Scenes from a Courtesan's Life - Honore de Balzac

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She is being educated. She can, if she may, under the influence of your love, become a Ninon, a Marion Delorme, a du Barry, as the journalist at the opera ball remarked. You may proclaim her your mistress, or you may retire behind a curtain of your own creating, which will be wiser. By either method you will gain profit and pride, pleasure and advancement; but if you are as great a politician as you are a poet, Esther will be no more to you than any other woman of the town; for, later, perhaps she may help us out of difficulties; she is worth her weight in gold. Drink, but do not get tipsy.

      “If I had not held the reins of your passion, where would you be now? Rolling with La Torpille in the slough of misery from which I dragged you. Here, read this,” said Herrera, as simply as Talma in Manlius, which he had never seen.

      A sheet of paper was laid on the poet’s knees, and startled him from the ecstasy and surprise with which he had listened to this astounding speech; he took it, and read the first letter written by Mademoiselle Esther:—

      To Monsieur l’Abbe Carlos Herrera.

       “MY DEAR PROTECTOR—Will you not suppose that gratitude is

       stronger in me than love, when you see that the first use I make

       of the power of expressing my thoughts is to thank you, instead of

       devoting it to pouring forth a passion that Lucien has perhaps

       forgotten. But to you, divine man, I can say what I should not

       dare to tell him, who, to my joy, still clings to earth.

       “Yesterday’s ceremony has filled me with treasures of grace, and I

       place my fate in your hands. Even if I must die far away from my

       beloved, I shall die purified like the Magdalen, and my soul will

       become to him the rival of his guardian angel. Can I ever forget

       yesterday’s festival? How could I wish to abdicate the glorious

       throne to which I was raised? Yesterday I washed away every stain

       in the waters of baptism, and received the Sacred Body of my

       Redeemer; I am become one of His tabernacles. At that moment I

       heard the songs of angels, I was more than a woman, born to a life

       of light amid the acclamations of the whole earth, admired by the

       world in a cloud of incense and prayers that were intoxicating,

       adorned like a virgin for the Heavenly Spouse.

       “Thus finding myself worthy of Lucien, which I had never hoped to

       be, I abjured impure love and vowed to walk only in the paths of

       virtue. If my flesh is weaker than my spirit, let it perish. Be

       the arbiter of my destiny; and if I die, tell Lucien that I died

       to him when I was born to God.”

      Lucien looked up at the Abbe with eyes full of tears.

      “You know the rooms fat Caroline Bellefeuille had, in the Rue Taitbout,” the Spaniard said. “The poor creature, cast off by her magistrate, was in the greatest poverty; she was about to be sold up. I bought the place all standing, and she turned out with her clothes. Esther, the angel who aspired to heaven, has alighted there, and is waiting for you.”

      At this moment Lucien heard his horses pawing the ground in the courtyard; he was incapable of expressing his admiration for a devotion which he alone could appreciate; he threw himself into the arms of the man he had insulted, made amends for all by a look and the speechless effusion of his feelings. Then he flew downstairs, confided Esther’s address to his tiger’s ear, and the horses went off as if their master’s passion had lived in their legs.

      The next day a man, who by his dress might have been mistaken by the passers-by for a gendarme in disguise, was passing the Rue Taitbout, opposite a house, as if he were waiting for some one to come out; he walked with an agitated air. You will often see in Paris such vehement promenaders, real gendarmes watching a recalcitrant National Guardsman, bailiffs taking steps to effect an arrest, creditors planning a trick on the debtor who has shut himself in, lovers, or jealous and suspicious husbands, or friends doing sentry for a friend; but rarely do you meet a face portending such coarse and fierce thoughts as animated that of the gloomy and powerful man who paced to and fro under Mademoiselle Esther’s windows with the brooding haste of a bear in its cage.

      At noon a window was opened, and a maid-servant’s hand was put out to push back the padded shutters. A few minutes later, Esther, in her dressing-gown, came to breathe the air, leaning on Lucien; any one who saw them might have taken them for the originals of some pretty English vignette. Esther was the first to recognize the basilisk eyes of the Spanish priest; and the poor creature, stricken as if she had been shot, gave a cry of horror.

      “There is that terrible priest,” said she, pointing him out to Lucien.

      “He!” said Lucien, smiling, “he is no more a priest than you are.”

      “What then?” she said in alarm.

      “Why, an old villain who believes in nothing but the devil,” said Lucien.

      This light thrown on the sham priest’s secrets, if revealed to any one less devoted than Esther, might have ruined Lucien for ever.

      As they went along the corridor from their bedroom to the dining-room, where their breakfast was served, the lovers met Carlos Herrera.

      “What have you come here for?” said Lucien roughly.

      “To bless you,” replied the audacious scoundrel, stopping the pair and detaining them in the little drawing-room of the apartment. “Listen to me, my pretty dears. Amuse yourselves, be happy—well and good! Happiness at any price is my motto.—But you,” he went on to Esther, “you whom I dragged from the mud, and have soaped down body and soul, you surely do not dream that you can stand in Lucien’s way?—As for you, my boy,” he went on after a pause, looking at Lucien, “you are no longer poet enough to allow yourself another Coralie. This is sober prose. What can be done with Esther’s lover? Nothing. Can Esther become Madame de Rubempre? No.

      “Well, my child,” said he, laying his hand on Esther’s, and making her shiver as if some serpent had wound itself round her, “the world must never know of your existence. Above all, the world must never know that a certain Mademoiselle Esther loves Lucien, and that Lucien is in love with her.—These rooms are your prison, my pigeon. If you wish to go out—and your health will require it—you must take exercise at night, at hours when you cannot be seen; for your youth and beauty, and the style you have acquired at the Convent, would at once be observed in Paris. The day when any one in the world, whoever it be,” he added in an awful voice, seconded by an awful look, “learns that Lucien is your lover, or that you are his mistress, that day will be your last but one on earth. I have procured that boy a patent permitting him to bear the name and arms of his maternal ancestors. Still, this is not all; we have not yet recovered the title of Marquis; and to get it, he must marry a girl of good family, in whose favor the King will grant this distinction. Such an alliance will get Lucien on in the world and at Court. This boy, of whom I have made a man, will be first Secretary to an Embassy; later, he shall be Minister at some German Court, and God, or I—better still—helping him, he will take his seat some day on the bench reserved for peers——”

      “Or on the bench reserved for——” Lucien began, interrupting the man.

      “Hold your tongue!” cried Carlos, laying his broad hand on Lucien’s mouth. “Would you tell such a secret to a woman?” he muttered in his ear.

      “Esther! A woman!” cried the poet of Les Marguerites.

      “Still inditing sonnets!” said the Spaniard. “Nonsense! Sooner or later all these angels relapse into being women, and every woman at moments is a mixture of a monkey and a child, two creatures who can kill us for fun.—Esther, my jewel,” said he to the terrified

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