Scenes from a Courtesan's Life - Honoré de Balzac (philippa perry book .txt) 📗

fifty thousand more. But the Baron took it all very well.--He is going to remove you from hence, and place you in a little palace.--On my honor, you are not so badly off. In your place, as you have got on the right side of this man, as soon as Carlos is satisfied, I should make him give me a house and a settled income. You are certainly the handsomest woman I ever saw, madame, and the most attractive, but we so soon grow ugly! I was fresh and good-looking, and look at me! I am twenty-three, about the same age as madame, and I look ten years older. An illness is enough.--Well, but when you have a house in Paris and investments, you need never be afraid of ending in the streets."

Esther had ceased to listen to Europe-Eugenie-Prudence Servien. The will of a man gifted with the genius of corruption had thrown Esther back into the mud with as much force as he had used to drag her out of it.

Those who know love in its infinitude know that those who do not accept its virtues do not experience its pleasures. Since the scene in the den in the Rue de Langlade, Esther had utterly forgotten her former existence. She had since lived very virtuously, cloistered by her passion. Hence, to avoid any obstacle, the skilful fiend had been clever enough to lay such a train that the poor girl, prompted by her devotion, had merely to utter her consent to swindling actions already done, or on the point of accomplishment. This subtlety, revealing the mastery of the tempter, also characterized the methods by which he had subjugated Lucien. He created a terrible situation, dug a mine, filled it with powder, and at the critical moment said to his accomplice, "You have only to nod, and the whole will explode!"

Esther of old, knowing only the morality peculiar to courtesans, thought all these attentions so natural, that she measured her rivals only by what they could get men to spend on them. Ruined fortunes are the conduct-stripes of these creatures. Carlos, in counting on Esther's memory, had not calculated wrongly.

These tricks of warfare, these stratagems employed a thousand times, not only by these women, but by spendthrifts too, did not disturb Esther's mind. She felt nothing but her personal degradation; she loved Lucien, she was to be the Baron de Nucingen's mistress "by appointment"; this was all she thought of. The supposed Spaniard might absorb the earnest-money, Lucien might build up his fortune with the stones of her tomb, a single night of pleasure might cost the old banker so many thousand-franc notes more or less, Europe might extract a few hundred thousand francs by more or less ingenious trickery,--none of these things troubled the enamored girl; this alone was the canker that ate into her heart. For five years she had looked upon herself as being as white as an angel. She loved, she was happy, she had never committed the smallest infidelity. This beautiful pure love was now to be defiled.

There was, in her mind, no conscious contrasting of her happy isolated past and her foul future life. It was neither interest nor sentiment that moved her, only an indefinable and all powerful feeling that she had been white and was now black, pure and was now impure, noble and was now ignoble. Desiring to be the ermine, moral taint seemed to her unendurable. And when the Baron's passion had threatened her, she had really thought of throwing herself out of the window. In short, she loved Lucien wholly, and as women very rarely love a man. Women who say they love, who often think they love best, dance, waltz, and flirt with other men, dress for the world, and look for a harvest of concupiscent glances; but Esther, without any sacrifice, had achieved miracles of true love. She had loved Lucien for six years as actresses love and courtesans--women who, having rolled in mire and impurity, thirst for something noble, for the self-devotion of true love, and who practice exclusiveness--the only word for an idea so little known in real life.

Vanished nations, Greece, Rome, and the East, have at all times kept women shut up; the woman who loves should shut herself up. So it may easily be imagined that on quitting the palace of her fancy, where this poem had been enacted, to go to this old man's "little palace," Esther felt heartsick. Urged by an iron hand, she had found herself waist-deep in disgrace before she had time to reflect; but for the past two days she had been reflecting, and felt a mortal chill about her heart.

At the words, "End in the street," she started to her feet and said:

"In the street!--No, in the Seine rather."

"In the Seine? And what about Monsieur Lucien?" said Europe.

This single word brought Esther to her seat again; she remained in her armchair, her eyes fixed on a rosette in the carpet, the fire in her brain drying up her tears.

At four o'clock Nucingen found his angel lost in that sea of meditations and resolutions whereon a woman's spirit floats, and whence she emerges with utterances that are incomprehensible to those who have not sailed it in her convoy.

"Clear your brow, meine Schone," said the Baron, sitting down by her. "You shall hafe no more debts--I shall arrange mit Eugenie, an' in ein mont you shall go 'vay from dese rooms and go to dat little palace.--Vas a pretty hant.--Gife it me dat I shall kiss it." Esther gave him her hand as a dog gives a paw. "Ach, ja! You shall gife de hant, but not de heart, and it is dat heart I lofe!"

