A Harlot High and Low

by Honoré de Balzac

  The ignoble convict who yet embodied a poem shadowed forth by so many poets, by Moore, by Lord Byron, by Mathurin, by Canalis (that of a demon possessing an angel drawn into its circle of hell to refresh it with dew stolen from paradise), Jacques Collin, if one has truly penetrated this heart of bronze, had for seven years renounced mere self. His powerful faculties, absorbed in Lucien, had been brought into play only for Lucien; his advancement, his loves, his ambition had been the source of the convict’s only joy. Lucien had been his visible soul.

  Dodgedeath had dined at the Grandlieus’, slipped into great ladies’ boudoirs, loved Esther by proxy. Finally, in Lucien he had seen a Jacques Collin, handsome, youthful, ennobled, in the position of an ambassador.

  Dodgedeath had fulfilled the German superstition of the Doppelgänger by a phenomenon of intellectual paternity which will be easily comprehended by women who, in their lives, have truly loved, who have felt their soul pass into that of the man they loved, who lived with his life, whether it was infamous or noble, happy or unhappy, famous or obscure, who, in spite of the distance between then, have felt pain in their leg if he had received a wound there, who knew when he was fighting a duel and who, to sum up in a word what was more important still, didn’t need to learn of his unfaithfulness to know it.

  Taken back to his cell, Jacques Collin said to himself: ‘The child is being questioned!’

  And he shuddered, he who killed as a workman drinks.

  ‘Was he able to see his mistresses?’ he wondered. ‘Did my aunt find those damned females? Did those duchesses, those countesses move, have they prevented the interrogation? Did Lucien receive my instructions?… And if fate means him to be questioned, how will he hold? Poor child, I brought him to this pass! It was that brigand Paccard and that weasel Europe who caused this uproar, by snitching the seven hundred and fifty thousand francs’ order given by Nucingen to Esther. Those two rogues made us stumble at the last step; but they’ll pay dearly for that caper! Another day, and Lucien would have been rich! he’d have married his Clotilde de Grandlieu. I no longer had Esther on my hands. Lucien loved that wench too much, whereas he’d never have loved the drowning man’s plank, that Clotilde… Ah, then the child would have been mine altogether! And to think that our fortune depends on a glance, on Lucien blushing in front of this Camusot, who sees everything, who isn’t lacking in the subtlety of judges! for, when he showed me those letters, he exchanged looks by which we sounded each other, and he knew that I could blackmail Lucien’s mistresses!…’

  The monologue lasted three hours. The anguish was such that it gained ascendancy over that constitution of iron and vitriol. Jacques Collin, whose brain was as though on fire with madness, felt so devouring a thirst that, without noticing that he was doing so, he drained all the supply of water contained in one of the two buckets which constitute, with a blank bed, all the furniture of a confinement cell.

  ‘If he loses his head, what will become of him? for that poor child lacks Théodore’s strength,…’ he wondered as he lay down on his guardroom bed.

  A word about the Théodore who occurred to Jacques Collin’s mind at that moment of extremity. Théodore Calvi, a young Corsican, sentenced to life imprisonment for eleven murders, at the age of eighteen, thanks to influence which had been dearly bought, had been Jacques Collin’s chain mate from 1819 to 1820. Jacques Collin’s last escape, one of his finest operations (he had got out disguised as one of the armed constabulary with Théodore Calvi walking beside him as a convict to be taken before the superintendent), that superb escape had taken place at the port of Rochefort, where the convicts die like flies, and where the authorities had hoped to see the last of those two dangerous individuals. Escaping together, they had been forced to separate by the hazards of flight. Théodore, recaptured, had been returned to the penitentiary. Having reached Spain and there transforming himself into Carlos Herrera, Jacques Collin was looking for his Corsican friend in the neighbourhood of Rochefort when he met Lucien on the banks of the Charente. The young hero of the bandits and the maquis, to whom Dodgedeath owed his knowledge of Italian, had then been naturally sacrificed to the new idol.

  Life with Lucien, a young man without police record, guilty even to his own mind only of the very slightest transgressions, rose, furthermore, fair and splendid like the sun of a summer day; whereas with Théodore, Jacques Collin had foreseen no other outcome than the scaffold, at the end of a series of inevitable crimes.

  The thought of some misfortune caused by Lucien’s weakness, for solitary confinement might well cause him to lose his head, assumed dreadful proportions in Jacques Collin’s mind; and, imagining the possible catastrophe, this unfortunate man felt his eyes fill with tears, a phenomenon which he had never once experienced since childhood.

