Your carriage shall come for you and your people.
— Dat teufel Asie!”
“The first time, and you leave me alone!” said Esther. “Come, come, you must have courage enough to die on deck.
I must have my man with me as I go out.
If I were insulted, am I to cry out for nothing?”
The old millionaire’s selfishness had to give way to his duties as a lover. The Baron suffered but stayed.
Esther had her own reasons for detaining “her man.” If she admitted her acquaintance, she would be less closely questioned in his presence than if she were alone.
Philippe Bridau hurried back to the box where the dancers were sitting, and informed them of the state of affairs.
“Oh! so it is she who has fallen heir to my house in the Rue Saint–Georges,” observed Madame du Val–Noble with some bitterness; for she, as she phrased it, was on the loose.
“Most likely,” said the Colonel. “Du Tillet told me that the Baron had spent three times as much there as your poor Falleix.”
“Let us go round to her box,” said Tullia.
“Not if I know it,” said Mariette; “she is much too handsome, I will call on her at home.”
“I think myself good-looking enough to risk it,” remarked Tullia.
So the much-daring leading dancer went round between the acts and renewed acquaintance with Esther, who would talk only on general subjects.
“And where have you come back from, my dear child?” asked Tullia, who could not restrain her curiosity.
“Oh, I was for five years in a castle in the Alps with an Englishman, as jealous as a tiger, a nabob; I called him a nabot, a dwarf, for he was not so big as le bailli de Ferrette.
“And then I came across a banker — from a savage to salvation, as Florine might say.
And now here I am in Paris again; I long so for amusement that I mean to have a rare time.
I shall keep open house.
I have five years of solitary confinement to make good, and I am beginning to do it.
Five years of an Englishman is rather too much; six weeks are the allowance according to the advertisements.”
“Was it the Baron who gave you that lace?”
“No, it is a relic of the nabob. — What ill-luck I have, my dear!
He was as yellow as a friend’s smile at a success; I thought he would be dead in ten months.
Pooh! he was a strong as a mountain.
Always distrust men who say they have a liver complaint.
I will never listen to a man who talks of his liver. — I have had too much of livers — who cannot die. My nabob robbed me; he died without making a will, and the family turned me out of doors like a leper.
— So, then, I said to my fat friend here,
‘Pay for two!’— You may as well call me Joan of Arc; I have ruined England, and perhaps I shall die at the stake ——”
“Of love?” said Tullia.
“And burnt alive,” answered Esther, and the question made her thoughtful.
The Baron laughed at all this vulgar nonsense, but he did not always follow it readily, so that his laughter sounded like the forgotten crackers that go off after fireworks.
We all live in a sphere of some kind, and the inhabitants of every sphere are endowed with an equal share of curiosity.
Next evening at the opera, Esther’s reappearance was the great news behind the scenes.
Between two and four in the afternoon all Paris in the Champs–Elysees had recognized La Torpille, and knew at last who was the object of the Baron de Nucingen’s passion.
“Do you know,” Blondet remarked to de Marsay in the greenroom at the opera-house, “that La Torpille vanished the very day after the evening when we saw her here and recognized her in little Rubempre’s mistress.”
In Paris, as in the provinces, everything is known.
The police of the Rue de Jerusalem are not so efficient as the world itself, for every one is a spy on every one else, though unconsciously.
Carlos had fully understood the danger of Lucien’s position during and after the episode of the Rue Taitbout.
No position can be more dreadful than that in which Madame du Val–Noble now found herself; and the phrase to be on the loose, or, as the French say, left on foot, expresses it perfectly.
The recklessness and extravagance of these women precludes all care for the future.
In that strange world, far more witty and amusing than might be supposed, only such women as are not gifted with that perfect beauty which time can hardly impair, and which is quite unmistakable — only such women, in short, as can be loved merely as a fancy, ever think of old age and save a fortune. The handsomer they are, the more improvident they are.
“Are you afraid of growing ugly that you are saving money?” was a speech of Florine’s to Mariette, which may give a clue to one cause of this thriftlessness.
Thus, if a speculator kills himself, or a spendthrift comes to the end of his resources, these women fall with hideous promptitude from audacious wealth to the utmost misery.
They throw themselves into the clutches of the old-clothes buyer, and sell exquisite jewels for a mere song; they run into debt, expressly to keep up a spurious luxury, in the hope of recovering what they have lost — a cash-box to draw upon.
These ups and downs of their career account for the costliness of such connections, generally brought about as Asie had hooked (another word of her vocabulary) Nucingen for Esther.
And so those who know their Paris are quite aware of the state of affairs when, in the Champs–Elysees — that bustling and mongrel bazaar — they meet some woman in a hired fly whom six months or a year before they had seen in a magnificent and dazzling carriage, turned out in the most luxurious style.
“If you fall on Sainte–Pelagie, you must contrive to rebound on the Bois de Boulogne,” said Florine, laughing with Blondet over the little Vicomte de Portenduere.
Some clever women never run the risk of this contrast.
They bury themselves in horrible furnished lodgings, where they expiate their extravagance by such privations as are endured by travelers lost in a Sahara; but they never take the smallest fancy for economy.