A Harlot High and Low

by Honoré de Balzac

  ‘Oh, father, you who know him, how could you ask me such a question?’ she replied with a smile that was radiant, superb. ‘A God can’t be resisted.’

  ‘Do not blaspheme,’ said the ecclesiastic in a gentle voice. ‘Nobody can be like God; that kind of exaggeration ill becomes real love, it wasn’t a pure, true love you had for your idol. If you had undergone the change you lay claim to, you would have acquired the virtues of youth, you would have known the delights of chastity, the delicacy of shame, those two glories of a young girl. You are not in love.’

  Esther made a frightened movement which did not escape the priest, but which in no way affected his imperturbability as confessor.

  ‘Yes, you love him for your own sake and not for his, for the temporal pleasures you are addicted to, not for love itself; gaining a hold on him thus, you did not display that holy trembling which inspires a being upon whom God has set the seal of the most adorable perfections: did you think how you degraded him with your past impurity, that you were corrupting a child with those fearful delights which gave you your nickname, with its infamous glory? You were inconsistent with yourself and your short-lived passion…’

  ‘Short-lived!’ she repeated raising her eyes.

  ‘How else are we to describe a love which is not eternal, which does not unite us, even to the Christian hereafter, with the one we love?’

  ‘Ah, I want to be a Catholic!’ she cried out in a violent, toneless voice that would have obtained Our Saviour’s grace.

  ‘Could a girl who received the baptism neither of the Church nor of secular knowledge, who can neither read nor write, nor pray, who can’t take a step in the street without the paving stones rising up to accuse her, remarkable only for the fugitive gift of a beauty which illness will perhaps destroy tomorrow; could so debased, degraded a creature, knowing her degradation… (unknowing and less loving, you might have been more readily excused…), could the eventual prey of suicide and damnation be a fit wife for Lucien de Rubempré?’

  Each phrase was a dagger-thrust which went home. At each phrase, the despairing girl’s increased sobs and abundant tears attested the force with which light penetrated at once into her intelligence as pure as that of a savage, her soul at last awakened, her nature upon which depravity had deposited a layer of muddy ice, now melting in the sun of faith.

  ‘Why am I not dead!’ was the sole idea she expressed amid the torrent of ideas which streamed destructively through her brain.

  ‘My daughter,’ said the terrible judge, ‘there is a love un-confessed before men, which yet, confided to the angels, is welcomed by them with smiles of happiness.’

  ‘What love?’

  ‘The love which is without hope, when it is the inspiration of a life, when that life is governed by its devotion, when every action is ennobled by the thought of reaching an ideal perfection. Yes, the angels approve such a love; it leads to the knowledge of God. To perfect oneself unceasingly in order to be worthy of the loved one, to make a thousand hidden sacrifices for him, adore him from a distance, give one’s blood drop by drop, for him to destroy all self-love, all pride and anger, to spare him even the knowledge of whatever pangs of jealousy he may cause, give him whatever he wishes, even to our own detriment, love what he loves, to keep one’s face turned towards him and to follow him without him knowing; religion would have forgiven you such a love, it offended against neither human nor divine law, and led to other courses than that of your filthy pleasures.’

  Upon hearing this horrible decree expressed by one word (and what a word? and pronounced in what a tone?) Esther was understandably tormented by suspicion. This word was like a thunderclap presaging a storm to come. She looked at the priest, and was pierced by the sudden chill with which even the bravest are seized in the face of a sudden and imminent danger. No look could have read what was passing through the mind of this man; but the boldest would have seen more to tremble at than to hope for in the expression of those eyes, once pale and yellow like those of a tiger, but over which privation and austerity had cast a veil like that which lies on the horizon in sultry weather : the earth is hot and bright, but the mist renders it indistinct, vaporous, it is almost invisible. A heaviness that was wholly Spanish, deep lines which the countless scars of a dreadful smallpox made hideous, like trampled furrows, scored his olive-skinned, sun-baked face. The harshness of this physiognomy was brought out all the more sharply by the hair which framed it, the tattered wig of a priest who no longer cares about his person, threadbare and of a black which showed red in the light. His athletic torso, his old soldier’s hands, his square build and massive shoulders belonged to one of those caryatids which the architects of the Middle Ages have placed before certain Italian palaces, imperfectly recalled by those at the Porte Saint Martin theatre. Individuals of no great penetration would have thought that the strongest passions or circumstances out of the ordinary must have thrown this man into the bosom of the Church; certainly, only the most extraordinary blows of fate could have changed him, if indeed such a nature had been susceptible of change.