The words were spoken with such sincerity of accent, that poor Esther looked at the old man with a compassion in her eyes that almost maddened him. Lovers, like martyrs, feel a brotherhood in their sufferings! Nothing in the world gives such a sense of kindred as community of sorrow.

"Poor man!" said she, "he really loves."

As he heard the words, misunderstanding their meaning, the Baron turned pale, the blood tingled in his veins, he breathed the airs of heaven. At his age a millionaire, for such a sensation, will pay as much gold as a woman can ask.

"I lofe you like vat I lofe my daughter," said he. "An' I feel dere"--and he laid her hand over his heart--"dat I shall not bear to see you anyting but happy."

"If you would only be a father to me, I would love you very much; I would never leave you; and you would see that I am not a bad woman, not grasping or greedy, as I must seem to you now----"

"You hafe done some little follies," said the Baron, "like all dose pretty vomen--dat is all. Say no more about dat. It is our pusiness to make money for you. Be happy! I shall be your fater for some days yet, for I know I must make you accustom' to my old carcase."

"Really!" she exclaimed, springing on to Nucingen's knees, and clinging to him with her arm round his neck.

"Really!" repeated he, trying to force a smile.

She kissed his forehead; she believed in an impossible combination--she might remain untouched and see Lucien.

She was so coaxing to the banker that she was La Torpille once more. She fairly bewitched the old man, who promised to be a father to her for forty days. Those forty days were to be employed in acquiring and arranging the house in the Rue Saint-Georges.

When he was in the street again, as he went home, the Baron said to himself, "I am an old flat."

But though in Esther's presence he was a mere child, away from her he resumed his lynx's skin; just as the gambler (in _le Joueur_) becomes affectionate to Angelique when he has not a liard.

"A half a million francs I hafe paid, and I hafe not yet seen vat her leg is like.--Dat is too silly! but, happily, nobody shall hafe known it!" said he to himself three weeks after.

And he made great resolutions to come to the point with the woman who had cost him so dear; then, in Esther's presence once more, he spent all the time he could spare her in making up for the roughness of his first words.

"After all," said he, at the end of a month, "I cannot be de fater eternal!"

Towards the end of the month of December 1829, just before installing Esther in the house in the Rue Saint-Georges, the Baron begged du Tillet to take Florine there, that she might see whether everything was suitable to Nucingen's fortune, and if the description of "a little palace" were duly realized by the artists commissioned to make the cage worthy of the bird.

Every device known to luxury before the Revolution of 1830 made this residence a masterpiece of taste. Grindot the architect considered it his greatest achievement as a decorator. The staircase, which had been reconstructed of marble, the judicious use of stucco ornament, textiles, and gilding, the smallest details as much as the general effect, outdid everything of the kind left in Paris from the time of Louis XV.

"This is my dream!--This and virtue!" said Florine with a smile. "And for whom are you spending all this money?"

"For a voman vat is going up there," replied the Baron.

"A way of playing Jupiter?" replied the actress. "And when is she on show?"

"On the day of the house-warming," cried du Tillet.

"Not before dat," said the Baron.

"My word, how we must lace and brush and fig ourselves out," Florine went on. "What a dance the women will lead their dressmakers and hairdressers for that evening's fun!--And when is it to be?"

"Dat is not for me to say."

"What a woman she must be!" cried Florine. "How much I should like to see her!"

"An' so should I," answered the Baron artlessly.

"What! is everything new together--the house, the furniture, and the woman?"

"Even the banker," said du Tillet, "for my old friend seems to me quite young again."

"Well, he must go back to his twentieth year," said Florine; "at any rate, for once."

In the early days of 1830 everybody in Paris was talking of Nucingen's passion and the outrageous splendor of his house. The poor Baron, pointed at, laughed at, and fuming with rage, as may easily be imagined, took it into his head that on the occasion of giving the house-warming he would at the same time get rid of his paternal disguise, and get the price of so much generosity. Always circumvented by "La Torpille," he determined to treat of their union by correspondence, so as to win from her an autograph promise. Bankers have no faith in anything less than a promissory note.

So one morning early in the year he rose early, locked himself into his room, and composed the following letter in very good French; for though he spoke the language very badly, he could write it very well:--

"DEAR ESTHER, the flower of my thoughts and the only joy of my
life, when I told you that I loved you as I love my daughter, I
deceived you, I deceived myself. I only wished to express the
holiness of my sentiments, which are unlike those felt by other
men, in the first place, because I am an old man, and also because