I have received nothing but benefits from you, and I have betrayed you. This unintended ingratitude must be my death, and so, when you read these lines, I shall no longer exist; you will not be there to save me this time.

  You freely gave me the right to cast you off whenever it suited me, flinging you to the ground like a cigar butt, but I found another and totally senseless way of bringing about your ruin. To free myself from an awkward situation, taken in by the clever question of an examining magistrate, your spiritual son, he whom you adopted, allied himself with those who would murder you at any cost, by establishing an identity, which I know to be impossible, between you and a French criminal. Need I say more?

  Between a man of power like yours and myself, of whom you tried to make a greater figure than I had it in me to be, there can be no silliness exchanged at the moment of final separation. You wished to make me powerful and glorious, you have flung me into the pit of suicide, that is all. I have seen this giddiness approaching for a long time.

  As you once said, there is the posterity of Cain and that of Abel. Cain, in the great drama of Humanity, is the opposition. You descend from Adam by this line in which the devil still blows on that fire whose first spark was struck in Eve. Among that demonic progeny, there appear from time to time, terribly, one or two of massive constitution, who sum up in themselves all human energy, and who are like those feverish animals of the wilderness whose form of life calls for the vast spaces they find there. People like that are dangerous in society as lions would be in the heart of Normandy: they must feed on something, they devour common men and browse on the money of fools; their play is so perilous that they end by killing the humble dog they have made a companion of, an idol even. When God chooses, such mysterious beings may be Moses, Attila, Charlemagne, Mahomet or Napoleon; but when He allows these giant instruments to rust on the sea-bottom of a generation, they become only Pugatcheff, Robespierre, Louvel and Father Carlos Herrera. Endowed with power over tender souls, these are drawn to them and ground small. In its own way, the spectacle is great and beautiful. It is that of a brightly coloured poison plant which fascinates children in the woods. It is the poetry of evil. Men like you should dwell in caves and never come out. You made me live with your giant’s life, and I have paid for it with my very existence. So I take my head out of the Gordian knot of politics and give it to the slip-knot I have tied in my cravat.

  To make amends for my fault, I am sending the Attorney General a formal retractation of all that I said at my interrogation; you will know how to turn this document to your advantage.

  According to the provisions of a will drawn up in due form, you will receive back, Monsieur l’Abbé, the sums belonging to your Order which you so imprudently laid out on my behalf, in consequence of the paternal tenderness you bore me.

  Farewell, then, farewell, mighty monument of evil and corruption, farewell, you who, set in the right road, could have been greater than Jiménez or Richelieu; you kept your promises: I am become again what I was on the banks of the Charente, after owing to you the dream and its enchantment; but, alas, it is not now the river of my own countryside where I was going to drown the petty transgressions of my youth; but the Seine, and the deep pool I chose is a dark cell in the Conciergerie.

  Don’t feel regret for me; my contempt for you was no less than my admiration.

  LUCIEN.

  I the undersigned hereby declare that I totally retract what is contained in the report of the interrogation to which Monsieur Camusot subjected me today.

  Abbé Carlos Herrera commonly described himself as my spiritual father, and I must have been misled by the examining magistrate taking this word in a
nother sense, doubtless without intention.

  I know that, for political ends and in order to annul secret information concerning government inner circles at the Tuileries and in Spain, certain agents of diplomacy are trying to establish an identity between Father Carlos Herrera and a convict by the name of Jacques Collin; but Father Carlos Herrera’s confidential disclosures to me on this point have had to do solely with his efforts to obtain proof either of the demise or of the continued existence of Jacques Collin.

  From the Conciergerie, this 15th May, 1830.

  LUCIEN DE RUBEMPRÉ.

