A Harlot High and Low

by Honoré de Balzac

  Not that we ever, in this novel, find ourselves in court, though in Parts Three and Four lawyers, and especially Parquet personnel, abound. The reader will manage, I hope, without knowing much about the French legal system and its ways of proceeding. If he wants to know more, I might perhaps, without immodesty, direct his attention to the relevant chapters in two books of my own, A Little Pattern of French Crime and French Crime in the Romantic Age. There also he will find something about the Conciergerie and other prisons and the changing organization of the French police, though Balzac, I fancy, is clear enough about all that. I had trouble with the word ‘police’ itself, more often meaning police work or police methods than a simple collectivity of policemen, but that needn’t bother the reader.

  Nor, I hope, need that classification of the types of harlotry, that pornotypology, which so occupied writers in Balzac’s time. It was the simplest and most general word of all, ‘fille’, which gave me most trouble. We have no word which may equally mean a common prostitute, a serving woman, in certain contexts a nun, and at the same time a daughter of even the most respectable or noble family, and it is with the large general category of ‘les filles’ that Balzac’s sociology and psychology are concerned. His generalizations are all about what ‘les filles’ think, feel and do, not with the possibly more specific thoughts, emotions and actions of ‘courtisanes’, ‘lorettes’, ‘rats’ and ‘filles soumises’, let alone with those of little seamstresses or grisettes. The cruellest deed ever performed by Vautrin was, I feel sure, suggested to Balzac’s mind by the simple linguistic fact that a ‘fille’ was also a daughter and that nothing renders a man so vulnerable as a cherished daughter, who may be turned overnight into a fille publique. The same thing might occur in an English novel, but the language itself would not bring this about.

  The totally inescapable snag was more specific, and there was nothing my conscience would let me do to conceal it. While I was known to be translating this book, a question I was asked by both French and knowledgeable English admirers of Balzac was what I proposed to do about Esther’s nickname. The reader would not have been long in finding out, and I fancy he might have been jolted. The English translator of Félicien Marceau’s still-quite-recent book on the world of Balzac has, I see, let the name stand in French as ‘ la Torpille’. I have been bolder. I have allowed Esther to be referred to as ‘the Torpedo’, fully aware that this lends her associations we might nowadays think more characteristic of some blonde bombshell, Esther being neither a bombshell nor (except on an early page, through Balzac’s forgetfulness) blonde. The word‘torpille’ is French for a numb-fish, cramp-fish or electric ray (not to be confused with the sting ray). ‘Torpedo’ was the Latin word for this fish. When moored or floating mines were devised as an instrument of naval warfare, we and the French both named them after it. You touched them and got a shock. The French and ourselves now both reserve the designation ‘ torpille’ or ‘torpedo’ to the self-propelled weapon originally called a ‘torpille locomotrice’ or ‘locomotive torpedo’. Neither we nor they now think of a moored or floating mine as a torpedo. The word ‘torpille’, it is true, may still be used in French for a numb-fish, cramp-fish or electric ray, but the fact seems to be unknown to most Frenchmen, except perhaps on the Mediterranean. I have certainly found it to be unknown to a university-educated young Breton. The fish itself is, I dare say, less common in our waters.

