A Harlot High and Low

by Honoré de Balzac

  Such a view of the matter explains the effect of the words: ‘Madame, here is Madame Camusot on an urgent matter, which Madame knows about!’ said to the Marquise d’Espard by her maid who supposed her to be awake.

  Thus the marchioness cried out that Amélie was to be shown in without delay. The magistrate’s wife was listened to carefully, when she began with these words:

  ‘Madame la Marquise, we are ruined for having tried to avenge you…’

  ‘What, my little picture?… ’ replied the marchioness inspecting Madame Camusot in the penumbra cast by the half-open door. ‘‘You look divine, this morning, in that little hat. Where do you find models like that?… ’

  ‘Madame, you are most kind… But you must know that the way in which Camusot interrogated Lucien de Rubempré reduced the young man to despair, and that he hanged himself in prison…’

  ‘Whatever will happen to Madame de Sérisy?’ cried the marchioness pretending ignorance so that she could hear all again.

  ‘Alas! she is thought to have gone out of her mind,…’ replied Amelia. ‘Ah! if you can arrange for His Highness to summon my husband at once by courier to the Law Courts, the minister will learn the strangest things, the King will be most interested… Then Camusot’s enemies will be reduced to silence.’

  ‘Who are Camusot’s enemies?’ asked the marquise.

  ‘First, the Attorney General, and now Monsieur de Sérisy…’

  ‘Splendid, my child,’ replied Madame d’Espard, who owed to Messieurs de Granville and Sérisy her defeat in the ignoble lawsuit she had brought to deprive her husband of the control of his estate, ‘I shall defend you. I forget neither my friends, nor my enemies.’

  She rang, had the curtains drawn, light flooded into the room, she demanded her writing-desk, and her maid brought it. The marchioness rapidly scribbled a short letter.

  ‘Tell Goddard to saddle a horse, and take this note to the chancellery; there is no reply,’ she said to her maid.

  The maid went out briskly, but, in spite of her orders, stayed at the door listening for a while.

  ‘There are dark secrets, then, are there?’ asked Madame d’Espard. ‘Tell me all about them, my dear. Isn’t Clotilde de Grandlieu mixed up in the matter?’

  ‘Madame la Marquise will learn all that from His Highness, for my husband told me nothing, he only warned me of his danger. It would be better for us for Madame de Sérisy to die than to stay out of her mind.’

  ‘Poor woman!’ said the marquise. ‘But was she in her mind?’

  By the hundred different ways they have of pronouncing the same phrase, society women display to attentive ears the boundless range of musical modes. The soul reveals itself as much in the voice as in the look, it impresses itself on light as on the air, the elements upon which the eyes and the larynx respectively work. By her accentuation of those two words: ‘Poor woman!’ the marchioness allowed the contentment of satisfied hatred, the happiness of triumph, to be divined. Ah! how great the misfortunes she wished for the protectress of Lucien! Vengeance beyond the death of the hated object, never assuaged, produces a gloomy and fearful effect. Herself of a ruthless, vindictive and meddlesome nature, Madame Camusot was nevertheless dumbfounded. She could think of nothing to say, she remained silent.

  ‘Diana told me, indeed, that Léontine had gone to the prison,’ Madame d’Espard continued. ‘The dear duchess is most upset by this sudden stroke, for it is one of her weaknesses to be extremely fond of Madame de Sérisy; but it is understandable, they adored that little idiot Lucien at much the same time, and nothing so unites or disunites two women as paying their devotions at the same altar. And so this kind friend yesterday spent two hours in Léontine’s room. It seems that the poor countess says dreadful things! I’m told it was downright disgusting!… A respectable woman really ought not to be subject to such attacks!… For shame! It was a wholly physical passion… The duchess came to see me as pale as death, she’s terribly brave! There is something about this affair which is utterly monstrous…’

  ‘My husband will justify himself in telling all to the Keeper of the Seals, for they wanted to save Lucien, and he, Madame la Marquise, only did his duty. An examining magistrate is bound to examine those in solitary confinement, with no more delay than the law allows!… Questions of some kind had to be put to the wretched young man, who didn’t understand that the interrogation was a formality, so that he started confessing at once…’

  ‘He was an impertinent young fool!’ Madame d’Espard said curtly.

  The magistrate’s wife held her tongue on hearing this decree.

  ‘If the petition in respect of Monsieur d’Espard was thrown out, it was not Camusot’s fault, I shall always remember that! ’ the marchioness went on after a pause… ‘It was Lucien, with Messieurs de Sérisy, Bauvan and Granville who defeated us. In time, God will be on my side! All those men will end badly. Don’t worry, I shall send the Chevalier d’Espard to the Keeper of the Seals so that he makes haste to send for your husband, if that will help…’

  ‘Ah, Madame!…’

  ‘Listen!’ said the marquise, ‘I promise you the decoration of the Legion of Honour immediately, tomorrow! That will be a signal witness to my satisfaction at your conduct in this matter. Yes, it will be a further censure on Lucien, it will declare him guilty! People don’t often hang themselves for pleasure… And so good-bye, pretty one!’