  The difficulty of committing suicide in prison

  THE fever of suicide communicated to Lucien a great lucidity of mind and that manual activity which authors know when they are a prey to the fever of composition. This state of feeling was so strong in him that these four documents were written in the space of half an hour. He put them together in one packet, closed it with sealing wafers, stamped these forcibly with his arms by means of a signet ring he wore on his finger, and placed it in a prominent position in the middle of the floor, on the tiles. Certainly, it would have been difficult to behave with greater dignity in the false position in which so much infamy had put Lucien: he was preserving his memory from disgrace, and he was repairing the harm done to his accomplice, in so far as the wit of a dandy could cancel the results of a poet’s trustfulness.

  If Lucien had been in one of the solitary-confinement cells, he would have come up against the impossibility of there executing his design, for the only furniture in those freestone boxes is a sort of camp or guardroom bed and a bucket for imperative natural needs. There is no chair or stool, nor even a nail in the wall. The bed is so firmly fixed to the floor that it cannot be moved without a labour which would be bound to be observed by a warder, for the iron-framed spy-hole is always open. Moreover, when a prisoner’s behaviour is considered uncertain, he is kept under observation by a member of the armed constabulary or other policeman. In the rooms in the pistole and specifically in that to which Lucien had been transferred on account of the consideration the examining magistrate felt impelled to show a young man belonging to Parisian high society, the moveable bed, the table and chair, may help the occupant to commit suicide, though not without some difficulty. Lucien wore a long blue silk stock; and, at the time of his return from questioning, he was already thinking of the manner in which Pichegru had, more or less voluntarily, ended his life. But in order to hang oneself it is necessary to find a point of support and sufficient space between the body and the ground for the feet not to rest on anything. Now, the window of his cell overlooking the prison yard had no hasp, and the iron bars fixed outside were separated from Lucien by the thickness of the wall, not allowing him to find his point of support there.

  This is the plan which Lucien’s inventive faculty quickly suggested to him as a means of accomplishing his suicide. If the hood attached to the bay prevented Lucien looking out on the prison yard, this hood equally prevented the warders from seeing what took place in his cell; now, although in the lower part of the window frame the glass had been replaced by two stout boards, the upper part contained, in each half, small panes separated and held in place by the cross-pieces which are proper to such glazing. By standing on the table Lucien could reach the glazed part of his window, remove two panes or break them, in such a way as to lay bare at the corner of the first cross-bar a solid point of support. He proposed to pass his neck-tie through at that point, to turn round so as to tighten it about his neck, after having knotted it securely, and then to kick the table away.

  To this end, he moved the table close to the window without making a noise, he took off his frock coat and waistcoat, then he climbed on to the table and unhesitatingly made holes in the glass above and below the first slat. Once on the table, he could see down into the prison yard, a magic spectacle which he glimpsed for the first time. The governor of the Conciergerie, having received Monsieur Camusot’s recommendation to show Lucien the greatest consideration, had caused him, as we have seen, to be led through the Conciergerie’s interior passages by way of an entrance below street level opposite the Tour d’Argent, thus avoiding showing an elegant young man to the crowd of prisoners who walk about in the yard. We may judge whether the aspect of that place of exercise is of such a sort as to capture the lively attention of a poet.

  Hallucination

  THE prison yard of the Conciergerie is bounded on the em-bankment by the Tour d’Argent and the Tour Bonbec; the distance between these two exactly marks from outside the breadth of the yard. The long gallery, the one called after Saint Louis, which leads from the Galerie Normande to the Central Court of Appeal and the Tour Bonbec, in which, it is said, Saint Louis, study may still be seen, will show the visitor the length of the prison yard, for it covers the same extent of ground. The solitary confinement cells and the pistoles lie beneath the Galerie Marchande. On her way to appear before the revolutionary tribunal, which held its sessions in what is now the solemn audience chamber of the Central Court of Appeal or Court of Cassation, Queen Marie-Antoinette, whose dungeon lay under the present solitary cells, was taken up a fearsome staircase built into the thickness of the walls which sustain the Galerie Marchande, and which is now condemned. One side of the yard, along the first floor of which runs the Galerie de Saint Louis, presents to the eyes a succession of Gothic pillars between which the architects of I know not what epoch constructed two tiers of cells to house as many prisoners as possible, clogging up with plaster, grill and foundation blocks the shafts and ogees of this magnificent cloister. Below the supposed study of Saint Louis in the Tour Bonbec, a spiral staircase leads to these cells. This prostitution of one of the most glorious memorials of France is hideous in its effect.