  RAYNER HEPPENSTALL

  Contents

  PART ONE

  ESTHER’S HAPPIEST DAYS

  PART TWO

  WHAT LOVE MAY COST AN OLD MAN

  PART THREE

  WHERE EVIL WAYS LEAD

  PART FOUR

  THE LAST INCARNATION OF VAUTRIN

  PART ONE

  ESTHER’S HAPPIEST DAYS

  A view of the Opera ball

  IN 1824, at the last Opera ball, a number of maskers were taken with the good looks of a young man walking about the corridors and the crush-room, with the air of somebody waiting for a woman kept at home by unforeseen circumstances. The meaning of this way of moving about, by turns indolent and hurried, is clear only to old ladies and confirmed loungers. In that enormous meeting-place, the crowd pays little attention to the crowd, people are only concerned with their own affairs, even idleness is somehow preoccupied. The young dandy was so engrossed by his own uneasy quest that he did not notice the success he was having: the jocularly admiring exclamations of some maskers, the solemn questioning of others, the biting witticisms and jeers, the sweet words, went all unheard, all unseen, by him. Though by appearance one of those exceptional people who go to the Opera ball with the idea of starting an adventure, which they expect as one might have expected a lucky number at roulette in Fras-cati’s time, he seemed complacently sure of what the evening held in store for him; was no doubt the hero in one of those mysterious little plays for three characters which are the whole life of an Opera fancy-dress ball, but which only those with parts in them know of; so that to oung women who come only to be able to say they’ve seen it, to country cousins, inexperienced young men and foreigners, the Opera at such times must appear to be simply the court of boredom and fatigue. To them, this black, creeping, hurried crowd, coming, going, twisting and turning, returning, climbing, descending, like ants on a woodpile, is no more comprehensible than the stock exchange to a peasant from Brittany who never heard of the Great Book of the Public Debt. With rare exceptions, in Paris, the men are not masked: a man in a domino looks ridiculous. This shows the national genius. People who wish to hide their happiness may set out for the Opera ball but fail to arrive, while the maskers absolutely forced to go in soon leave. A particularly amusing spectacle, from the moment the ball starts, is that of the flood of those escaping and those wishing to go in jammed at the door. The men in masks are thus either jealous husbands who have come to spy on their wives, or husbands with a good reason not to be spied on, both situations equally laughable. Now, the young man, without knowing it, was being followed by a masker who might have been thought to have murder in his heart, a short, heavily built man who rolled like a barrel. To anyone who regularly attended the Opera, this domino could only conceal some land agent, stockbroker, banker, a well-to-do citizen of some kind suspicious of his unfaithful lady, wife or other. In the best society, nobody looks for unflattering evidence. More than one masker had already laughingly pointed out to another this monstrous individual, others had apostrophized him, several young people had openly mocked him. He stoutly and squarely showed disdain for these shafts which did not carry; he followed where the young man led him, like a hunted boar who cares nothing either for the shot whistling about his ears or for the dogs barking round him. Although at first glance pleasure and uneasiness put on the same livery, the well-known Venetian black robe, and though all at an Opera ball is confusion, the various circles of which Parisian society is composed meet, recognize and observe each other. For some of the initiated, the seemingly unintelligible black book of conflicting interests is so precisely notated that they read it as though it were a novel, here and there amusing. To them, this man was therefore out of luck, otherwise he would have borne some agreed mark, red, white or green, the sign of happiness impending. Was it a question of revenge? Watching the mask so closely following a lucky man, a number of idlers looked again at the handsome face upon which pleasure’s aureole was set. The young man aroused interest: the further he proceeded, the more curiosity he awakened. Everything about him clearly indicated habituation to an elegant life. In accordance with a fatal law of our age, there existed little difference, whether physical or moral, between the most distinguished, the best-bred son of a duke and peer, and this pleasant young fellow whom poverty’s iron hand once held gripped in Paris. Youth and good looks were able

  to hide deep abysses in his nature and life, as in so many young men bent on cutting a figure in Paris without capital to support their pretensions, and who daily cast their all upon the all in a sacrifice to the most courted god of t
his royal city, Chance. Nevertheless, his bearing, his manners, were irreproachable, he trod the classic enclosure like one to whom the Opera crush-room was familiar ground. Who can fail to observe that there, as in every other zone of Paris, there is a mode of being which reveals what you are, what you do, where you come from, and what you are after?

  ‘What a fine young man! There’s room here to turn and look at him,’ said a masker in whom regular visitors perceived a highly respectable woman.

  ‘Don’t you remember him?’ replied her cavalier. ‘Mme du Châtelet introduced him to you…’

  ‘What! it’s the little apothecary she was enamoured of, who became a journalist, Mlle Coralie’s lover?’

  ‘I thought he’d fallen too low ever to rise again, and I don’t understand how he can reappear in Paris society,’ said Count Sixte du Châtelet.

  ‘He looks like a prince,’ said the masker, ‘and it wasn’t the actress he lived with who taught him that; my cousin, who knew all about it, couldn’t get him out of the scrape; I wish I knew the mistress of this Sargine, love’s pupil, tell me something about her that I can rouse his curiosity with.’

  This couple who also followed the young man, whispering, were now closely watched by the square-shouldered masker.

  ‘Dear Monsieur Chardon,’ said the prefect of Charente taking the dandy by the arm, ‘allow me to introduce you to someone who wishes to renew acquaintance with you…’

  ‘Dear Count Châtelet,’ replied the young man, ‘it was she who taught me to find the name you give me absurd. An ordinance of the King has restored to me that of my ancestors on my mother’s side,. the Rubemprés. It was in the papers, but, as the fact concerns a person of so little consequence, I do not blush at recalling it to my friends, my enemies or the indifferent: you will put yourself in which category you please, but I am sure you cannot disapprove of a step recommended to me by your wife when she was still only Madame de Bargeton.’ (This pretty stroke of wit, which made the marquise smile, caused the prefect of Charente a nervous start.) ‘Tell her,’ added Lucien, ‘that I now bear Gules, within a tressure vert a bull rampant argent.’