  Madame Camusot’s second call

  TEN minutes later, Madame Camusot entered the bedroom of the fair Diane de Maufrigneuse, who, having gone to bed at one o’clock, was still not asleep at nine.

  However insensitive duchesses may be, they are women who, despite their stucco hearts, cannot see one of their friends afflicted by madness without the fact making some impression on them.

  Moreover, the bond between Diane and Lucien, though dissolved eighteen months ago, had left enough memories in the duchess’s mind for the child’s tragic death to deal her also a sufficient blow. All night Diana had been seeing that handsome young man, so charming, so poetical, so adept at making love, hanged as Léontine depicted him in her attacks and with the gestures of raging fever. She had kept eloquent, intoxicating letters from Lucien, comparable with those written by Mirabeau to Sophie, but more literary, more polished, for they were letters dictated by the most violent of passions, vanity! To possess the most ravishing of duchesses, to see her commit follies for him, and those in secret, such happiness had turned Lucien’s head. The pride of the lover had truly inspired the poet. The duchess had therefore kept these moving letters, as some old men collect obscene engravings, for the sake of their hyperbolical eulogies upon what was least duchlesslike about her.

  ‘And he died in a low prison!’ she said to herself fearfully clutching the letters as she heard her maid knock gently on the door.

  ‘Madame Camusot, on business of the utmost gravity which concerns Madame la Duchesse,’ the maid announced.

  Diana at once got to her feet in terror.

  ‘Oh!’ she said looking at Amélie who had put on a face suited to the occasion, ‘I can guess all! It is about my letters… Ah, my letters!… Ah, my letters!…’ And she dropped on to a little settee. She remembered how, in her throes of passion, she had replied to Lucien in the same key, celebrating the poetry of the male just as he hymned the glories of womanhood, and not less dithyrambically!

  ‘Indeed, yes, Madame, I have come to save more than your life! it touches your honour… Pull yourself together, get dressed, and come along to the Duchesse de Grandlieu’s; since, happily for you, others besides yourself are compromised.’

  ‘But Léontine, yesterday, burned, I was told, at the Palais, all the letters seized at our poor Lucien’s apartment?’

  ‘Alas, Madame, Lucien was coupled with Jacques Collin!’ cried the magistrate’s wife. ‘You forget that frightful companionship, which, I am sure, is the sole cause of the death of that charming and regrettable young man! Well, now, that penitential Machiavelli, he never lost h
is head! Monsieur Camusot knows for a certainty that that monster has put away in a safe place the most compromising letters from the mistresses of his…'

  ‘His friend,’ said the duchess quickly. ‘You are right, my pretty child, we must go and take counsel with the Grandlieus. We are all concerned in this affair, and we are lucky to have Sérisy with us…’

  Extreme danger has, as we have seen from the happenings at the Conciergerie, as great an effect on the soul as powerful reagents on the body. It is a Volta battery of the mind. The day may not be far off when we shall discover by just what chemical means feeling is condensed into a fluid, similar perhaps to electricity.

  The same phenomenon took place in the duchess as in the convict. Cast down, half-dead, this duchess who hadn’t slept and who was always difficult to dress, recovered the strength of a lioness at bay, and the presence of mind of a general under fire. Diana herself then picked up garments and improvised her toilet with the speed of a seamstress who is her own maid. The achievement was so remarkable that the lady’s maid remained standing where she was for a moment, astonished to see her mistress in a shift, possibly happy to let the judge’s wife see, through the light mist of the linen, a white body as perfect as that of Canova’s Venus. It was like a piece of jewellery wrapped in tissue paper. Diana had suddenly noticed her quick-service corset, fastening at the front, which saves women in a hurry all the time wasted in lacing. She had already comfortably disposed the lace of her petticoat and the splendours of her bosom, when the maid brought her underskirt, and completed the job with a gown. While Amelia, at a sign from the maid, fastened this behind and helped the duchess, the maid fetched stockings in Scotch thread, velvet half-boots, a shawl and a hat. Amelia and the maid each shod one leg.

  ‘You are the most beautiful woman I have seen,’ said Amelia with due calculation kissing Diana’s fine, smooth knee rapturously.

  ‘Madame is without equal,’ said the maid.

  ‘Come now, Josette, be quiet,’ replied the duchess. ‘Have you a carriage?’ she said to Madame Camusot. ‘Let’s be off, my pretty, we’ll talk on the way.’ And the duchess ran down the great staircase of the Cadignan mansion drawing on her gloves, a sight which had never been seen.

  ‘To the Grandlieus, with speed!’ she said to one of her servants, signing to him to get up behind the carriage.

  The footman hesitated, for it was a hackney carriage.

