A Harlot High and Low

  All that morning, amid the comings and goings, the interviews, the issuing of orders, the five-minute conferences, which make Nucingen’s office a great financial Waiting Room, one of his brokers told him of the disappearance of a member of the Company, one of its cleverest and richest members, Jacques Falleix, brother of Martin Falleix, and successor to Jules Desmarets. Jacques Falleix was the accredited Broker of the Maison Nucingen. In concert with du Tillet and the Kellers, the baron had as coldly brought about this man’s ruin as though it had been a matter of killing a sheep for Easter.

  ‘Hiss nerf gafe vay,’ the baron calmly replied.

  Jacques Falleix had rendered great service in the stock-jobbing field. In a crisis, a few months earlier, he had saved the situation by bold dealing. But to expect gratitude from Sharks is like hoping to soften the hearts of the wolves of Ukraine in winter.

  ‘Poor man!’ said the dealer, ‘he so little expected this outcome that he’d furnished, in the rue Saint Georges, a little house for his mistress; he’d spent a hundred and fifty thousand francs on decorations and furniture. He was so much in love with Madame du Val-Noble!… Now the woman simply has to get out… Nothing’s paid for.’

  ‘Gut, gut!’ thought Nucingen, ‘zis is how I make up lest night’s losses… It iss oll unbait vor?’ he asked the stock-dealer.

  ‘Why, yes!’ the broker replied, ‘what uninformed furnisher would not have given Jacques Falleix credit? The cellar, it seems, is first-rate. And, by the way, the house is for sale, he was going to buy it. The lease is in his name. How stupid! Silver, furniture, wine, carriage, horses, it all becomes a job lot, and what will the creditors get out of that?’

  ‘Tomorrow you come,’ said Nucingen, ‘I shell hef been to see oll zet, end if zere iss no proceedings in pankruptcy, if oil iss to pe arrenged in friendly menner, you shell offer a reasson-aple brice for ze furnishings, und tek on ze lease…’

  ‘There won’t be any trouble about that,’ said the stockbroker. ‘Go round this morning, you’ll find one of Falleix’s friends with the contractors, who want a preferential claim; but the Val-Noble has all their invoices in Falleix’s name.’ Baron Nucingen at once sent a clerk round to his notary, Jacques Falleix had told him about the house, which cost at most sixty thousand francs, and he wanted to become its owner at once, so as to enjoy a preferential claim by reason of tenancy.

  The cashier (worthy man!) wanted to know if his master would lose anything by Falleix’s bankruptcy.

  ‘On ze gontrary, my dear Wolfgang, I shell mek a hundert tausend vrancs.’

  ‘No! how so?’

  ‘Well! I shell hef ze little house zis poor toffle Falleix hes been gedding ready for hiss misdress since a year. I shell hef oll by offering fifty tausend vrancs to ze greditors, und Meister Gartot, my notary, will hef my orders for ze house, for ze owner iss in tiffiguldies… I knew oll zet, pud I wassn’t sinking. Soon my tivine Esder will be lifing in a liddle balace… I owe zet to Falleix: it iss a dreasure, und shust rount ze corner from here… Oll zet fits me like a clove.’

  Falleix’s insolvency compelled the baron to go to the Stock Exchange; but he found it impossible to leave the rue Saint Lazare without passing by the rue Taitbout; he already suffered from having been several hours away from Esther, he wanted her by his side. The profit to which he counted on putting his stockbroker’s spoils made the loss of the four hundred thousand francs already paid out seem excessively easy to bear. Delighted at the thought of announcing to his enchel her imminent translation from the rue Taitbout to the rue Saint Georges, where she would be living in a smoll balace, where memories would not longer stand in the way of their happiness, he found the paving stones grateful to his feet, he walked like a young man in a young man’s dream. At the corner of the rue des Trois Frères, in mid-dream and mid-pavement, the baron saw Europe coming towards him, looking very upset.