  What constitutes a whore

  WOMEN who have led the life now so violently repudiated by Esther reach a point of total indifference to man’s exterior form. They are like the literary critic of today, who may be compared with them in more than one respect and who attains to a profound unconcern with artistic standards: he has read so many books, forgotten so many, is so accustomed to written pages, has watched so many plots unfold, witnessed so many dramatic climaxes, he has produced so many articles without saying what he really thought, so often betraying art to serve his friendships and his enmities, that in the end he views everything with distaste and continues nevertheless to judge. It would need a miracle for such a writer to produce a single book of his own, just as it needs a miracle for a pure and noble love to blossom in the heart of a courtesan. The manner and tone of this priest, who might have stepped out of a canvas by Zurbaran, appeared so hostile to the poor little tart, unable to see him in any such terms, that she felt herself to be less an object of solicitude than the victim of a plan. Incapable of distinguishing between smooth words and fair promises and the unction of charity, for one needs to be very vigilant to notice the bad money palmed off by a friend, she felt as though she were pinned by the claws of a monstrous and ferocious bird which had swooped on her after long hovering and, in her fear, she uttered these words in a voice of alarm: ‘I believed that priests were meant to console us, and it is my death you intend!’

  At this cry of innocence, the ecclesiastic made a vague gesture, and paused; he collected himself before replying. During that moment, the two individuals so strangely brought together eyed each other. The priest understood the girl, without the girl understanding the priest. Evidently he gave up some plan which threatened poor Esther, and returned to his earlier purpose.

  ‘We are the doctors of souls,’ he said in a gentle voice, ‘and we know what remedies are suited to their sicknesses.’

  ‘Much has to be forgiven to unhappiness,’ said Esther.

  She believed that she had been mistaken, slid down from the bed, prostrated herself at the feet of this man, kissed his cassock with deep humility, and raised towards him eyes bathed in tears.

  ‘I thought I had done all I could,’ she said.

  ‘Listen, my child, your fearful reputation has plunged Lucien’s family into grief; they fear, and not without justice, lest you lead him into dissipation, into a world of folly…’

  ‘It is true, I took him to the ball to awaken his curiosity.’

  ‘You are sufficiently beautiful for him to want to triumph through you in the eyes of the world, to show you off with pride like a prize horse. If it were only money it cost him!… but he will spend his time, his strength; he will lose all taste for the brilliant future that has been prepared for him. Instead of one day being an ambassador, rich, admired, famous, he will have been, like so many of the debauched whose talents have foundered in the mud of Paris, the lover o
f a harlot. As for you, after rising briefly into the world of fashion, you would have gone back to your old life, for you lack the power which a good education gives to resist vice and plan for the future. You would no more have broken with your former companions than you were able to break with the men who shamed you at the Opera, this morning. Lucien’s true friends, alarmed by the love you inspire in him, followed in his footsteps and learned all. Anxious and worried, they sent me to you to sound out your dispositions and decide what was to be done with you; they are powerful enough to clear any stumbling block out of this young man’s way, but they are also merciful. Know this, my daughter: a person loved by Lucien has rights in their eyes, as a true Christian may adore mire in which, by some chance, the divine light shines. I am here as the vehicle of their benevolence; but had I found you altogether perverted, armed with guile and effrontery, corrupt to the bone, deaf to the voice of repentance, I should have abandoned you to their wrath. That civic and political release, so difficult to obtain, which the Police rightly delays in the interests of Society itself, and which I heard you crave for with the strength of true remorse, I have it here,’ said the priest, drawing from his girdle an official-looking document. ‘You were seen yesterday, this form is dated today: you may conceive how powerful are those who take an interest in Lucien.’

  At the sight of this paper, Esther in her ingenuousness was so shaken by the trembling which an unhoped-for piece of good fortune may cause, that her lips bore a fixed smile like that of an idiot. The priest hesitated, looking at the child to see whether, robbed of the horrible strength which the corrupt draw from their very corruption, and brought back to a fragile and delicate original nature, she would continue impressionable. A deceitful whore, Esther would have acted as in a play; but, returned to innocence and truth, she could have died, as a blind man on whom a successful operation has been performed may lose his sight again on being struck by too vivid a light. This man thus saw human nature to its depths, but remained in a calm terrible by reason of its fixity : he was cold as an Alp, white and close to the sky, impermeable and supercilious, granite-sloped, beneficent nevertheless. The daughters of pleasure are essentially unstable beings, changing without reason from bewildered suspicion to absolute trust. In this respect, they are lower than the animals. Extreme in everything, in their joys, their despairs, their religion, their irreligion; most of them would go mad if they were not decimated by an unusual rate of mortality, and if accidents of fortune did not raise some of them out of the mire in which they live. Nothing could better have illuminated the depths of this horrible life than to see how far one of its creatures may go in madness and yet emerge from it, marvelling at the Torpedo’s violent ecstasy at the knees of this priest. The poor wench gazed at the order of her release with an expression which Dante forgot, surpassing the inventions of his Inferno. But with tears came the reaction. Esther rose to her feet, threw her arms about this man’s neck, placed her head on his bosom, wept on it, kissed the rough material which covered the heart of steel, and seemed bent on penetrating it. She laid hold of the man, covered his hands with kisses; in a holy effusion of gratitude, yet wheedled him with caresses, lavished fond names upon him, among the honeyed phrases said to him again and again: ‘Give it to me!’ with as many varied intonations; enfolded him in tenderness, covered him in glances so rapid they should have laid him defenceless; in the end, numbed his anger. The priest saw how this woman had come by her nickname; he understood how difficult it was to resist the enchanting creature, he all at once unriddled Lucien’s love and the charm which had caused it. Such a passion, among its many attractions, conceals a barbed sharpness which hooks especially the lofty souls of poets and artists. Inexplicable to the crowd, such passions are fully explained by that thirst for ideal beauty which is characteristic of creative natures. To purify such a being, is it not to be a bit like the angels charged with leading the guilty back to nobler feelings, is it not to create? What a temptation to bring moral and physical beauty into consonance! What pride in one’s joy if one succeeds! What a fair task which needs no instrument but love! Unions of that kind, illustrated moreover by the examples of Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Cethegus, Pompey, yet monstrous in the eyes of the vulgar, are based on that feeling which led Louis XIV to build Versailles, which has always thrown men into ruinous undertakings : to convert the miasma of a swamp into heaped-up scents surrounded by living water; to put a lake on a hill-top, as the Prince of Conti did at Nointel, or the views of Switzerland at Cassan, like Farmer General Bergeret. In the last resort, it is the irruption of Art into Morality.