  At the height at which Lucien stood, he was looking slantwise along this gallery and took in the details of the building between the Tour d’Argent and the Tour Bonbec, whose pointed turrets he could see. He stood astounded, his suicide delayed by a sense of wonder. Today the phenomena of hallucination are admitted by the science of medicine, and this mirage of our senses, this strange faculty of our mind, is no longer contested. Under the pressure of a feeling brought to the point of monomania by its intensity, a man often finds himself in the state produced by opium, hashish and nitrous oxide. Then appear spectres, phantoms, then dreams take on bodily form, things vanished revive in their pristine condition. That which in the brain was a mere idea becomes a living, animate creature or creation. Science has now begun to suppose that, under the influence of passions in a state of paroxysm, the brain is injected with blood, and that this congestion produces the terrifying play of waking dreams, so reluctant are scientists to regard thought as a living and generating force. Lucien saw the Palais in all its primitive beauty. The colonnade was slender, young, fresh. The abode of Saint Louis reappeared as it had once been, he marvelled at its Babylonian proportions and oriental fancies. He accepted this sublime vision as a poetic farewell to the created world of civilization. Taking measures intended to result in his death, he wondered how it was possible for this marvel to exist unknown in Paris. He was two Luciens, the Lucien who was a poet abroad in the Middle Ages, under the archways and turrets of Saint Louis, and the Lucien preparing to kill himself.

  Drama in the life of a woman of fashion

  AT the moment when Monsieur de Granville finished giving instructions to his young secretary, the governor of the Conciergerie appeared, the expression on his face was such that the Attorney General had a foreboding of misfortune.

  ‘Did you meet Monsieur Camusot?’ he asked.

  ‘No, sir,’ replied the governor. ‘His clerk Coquart told me to release Father Carlos from solitary confinement and to set Monsieur de Rubempré at liberty, but it is too late…’

  ‘Good God! what has happened?’

  ‘Here, sir,’ said the governor, ‘is a packet of letters for you which should explain the catastrophe. A warder in the prison yard heard the sound of windows breaking, in the
pistole, and Monsieur Lucien’s neighbour started shouting at the top of his voice, for he could hear the death agony of the poor young man. The warder returned pale from the sight which met his eyes, he saw the prisoner hanging from the window by his neck-tie…’

  Although the governor spoke in an undertone, the terrible cry which Madame de Sérisy uttered proved that, in exceptional circumstances, our organs develop an incalculable power. The countess heard or guessed; and, before Monsieur de Granville could turn round, without either Monsieur de Sérisy or Monsieur de Bauvan being able to check movements so quickly made, she was off like a shot, through the door, and reached the Galerie Marchande along which she ran to the head of the staircase which descends to the rue de la Barillerie.

  A barrister was handing in his gown at the door of one of the shops which for so long encumbered that street, where shoes were sold and where gowns and caps could be hired. The countess asked him the way to the Conciergerie.

  ‘Along there and turn to the left, the entrance is in the Quai de l’Horloge, first archway.’

  ‘That woman is out of her mind…’ said the woman who kept the shop, ‘she ought to be followed.’

  , Nobody could have followed Léontine, she flew. A doctor might explain how society women, whose strength goes unemployed, are able to draw on such resources in moments of crisis. The countess dashed through the arcade towards the wicket so fast that the constable on sentry duty did not see her go in. She was swept against the grating like a feather in a gale, she shook the iron bars with such fury that she tore out the one she had seized. She struck her breast with the broken fragments, blood spurted, and she fell crying: ‘Open! open!’ in a voice which froze the warders.