  ‘Are going where?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, sir, I was on my way to see you… You were right yesterday! I can see now that my poor lady would have done well to let herself be taken to prison for a few days. But do you expect women to know anything about finance?… As soon as my lady’s creditors knew she was back at home, they came at us like a pack of hounds… Yesterday, at seven o’clock in the evening, sir, they pasted up awful bills advertising the sale of her furniture on Saturday… But that’s nothing… My lady’s all heart, and once upon a time she tried to oblige that monster of a man, you know!’

  ‘Vhich monsder?’

  ‘Oh, well, the one she loved, you know, d’Estourny, oh, he was charming. He gambled, that’s all.’

  ‘He blayed mit marked garts…’

  ‘Well, what about you?…’ said Europe, ‘what do you do at the Stock Exchange? But let me go on. One day, to stop Georges blowing his brains out as he said he would, she took all her silver and jewels, still not paid for, to the pawnshop. As soon as they learned she’d advanced something to one creditor, all the others started making a fuss… She was threatened with a court of summary jurisdiction… Your angel in that dock!… wouldn’t it make a wig stand up on your head?… She burst into tears, she speaks of going and throwing herself in the river… She’ll do it, too!’

  ‘If I com’ to zee you, I shell never get to ’Chenge!’ cried Nucingen. ‘Und I most go zere, for zen I vin somesing for her… Go and galm her: I vill bay her tebts, I vill go see her at vour o’clock. But, Eugénie, tell her to luf me a liddle…’

  ‘A little, sir, nay, a lot!… Look, sir, there’s nothing like generosity for winning a woman’s heart… Certainly, you might have saved a hundred thousand francs by letting her go to prison, but you’d never have had her heart then… As she said to me, “Eugénie,” she said, “he’s been so great, so splendid… He has a noble mind!” ’

  ‘Tit she zay zat, Eugénie?’ exclaimed the baron.

  ‘Yes, indeed, sir, she said it to me.’

  ‘Ah, look, here are den louis…’

  ‘Thanks, I’m sure… But she’s weeping at this moment, since yesterday she’s wept as much as Mary Magdalene wept in a month… The one you love is in despair, over debts that aren’t even her own! Oh, men! they sponge on women just as women do on old men… just think!’

  ‘Zey are oll ze same!… Gommitting zemselves!… Ah, one most never gommit oneself… She most never zign anysing again. I vill pay, but if she ever zign her nem again… I…’

  ‘Yes, what will you do?’ said Europe firmly.

  ‘Mein Gott! I hef no gontrol ofer her… I most tek charge of her affairs… Horry, horry, gonsole her, and dell her zat in a mont’ she vill pe lifing in a balace.’

  ‘Monsieur le Baron, your investments will bear great interest in a woman’s heart! Look… I can see you are rejuvenated, I’m only a lady’s maid, I know, but I’ve often seen the same thing,… it is happiness,… happiness reflects itself… If you’re a bit out-of-pocket, don’t worry,… it’ll be made up to you. First, as I was saying to my lady: she’d be the lowest of the low, a common tart, if she didn’t love you, for you’re raising her out of hell… Once she’s got rid of her worries, you’ll see. Between ourselves, I can tell you, the night she wept so hard… What do you expect?… you’ve got to earn the respect of a man who’s going to keep you,… she didn’t dare tell you all that,… she meant to run away.’

  ‘Run avay!’ cried the baron startled by this idea. ‘But I most go on to ze Stock Exchenge. Go beck, I vill not com’ in… But I vould like to zee her at ze vindow,… ze sight off her vill gif me gourage…’

  Esther smiled at Monsieur de Nucingen as he passed before the house, and he clumped heavily away saying to himself: ‘She iss ein Engel! ’This is how Europe had set herself about producing such an unexpected result.

  Necessary explanations

  A T about half past two, Esther had finished dressing as she would when she was awaiting Lucien, she looked exquisite; seeing her thus, Prudence said to her, looking out of the window: ‘There he is!’ The poor girl rushed to the w
indow, expecting to see Lucien, and saw Nucingen.

  ‘Oh, how could you do that to me!’ she said.