  ‘Pawing the air for money?’ Châtelet ventured.

  ‘The marchioness will explain to you, if you don’t know, why this ancient scutcheon ranks somewhat above the Empire chamberlain’s key and bees or found in yours, to the despair of Madame Châtelet, née Nègrepelisse d’Espard…’ said Lucien with feeling.

  ‘Since you’ve recognized me, I can no longer rouse your curiosity, and the extent to which you rouse mine could be expressed only with difficulty,’ the Marquise d’Espard said to him in an undertone, taken aback by the cool impertinence of the man she had formerly despised.

  ‘Allow me, then, dear lady, by remaining in a mysterious half-light, to preserve my only means of occupying your thoughts,’ said he with the smile of a man who does not wish to compromise the luck of which he is certain.

  The marquise could not repress a little shrug at feeling herself to have been, in an English expression, so unmistakably ‘cut’ by Lucien.

  ‘My compliments on the change in your position,’ said Count Châtelet.

  ‘I receive them as you intend,’ Lucien answered, bowing to the marquise with infinite grace.

  ‘Impudent fop!’ the count muttered to Madame d’Espard. ‘He has ended by acquiring ancestors.’

  ‘In young people, that sort of conceit, when we’re faced with it, almost invariably proclaims luck at the highest level; among people like you, it never bodes any good. Anyway, I should like to know which of the ladies of our acquaintance has taken this fine bird under her protection; I might then begin to enjoy myself this evening. That anonymous letter was probably a bit of mischief contrived by some rival, for the young man was mentioned in it; his impudence had been dictated to him: keep an eye on him. I’m going to take the arm of the Duc de Navarreins, you’ll know where to find me.’

  At the moment at which Madame d’Espard was on the point of approaching her kinsman, the mysterious masker interposed between her and the duke to whisper to her: ‘Lucien’s devoted to you, he wrote the letter; your prefect is his greatest enemy, his presence ruled out any explanation.’

  The unknown man walked away, leaving Madame d’Espard a prey to astonishment on two counts. The marquise did not know anybody whose face could lie under that mask, she feared a trap, went and sat down to hide. Count Sixte du Châtelet, from whose name Lucien had cut out the high-flown du with an ostentatiousness in which one detected a revenge long dreamed of, followed that remarkable dandy at a distance, and presently met a young man to whom he felt he could open his heart.

  ‘Well, Rastignac, have you seen Lucien? He’s cast his slough.’

  ‘If I were as good-looking a fellow, I should be even richer than he is,’ replied the young swell in a casual but shrewd tone which contained a good deal of Attic salt.

  ‘No,’ murmured in his ear the heavily built masker, accentuating the monosyllable in a way that multiplied the raillery by a thousand.

  Rastignac, who was not one to swallow insults, stood as though struck by lightning, and allowed himself to be led to a window corner by a hand of steel, which he could not shake off.

  ‘Young cock out of Ma Vauquer’s chicken-run, you whose heart failed him in laying hold of Papa Taillefer’s millions when the worst of the work had been done, know, for your own safety’s sake, that if you don’t behave towards Lucien as to a brother whom you might love, you are in our hands without us being in yours. Silence and friendship, or I join in your game and bowl the skittles over. Lucien de Rubempré is protected by the greatest power of today, the Church. Choose between life and death. Your reply?’

  Rastignac experienced the vertigo of a man who, having fallen asleep in a forest, should awake beside a famished lioness. He was afraid, but without witnesses: the bravest men then give way to their fear.

  ‘Only he could know… and would dare…’ he said, as though to himself.

  The masker gripped his hand to stop him completing the phrase, and said: ‘Act as though it were he.’

  Further masks

  RASTIGNAC thereupon did what a millionaire does when confronted with a highwayman: he surrendered.

  ‘My dear count,’ he said to Châtelet, to whom he returned, ‘if you care for your position, treat Lucien de Rubempré as a man whom one day you will find placed much higher than you are.’

  The masked man permitted himself a barely perceptible movement of satisfaction, and returned to tracking Lucien.

  ‘My dear fellow, you’ve very quickly changed your opinion of him,’ replied the justly astonished prefect.

  ‘As quickly,’ said Rastignac to this prefect-deputy who for some days past had not voted with the Ministry, ‘as those who belong to the Centre but vote with the Right.’

  ‘Are there opinions nowadays? Surely, there are only conflicting interests,’ put in des Lupeaulx, who was listening. ‘Whom or what are we talking about?’