  The priest, ashamed of yielding to tenderness, sharply repulsed Esther, who sat down, herself ashamed, for what he said to her was: ‘You are still a whore.’ And coldly he tucked the letter back in his girdle. Like a child with only one thought in her head, Esther could not take her eyes off that place at his waist where the paper was.

  The rat becomes a Mary Magdalene

  ‘DAUGHTER,’ the priest continued after a pause, ‘your mother was a Jewess, and you were not baptised, but neither were you taken to the synagogue: your place is in the religious Limbo to which little children go…’

  ‘Little children!’ she repeated softly.

  ‘… Just as in Police files, you are a mere number, without social identity,’ went on the implacable priest. ‘If love, appearing to you as a runaway, made you suppose, three months ago, that you were reborn, you must feel that since that day you have been truly in a state of childhood. You must therefore conduct yourself like a child; you must change utterly, and I take it upon myself to put you beyond recognition. In the first place, you will forget Lucien.’

  The poor girl was heartbroken at this thought; she raised her eyes towards the priest and shook her head; she could not speak, finding that the supposed rescuer was still to be her executioner.

  ‘You will at least stop seeing him,’ said the priest. ‘I shall take you to a religious house where the daughters of the best families receive their education; there you will become a Catholic, you will be instructed in Christian practices, you will be taught religion; you could leave that place a girl with accomplishments, chaste, pure, well-bred, if…’

  He held up a finger and paused.

  ‘If,’ he went on, ‘you feel that you have the strength to leave the Torpedo here.’

  ‘Ah!’ cried the poor child to whom each word had been like a note of music at the sound of which the gates of paradise were slowly opened, ‘Ah, if it were possible to pour out all my blood here and to receive new blood!…’

  ‘Listen to me.’

  She was silent.

  ‘Your future depends on your power to forget. Think of the extent of your obligations: one word, one gesture which betrayed the Torpedo kills Lucien’s wife; something you said in a dream, an involuntary thought, an immodest look, a sign of impatience, a memory of past dissolution, an omission, a movement of the head which revealed what you know or what to your misfortune has been known…’

  ‘Believe me, Father, believe me,’ the girl said with the exaltation of a saint, ‘to walk in shoes of red-hot iron and to smile, to live wrapped in a spiked corset and preserve the grace of a dancer, eat bread sprinkled with ashes, drink wormwood, it would all be easy, sweet!’

  She fell on her knees again, she kissed the priest’s shoes, made them wet with her tears, she clasped his legs and pressed her face against them, murmuring senseless words as she wept for joy. Her admirable fair hair hung to the ground and made a carpet beneath the feet of this messenger from heaven, whom she saw hard-faced, unsmiling, when she stood up and looked at him.

  ‘What offence have I given you?’ said she in fear again. ‘I have heard tell of a woman like me who poured aromatic ointment upon the feet of Jesus Christ. Alas, virtue has made me so poor that I have only tears to offer!’

  ‘Did you not hear me?’ he answered in a voice of cruelty. ‘I tell you, you must be able to leave the house where I am taking you so changed in your nature a
nd appearance that neither man nor woman among those who knew you will be able to call out to you: “Esther!” and make you turn your head. Yesterday, love had not given you the strength so deeply to bury the woman of pleasure that she should never reappear, she appears again in this adoration which belongs only to God.’

  ‘Did He not send you to me?’ said she.

  ‘If, during the course of your education, you caught sight of Lucien, all would be lost,’ he continued. ‘Think well of that.’

  ‘Who will console him?’ she said.

  ‘For what did you console him?’ asked the priest in a voice which, for the first time in this scene, betrayed a nervous tremor.

  ‘I don’t know, he was often sad when he came.’

  ‘Sad?’ the priest asked again. ‘Did he tell you why?’

  ‘Never,’ she replied.

  ‘He was sad at being in love with a woman like you,’ cried he.

  ‘Alas, he was right to be sad!’ she continued with deep humility. ‘I am the most despicable creature of my sex, and I could only find favour in his eyes by the strength of my love.’