  ‘It was the only way I could make you look as though you were paying attention to a poor old man who’s going to pay your debts,’ replied Europe, ‘for they are all going to be paid.’

  ‘What debts?’ cried the creature whose only thought was to regain her love driven away from her by dreadful hands.

  ‘Those that Monsieur Carlos made on Madame’s behalf.’

  ‘But look! there are nearly four hundred and fifty thousand francs here!’ cried Esther.

  ‘And there’s still a hundred and fifty thousand; but he took it all very well, the baron… He’s going to get you out of here and install you in ein smoll balace… Lord! some people are lucky!… In your place, since you’ve got that man at your finger-ends, once you’ve satisfied Carlos, I’d see I had a house and an income. Madame is certainly the most beautiful woman I’ve seen, and the most captivating, but looks don’t last! I was fresh and pretty once, and look at me now. I’m twenty-three, just about Madame’s age, and I look ten years older… One illness does it… Ah, well, if you’ve got a house in Paris and a fixed income, you don’t have to be afraid of ending up in the street…’

  Esther was no longer listening to Europe-Eugénie-Prudence Servien. The will of a man endowed with the genius of corruption had again sunk Esther in the mire with as much force as he had employed in once raising her from it. Those who know the infinitude of love understand that its pleasures and its virtues must be experienced together. Since the scene in her hovel in the rue de Langlade, Esther had totally forgotten her former life. She had continued to live virtuously, cloistered in her passion. Thus, in order to avoid meeting with any obstacle, the wily corruptor had so prepared all that the poor wench, impelled by her devotion, could only assent to knaveries already consummated or about to be so. Revealing as it does the superiority of his guile, the corrupter’s way of proceeding in this matter shows also by what means he had subjugated Lucien. The method is to engineer dreadful needs, to dig the mine, fill it with powder, and, at the critical moment, say to your accomplice: ‘Just nod, and everything goes up!’ Imbued with the morality peculiar to harlots, Esther had once found it natural to exact flattering tribute and judged her rivals purely by what they could get a man to spend. Ruined fortunes are the long-service stripes of these creatures. Counting on Esther’s memories, Carlos was not mistaken. Such stratagems of war, such tactics a thousand times employed, not only by women but by spendthrift males, didn’t trouble Esther’s mind. The poor tart only felt her degradation. She was in love with Lucien, she was becoming the acknowledged mistress of Baron Nucingen: that was the only truth which affected her. That the sham Spaniard should take the money left as a deposit, that Lucien should build the edifice of his fortune with stones from Esther’s tomb, that one night of pleasure should cost the old banker so many thousand francs more or less, that Europe should more or less ingeniously take her few hundred francs’ pickings out of these, nothing of all that concerned this whore in love; but such was the canker which gnawed at her heart. For five years past she had seen herself white as an angel! She was in love, she was happy, she hadn’t committed the least infidelity. That beautiful, pure love was to be defiled. It was not her mind which contrasted the fine, secret life with the vile life to come. It was a matter neither of calculation nor of lyricism, she simply felt undefinedly but with great force that her white was turned to black; pure to impure; noble to ignominious. Ermine to herself by force of will, she could not endure any thought of moral defilement. And so when the baron had threatened her with his love, the idea of throwing herself from the window had come to her mind. Lucien was in fact loved absolutely, and as women very rarely love a man. Women who say that they love, who often believe that they love exceptionally, dance, waltz, flirt with other men, dress for social occasions, at which they look for a harvest of covetous glances; but Esther, without regarding it as a sacrifice, had performed miracles of true love. She had loved Lucien for six years with the love of actresses and courtesans who, having wallowed in mud and impurity, thirst after the nobility, the devotion of real love in all its exclusiveness (the word is needed for something so little put into practice). The vanished peoples of Greece, Rome and the nations of the East always shut their women away, the woman who loves ought to sequester herself. It is therefore easily understood that, emerging from the palace of the imagination in which that festival, that poem had been consummated, for the smoll balace of a chilly old man, Esther fell prey to a kind of moral sickness. Impelled by a hand of iron, she had found herself up to the waist in infamy without time to reflect; but for two days past she had reflected and felt a mortal chill at heart.