  ‘ Ah, Madame la Duchesse, you didn’t tell me that the young man had letters from you! otherwise, Camusot would have set about the matter differently…’

  ‘I was so preoccupied by Léontine’s situation that I altogether forgot about myself,’ said she. ‘The poor woman was nearly out of her mind the day before yesterday, so you can judge the effect of this fatal upshot! Ah! if you only knew, my dear, what a day we had yesterday… No, really, it’s enough to make one give up love. In the morning, dragged the two of us, Léontine and I, by a horrible old woman, a clothes dealer, very capable I must say, into that smelly, bleeding sink called the Law, I said to her, on our way to the Palais : “Couldn’t one, really, fall on one’s knees and cry out, like Madame de Nucingen, when, on her way to Naples, she was overtaken by one of those fearful storms in the Mediterranean: ‘Dear God! save me, and I promise never again!’ I shall certainly remember these two days! why do we write letters?… But there, one is in love, one receives pages which set the heart on fire by way of the eyes, everything bursts into flame! caution is thrown to the wind! and one writes back…’

  ‘Why write, when you can act!’ said Madame Camusot.

  ‘All for love!’ said the duchess proudly. ‘Destroying oneself is a pleasure at the time.’

  ‘Beautiful women,’ modestly commented Madame Camusot, ‘must be excused, they have more opportunities than the rest of us to succumb!’

  The duchess smiled.

  ‘We are always too generous,’ Diane de Maufrigneuse continued. ‘I shall do like that frightful Madame d’Espard.’

  ‘What does she do?’ the magistrate’s wife asked curiously.

  ‘She’s written at least a thousand love-letters…’

  ‘As many as that!…’ cried la Camusot interrupting the duchess.

  ‘…And you wouldn’t, my dear, find a single compromising word in them all…’

  ‘You couldn’t keep up that coldness, that calculation,’ Madame Camusot replied. ‘You’re a woman, you’re one of those angels who can’t resist the devil…’

  ‘I have sworn that I will never write again. I never, in my whole life, wrote to anyone but the unfortunate Lucien… I shall keep his letters until the day I die! My dear child, it warms one, and one needs warming at times…’

  ‘But if they were found! ‘ said la Camusot with a shy little gesture.

  ‘Oh, I should say they were the beginning of a novel. For I copied them all out, my dear, and burned the originals!’

  ‘Oh, Madame, as a reward, let me read them…’

  ‘I might,’ said the duchess. ‘You will see then, my dear, that he didn’t write like that to Léontine!’

  There spoke the whole of womankind, the woman of all ages and every country.

  An important figure vowed to oblivion

  LIKE the frog in La Fontaine’s fable, Madame Camusot was bursting in her skin with pleasure at entering the Grandlieu house in the company of the fair Diane de Maufrigneuse. She was to forge, that morning, one of the links so necessary to ambition. She could already hear herself being addressed as ‘Madame la Présidente’. She experienced the ineffable joy of overcoming enormous obstacles, the chief of which was her husband’s incapacity, still unknown to the world, but clear enough to her. To bring success to a second-rate man! for a woman, as for kings, the pleasure is like that which appeals to so many actors, the pleasure of giving a hundred performances of a bad play. It is the intoxication of egoism! In a sense it is also the saturnalia of power. Power especially proves itself to itself by the singular abuse of itself which consists in crowning some absurdity with the laurels of success, thereby insulting genius, the only strength which power can never attain. The promotion of Caligula’s horse, that imperial farce, has enjoyed an almost unbroken run.

  Within minutes, Diana and Amelia had passed from the elegant disorder of the fair Diana’s bedroom to the carefully ordered grandeur and severe luxury of the Grandlieu establishment.

  The Duchesse de Grandlieu was Portuguese and very pious. She rose at eight every morning and went to mass at the little church of Sainte Valère, succursal of Saint Thomas Aquinas’s, then in the Esplanade des Invalides. This chapel, later demolished, was moved to the rue de Bourgogne, to make way for a Gothic church to be dedicated to Sainte Clotilde.

  At the first words murmured into the ear of the Duchese de Grandlieu by Diane de Maufrigneuse, the pious woman went to Monsieur de Grandlieu’s apartments and at once returned with him. The duke cast upon Madame Camusot one of those rapid glances with which great lords analyse a whole existence and often the soul. Amelia’s costume helped him to sum up that middle-class course of life from Alençon to Mantes, and from Mantes to Paris.

  If the magistrate’s wife had understood the gift dukes have, she might have quailed before that look so politely ironical, in which she perceived only politeness. Ignorance shares the privileges of guile.

  ‘This is Madame Camusot, Thirion’s daughter, one of the royal ushers,’ said the duchess to her husband.

  The duke bowed very politely to the lawyer’s wife, and his face lost a little of its solemnity. He rang, and his valet appeared

  ‘Go to the rue Honoré Chevalier, take a carriage. There, you will ring at a little door, Number 10. Tell the servant who comes to open the door that I beg his or her master to come along here; if this gentleman is at home bring him with you.

  Use my name, it will do to smooth out any difficulties. Try not to spend more than a quarter of an hour over all this.’

  Another footman, the duchess’s, appeared the moment the duke’s man
had gone.

  ‘Go from me to the Duc de Chaulieu’s, have this card handed to him.’ The duke gave the man his card turned down in a particular way. When these two intimate friends felt the need to see each other at once over some urgent and mysterious affair which could not be set down in writing, they summoned each other in that way.