  ‘The Sieur de Rubempré, whom Rastignac is trying to present to me as a figure of importance,’ the deputy replied to the Secretary General.

  ‘My dear count,’ said des Lupeaulx with a solemn air, ‘Monsieur de Rubempré is a young man of the greatest merit, and so well backed that I should be exceptionally glad to renew acquaintance with him.’

  ‘There’s a hornets’ nest to bring about your ears, the profligates of the age,’ Rastignac preferred.

  The three of them turned towards a corner in which stood a group of known wits, men of more or less repute and some of fashion. These gentlemen were pooling observations, epigrams and items of gossip, amusing each other or waiting for amusement. Among this oddly composed troop were some with whom Lucien had once had relations superficially amiable but not without a background of harm done, sly tricks played.

  ‘Well, Lucien, my child, my darling, here we are, patched up, re-upholstered! Where have we come from? We’ve climbed back on the old horse, have we, with the help o
f little gifts from Florine’s dressing-room? Well done, old boy,’ said Blondet, letting go Finot’s arm to take Lucien by the waist and press him with unabashed familiarity to his bosom.

  Andoche Finot was the proprietor of a review for which Lucien had worked almost without payment, and which benefited from Blondet’s contributions, the sagacity of his counsels and the profundity of his views. Finot and Blondet might have been the Bertrand and Raton of La Fontaine’s fable, except that the cat finally saw through the deception, while Blondet, though he knew he was being tricked, went on serving Finot. This brilliant condottiere of the pen would, indeed, long remain in a condition of slavery. Beneath his dull exterior, behind the bulwarks of stupidity and malice, brushed with wit as a labourer’s crust is brushed with garlic, Finot concealed a ruthless will. Gleaning in the fields where men of letters and political schemers scatter ideas and small change, he stocked his barns. His powers put in the pay of his idleness and his vices, Blondet guaranteed his own misfortune. Always surprised by need, he belonged to the wretched clan of outstanding people who so lavishly serve anybody’s purpose but their own, Aladdins who lend out their lamps. Their advice is invaluable, so long as their own interest is not at stake. With them, the head acts, the arm hangs limp. Whence their disordered lives, whence the poor regard in which they are held by inferior minds. Blondet shared his purse with the comrade he had injured yesterday; he dined, drank, slept with the one whose throat he would cut tomorrow. His amusing paradoxes justified all. Taking the whole world as a joke, he refused to be taken seriously himself. Young, much-loved, almost famous, of happy disposition, he was quite unconcerned to lay up, like Finot, what he might need in old age. The most difficult form of courage is perhaps that which Lucien needed at the moment, the ability to ‘cut’ Blondet as he had just cut Madame d’Espard and Châtelet. With him, unfortunately, the pleasures of vanity hindered the operations of pride, greatness’s mainspring. His vanity had triumphed in the recent encounter: two people who had disdained him when he was poor and miserable had been confronted with his disdain, his wealth and happiness; but could a poet, like an elderly diplomat, quarrel openly with two supposed friends who had welcomed him when he was poor, who had given him a bed when he was penniless? Finot, Blondet and he had debased themselves in each other’s company, had wallowed in orgies where not alone their creditors’ money vanished. Like a soldier who cannot see where his courage is best bestowed, Lucien did what countless people do in Paris, he once more compromised his character by accepting a shake of the hand from Finot, by not drawing back from Blondet’s endearment. Anybody who was once caught up in journalism, or is caught up in it still, is under the cruel necessity of greeting men he despises, smiling at his worst enemy, condoning actions of the most unspeakable vileness, soiling his hands to pay his aggressors out in their own coin. You grow used to seeing evil done, to letting it go; you begin by not minding, you end by doing it yourself. In the end, your soul, spotted daily by shameful transactions always going on, shrinks, the spring of noble thoughts rusts, the hinges of small talk wear loose and swing unaided. The Alcestes become Philintes, character loses its temper, talent degenerates, the belief in works of beauty evaporates. A man who wanted to take pride in his pages spends himself in wretched articles which sooner or later his conscience will tell him were base actions. You came on the scene, like Lousteau, like Vernou, intending to be a great writer, you find you have become an impotent hack. And so no honour is too high to be paid to those, like d’Arthez, whose character is equal to their talent, who steer an even keel between the reefs of the literary life. Lucien was incapable of a reply to Blondet’s patter, the man’s mind still exerted upon him an irresistible charm, retained the ascendancy of a corruptor over his pupil, he was, moreover, well placed in the world by reason of his connection with Countess Montcornet.