  At the words: ‘ending up in the street’ she rose abruptly and said: ‘End up in the street?… no, rather end up in the Seine…’

  ‘In the Seine?… What about Monsieur Lucien?…’ said Europe.

  The name by itself caused Esther to sit down again on a chair, from which she gazed at a rosette in the pattern of the carpet, the tears melting inside her skull. At four o’clock, Nucingen found his angel deep in that ocean of reflections, of resolutions, upon which the female mind floats and from which it emerges speaking words incomprehensible to those not of the convoy.

  ‘Zdop vrowning,… my peautiful,’ said the baron sitting beside her. ‘You shell hef no more tebts… I vill arrendge tings mit Eugénie, und in von mont’ you will leaf zis apardment und moof into a smoll balace… Oh, vot a priddy hant. Let me kizz it.’ (Esther allowed him to take her hand as a dog might stretch out its paw.) ‘Ah, you gif de hant, but not de heart,… and iss ze heart I vish…’

  This was said with such an accent of truth, that poor Esther turned her eyes upon the old man with an expression of pity which robbed him of his wits. Lovers and saints feel like brothers in martyrdom! Nothing in the world creates so much understanding as shared pain.

  ‘Poor man!’ she said, ‘he is in love.’

  Hearing the word, but not understanding its use, the baron turned pale, the blood danced in his veins, he breathed the air of paradise. At his age millionaires pay as much for sensations of that kind as a woman cares to ask for.

  ‘I lof you as I lof my daughder,…’ he said, ‘and I feel it dere’; he continued placing his hand on his heart, ‘zet I con only pear to zee you hoppy.’

  ‘If you were willing only to be my father, I should love you dearly, I should never leave you, and you would see that I am not a wicked or a venal or a calculating woman, as you must think me now…’

  ‘You hef done silly tings,’ the baron went on, ‘like on, ‘like oll priddy womans, det is oll. Let us not tok about zem. Our jop now is to mek moneys for you… Be hoppy: I vill be your vather for a tay or dwo, I onnderstent dot you muzd begome used to my poor gargass.’

  ‘Truly!…’ she exclaimed getting up and throwing herself on Nucingen’s knees, putting her arm about his neck and pressing herself to him.

  ‘Druly,’ he replied forcing his face into a smile.

  She kissed his forehead, she was ready to believe the impossible: that she could remain pure, and see Lucien… She wheedeld the baron with so much skill that the former Torpedo reappeared in her. She bewitched the old man, who promised to be her father for forty days. Those forty days were needed for the purchase and setting in order of the house in the rue Saint Georges. Once in the street, and on his way home, the baron said to himself: ‘I em a vool!’ The fact was that, although he may have behaved like a child in Esther’s presence, the moment he was away from her he resumed his Shark’s skin, just as Regnard’s Gambler falls in love with Angélique again as soon as he hasn’t a bean.

  ‘Ha’f a million, and not yet efen gaught zight off her legs. it is too zilly; luggily nopody vill know,’ he was saying twenty days later. And he firmly resolved to put up with no more nonsense from a woman for whom he had paid out so much good money; then, when he was with Esther again, he spent all
the time he could afford to spend with her in making up for the first moment of brutal approach. ‘I gannot,’ he was telling himself by the end of a month, ‘pe de Edernal Vather.’

  Two great loves in conflict

  TOWARDS the end of December 1829, on the eve of installing Esther in the house in the rue Saint Georges, the baron begged du Tillet to take Florine there to see that everything was in keeping with the Nucingen fortune, to make sure that the expression a smoll balace had been justified by the craftsmen who had been commissioned to make the aviary worthy of its bird. All the devices of luxury as it was known before the revolution of 1830 had made the house a prototype of good taste. The architect Grindot’s decorative gifts had achieved a masterpiece. The new marble staircase, the mouldings, the materials, the discreetly applied gilding, the smallest details as well as the large effects surpassed anything of the same order that the century of Louis XV had left in Paris.