  ‘I’m sweating like a horse,’ he said to himself, ‘and perhaps if I got the doctor here and offered him a considerable sum he might put me in touch with Lucien.’

  At that moment, the warder appeared with his dinner.

  ‘It’s no use, my son, I cannot eat. Tell the governor of this prison to send the doctor to me, I feel so unwell, I think my last hour has come.’

  Hearing the guttural rhonchus with which the convict accompanied his words, the warder inclined his head and departed. Jacques Collin seized furiously upon the sudden hope; when, however, he saw the doctor and the governor enter his cell together, he saw the plan miscarried, and he coldly awaited the outcome of the visit, mechanically tendering his pulse to the doctor’s fingers.

  ‘The man is feverish,’ said the doctor to Monsieur Gault; ‘but there’s always a bit of fever with accused persons at this stage, and,’ he whispered to the sham Spaniard, ‘to me it is always a proof that there is criminal guilt of some kind.’

  At that moment, the governor, to whom the Procurator General had given the letter addressed by Lucien to Jacques Collin with instructions to hand it to the latter, left him and the doctor under the eye of the warder, and went to fetch the letter.

  ‘Doctor,’ said Jacques Collin seeing the turnkey at the door and without questioning the reasons for the governor’s withdrawal, ‘I should think nothing of going up to thirty thousand francs to get a few lines to Lucien de Rubempré.’

  ‘I don’t want to rob you,’ said Dr Lebrun, ‘nobody in the world will communicate with him again…’

  ‘Nobody?’ said Jacques Collin stupefied. ‘Why?’

  ‘He’s hanged himself…’

  Never did a tiger finding its little ones gone rend the jungles of India with so fearful a cry as that of Jacques Collin, who rose up on his feet like the tiger on its paws, who cast on the doctor a gaze burning like the lightning which accompanies a thunderbolt, then collapsed on his camp bed saying ‘Oh! my son!’

  ‘Poor man!’ cried the doctor moved by this terrible outcry of nature.

  The explosion was indeed followed by such total weakness, that the words: ‘Oh, my son!’ were little but a murmur.

  ‘Is this one going to croak on us, too?’ asked the warder.

  ‘No, it isn’t possible!’ continued Jacques Collin raising himself up and looking at the two witnesses of the scene with an eye devoid of flame or even warmth. ‘You’ve made a mistake, it wasn’t him! You didn’t look properly. There’s no way of hanging yourself in a cell like this! Look, how could I hang myself here? All Paris will answer to me for that life! God owes me that life!’

  The guard and the doctor were stupefied in their turn, they whom nothing had surprised for a long time. Monsieur Gault came back, holding Lucien’s letter in his hand. At sight of the governor, Jacques Collin, crushed by the very violence of that explosion of grief, seemed to grow calmer.

  ‘The Procurator gave me this letter for you, he said you could have it unopened,’ Monsieur Gault indicated.

  ‘It is from Lucien…’ said Jacques Collin.

  ‘Yes, indeed, sir.’

  ‘This young man, sir, he’s…?’

  ‘He’s dead,’ continued the governor
. ‘Even if the doctor had been here, unfortunately he’d have been too late… The young man died along there,… in one of the privilege cells…’

  ‘Can I see him with my own eyes?’ asked Jacques Collin timidly; ‘will you allow a father to go and weep over his son?’

  ‘If you want, you can take his room. I have orders that you’re to be transferred to a room in the pistole. You’re no longer in solitary confinement, sir.’

  The prisoner’s eyes, without warmth or life, wandered slowly from the governor to the doctor; Jacques Collin questioned them mutely, fearing some trap, and he hesitated to go.

  ‘If you want to see the body,’ the doctor told him, ‘there’s no time to lose, it has to be taken away tonight…’

  ‘If you have children, gentlemen,’ said Jacques Collin, ‘you will understand me behaving like an imbecile, I can hardly see clearly… This blow has been more than death to me, but you can’t understand what I’m saying… If you’re fathers, you’re only that and no more;… I’m a mother, too!… I,… I’m out of my mind,… I feel it, yes, this is madness.’

  The leavetaking

  ALONG passages whose massive doors open only before the governor, it is possible to go in very little time from the solitary confinement cells to the privileged prisoners’ quarters. The two rows of dwellings are separated by an underground corridor formed by two big structural walls which support the vaulting on which rests that gallery in the Palais de Justice known as the Galerie Marchande. Thus, accompanied by the warder who took his arm, preceded by the governor and followed by the doctor, in a matter of minutes Jacques Collin reached the cell in which Lucien lay, on the bed.

  At this sight, he fell upon the body and glued himself to it with a desperate embrace, whose force and feeling of passion made the three onlookers tremble.

