“There is no other way of getting you to seem to be gracious to a poor old man, who, after all, is going to pay your debts,” said Europe. “For they are all to be paid.”
“What debts?” said the girl, who only cared to preserve her love, which dreadful hands were scattering to the winds.
“Those which Monsieur Carlos made in your name.”
“Why, here are nearly four hundred and fifty thousand francs,” cried Esther.
“And you owe a hundred and 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!”