  ‘You see,’ said the doctor to the governor, ‘there’s an example of what I was saying to you. Look!… that man is going to knead and mould the body, and you don’t know what a corpse is, it’s stone…’

  ‘Leave me here!…’ said Jacques Collin in a spent voice, ‘I haven’t got long to see him, they’ll be taking him away from me, to…’

  He stopped before the word bury.

  ‘You will let me keep something of my dear child!… Be so kind, sir,’ he said to Dr Lebrun, ‘as to cut off one or two locks of his hair, I cannot…’

  ‘It is his son, that’s certain!’ said the doctor.

  ‘Do you think so?’ replied the governor with a doubtful air which made the doctor reflect uncertainly.

  The governor told the gaoler to leave the prisoner in this cell, and to see that a few locks of hair were cut off for the supposed father, before the body was taken away.

  It was then half past five, and in May it is still light enough at that time, even in the Conciergerie, despite the bars and gratings and close-meshed wire netting over the windows, to read a letter. Jacques Collin therefore spelled out Lucien’s terrible letter while holding the hand which had penned it.

  The man has not yet been found who can hold a piece of ice for ten minutes, gripping it firmly in the palm of his hand. The chill communicates itself with deadly speed to the sources of life itself. But the effect of that cold so extreme it acts like a poison is hardly to be compared with that produced on the soul by the rigid, frozen hand of a dead man held thus, pressed thus. Then Death spoke to Life, it recounted black secrets destructive of many a human feeling; for, where feelings are concerned, to change is to perish.

  If we read Lucien’s letter again with Jacques Collin, the dying man’s declaration may be seen for what it was to him, a poison cup.

  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 immense 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 I’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.

  They came to fetch the body a little before one o’clock in the morning and found Jacques Collin kneeling before the bed, the letter on the floor, let go no doubt as the suicide lets go of the pistol which has killed him; but the unfortunate man still held Lucien’s hand between his and was praying.

  Seeing the man thus, the bearers stopped a moment, for he was like one of those stone figures set kneeling for eternity on the tombs of the Middle Ages, by the genius of some carver of images. This false priest, his tiger’s eyes colourlessly pale, rigid with an almost supernatural immobility, made a great impression on them, so that it was very gently they told him to get up.

  ‘Why?’ he asked timidly.

  The audacious Dodgedeath was as weak as a child.

  This sight was pointed out by the governor to Monsieur de Chargeboeuf, who, respecting such obvious grief, and believing that Jacques Collin was indeed the father as he claimed, passed on Mons
ieur de Granville’s orders respecting the order of service and funeral procession for Lucien, who must, without further question, be removed to his domicile on the Quai Malaquais, where the clergy waited to keep vigil over him for the remainder of the night.

  ‘Yes, there speaks the great soul of that magistrate,’ the convict cried in a voice of distress. ‘Tell him, sir, that he may count on my gratitude… Yes, I shall be able to do him great service… Don’t forget that phrase; it is very important to him. Ah! sir, great changes take place in a man’s heart, when he has wept seven hours over a child like this… I shan’t see him any more, then?…’

  Brooding over Lucien with the look of a mother deprived of the body of her son, Jacques Collin sank down, in utter depression. As he saw them take up Lucien’s body, he let out a groan which made the bearers hurry.

  The Procurator General’s secretary and the prison governor had already withdrawn in haste.

  What had happened to this nature of bronze, whose power of decision was as rapid as the eye’s glance, in whom thought and action sprang together like a flash of lightning, whose nerves seasoned by three sentences of hard labour and three escapes had acquired the metallic hardness of a savage’s? Iron yields to certain degrees of hammering or sustained pressure; its impenetrable molecules, purified and homogenized by human agencies, break down; and, without smelting, the metal loses its power of resistance. Farriers, locksmiths, the makers of edge-tools, all those accustomed to work the metal describe its condition then by a technical term: ‘The iron is retted!’ they say, borrowing an expression otherwise used exclusively for hemp and flax, which are softened by steeping. In the same way, the human soul, or, if you prefer, the threefold energy of body, heart and mind may be reduced to a state analogous to that of iron under repeated shock. It may then be said of men as of hemp and iron: they are retted. Science, law and public opinion discover endless reasons for the fearful catastrophes which occur on the railways, by the cracking of a rail, the most appalling of which was that at Bellevue in 1842; but nobody thinks of asking the real experts on the matter, the iron-founders, who all say the same: ‘The iron was retted!’ The danger is unpredictable. The metal which has turned soft, the metal which is sound, look wholly alike.