Scenes from a Courtesan's Life by Honoré de Balzac (e reader TXT) 📕

do! Vat shall become of me!--She is right, dat cruel Europe. Esther, if she is rich, shall not be for me. Shall I go hank myself? Vat is life midout de divine flame of joy dat I have known? Mein Gott, mein Gott!"

The old man snatched off the false hair he had combed in with his gray hairs these three months past.

A piercing shriek from Europe made Nucingen quail to his very bowels. The poor banker rose and walked upstairs on legs that were drunk with the bowl of disenchantment he had just swallowed to the dregs, for nothing is more intoxicating than the wine of disaster.

At the door of her room he could see Esther stiff on her bed, blue with poison--dead!

He went up to the bed and dropped on his knees.

"You are right! She tolt me so!--She is dead--of me----"

Paccard, Asie, every one hurried in. It was a spectacle, a shock, but not despair. Every one had their doubts. The Baron was a banker again. A suspicion crossed his mind, and he was so imprudent as to ask what had become of the seven hundred and fifty thousand francs, the price of the bond. Paccard, Asie, and Europe looked at each other so strangely that Monsieur de Nucingen left the house at once, believing that robbery and murder had been committed. Europe, detecting a packet of soft consistency, betraying the contents to be banknotes, under her mistress' pillow, proceeded at once to "lay her out," as she said.

"Go and tell monsieur, Asie!--Oh, to die before she knew that she had seven millions! Gobseck was poor madame's uncle!" said she.

Europe's stratagem was understood by Paccard. As soon as Asie's back was turned, Europe opened the packet, on which the hapless courtesan had written: "To be delivered to Monsieur Lucien de Rubempre."

Seven hundred and fifty thousand-franc notes shone in the eyes of Prudence Servien, who exclaimed:

"Won't we be happy and honest for the rest of our lives!"

Paccard made no objection. His instincts as a thief were stronger than his attachment to _Trompe-la-Mort_.

"Durut is dead," he said at length; "my shoulder is still a proof before letters. Let us be off together; divide the money, so as not to have all our eggs in one basket, and then get married."

"But where can we hide?" said Prudence.

"In Paris," replied Paccard.

Prudence and Paccard went off at once, with the promptitude of two honest folks transformed into robbers.

"My child," said Carlos to Asie, as soon as she had said three words, "find some letter of Esther's while I write a formal will, and then take the copy and the letter to Girard; but he must be quick. The will must be under Esther's pillow before the lawyers affix the seals here."

And he wrote out the following will:--

"Never having loved any one on earth but Monsieur Lucien Chardon
de Rubempre, and being resolved to end my life rather than relapse
into vice and the life of infamy from which he rescued me, I give
and bequeath to the said Lucien Chardon de Rubempre all I may
possess at the time of my decease, on condition of his founding a
mass in perpetuity in the parish church of Saint-Roch for the
repose of her who gave him her all, to her last thought.

"ESTHER GOBSECK."

"That is quite in her style," thought _Trompe-la-Mort_.

By seven in the evening this document, written and sealed, was placed by Asie under Esther's bolster.

"Jacques," said she, flying upstairs again, "just as I came out of the room justice marched in----"

"The justice of the peace you mean?"

"No, my son. The justice of the peace was there, but he had gendarmes with him. The public prosecutor and the examining judge are there too, and the doors are guarded."

"This death has made a stir very quickly," remarked Jacques Collin.

"Ay, and Paccard and Europe have vanished; I am afraid they may have scared away the seven hundred and fifty thousand francs," said Asie.

"The low villains!" said Collin. "They have done for us by their swindling game."

Human justice, and Paris justice, that is to say, the most suspicious, keenest, cleverest, and omniscient type of justice--too clever, indeed, for it insists on interpreting the law at every turn--was at last on the point of laying its hand on the agents of this horrible intrigue.

The Baron of Nucingen, on recognizing the evidence of poison, and failing to find his seven hundred and fifty thousand francs, imagined that one of two persons whom he greatly disliked--either Paccard or Europe--was guilty of the crime. In his first impulse of rage he flew to the prefecture of police. This was a stroke of a bell that called up all Corentin's men. The officials of the prefecture, the legal profession, the chief of the police, the justice of the peace, the examining judge,--all were astir. By nine in the evening three medical men were called in to perform an autopsy on poor Esther, and inquiries were set on foot.

_Trompe-la-Mort_, warned by Asie, exclaimed:

"No one knows that I am here; I may take an airing." He pulled himself up by the skylight of his garret, and with marvelous agility was standing in an instant on the roof, whence he surveyed the surroundings with the coolness of a tiler.

"Good!" said he, discerning a garden five houses off in the Rue de Provence, "that will just do for me."

"You are paid out, _Trompe-la-Mort_," said Contenson, suddenly emerging from behind a stack of chimneys. "You may explain to Monsieur Camusot what mass you were performing on the roof, Monsieur l'Abbe, and, above all, why you were escaping----"

"I have enemies in Spain," said Carlos Herrera.

"We can go there by way of your attic," said Contenson.

The sham Spaniard pretended to yield; but, having set his back and feet across the opening of the skylight, he gripped Contenson and flung him off with such violence that the spy fell in the gutter of the Rue Saint-Georges.

Contenson was dead on his field of honor; Jacques Collin quietly dropped into the room again and went to bed.

"Give me something that will make me very sick without killing me," said he to Asie; "for I must be at death's door, to avoid answering inquisitive persons. I have just got rid of a man in the most natural way, who might have unmasked me."


At seven o'clock on the previous evening Lucien had set out in his own chaise to post to Fontainebleau with a passport he had procured in the morning; he slept in the nearest inn on the Nemours side. At six in the morning he went alone, and on foot, through the forest as far as Bouron.

"This," said he to himself, as he sat down on one of the rocks that command the fine landscape of Bouron, "is the fatal spot where Napoleon dreamed of making a final tremendous effort on the eve of his abdication."

At daybreak he heard the approach of post-horses and saw a britska drive past, in which sat the servants of the Duchesse de Lenoncourt-Chaulieu and Clotilde de Grandlieu's maid.

"Here they are!" thought Lucien. "Now, to play the farce well, and I shall be saved!--the Duc de Grandlieu's son-in-law in spite of him!"

It was an hour later when he heard the peculiar sound made by a superior traveling carriage, as the berline came near in which two ladies were sitting. They had given orders that the drag should be put on for the hill down to Bouron, and the man-servant behind the carriage had it stopped.

At this instant Lucien came forward.

"Clotilde!" said he, tapping on the window.

"No," said the young Duchess to her friend, "he shall not get into the carriage, and we will not be alone with him, my dear. Speak to him for the last time--to that I consent; but on the road, where we will walk on, and where Baptiste can escort us.--The morning is fine, we are well wrapped up, and have no fear of the cold. The carriage can follow."

The two women got out.

"Baptiste," said the Duchess, "the post-boy can follow slowly; we want to walk a little way. You must keep near us."

Madeleine de Mortsauf took Clotilde by the arm and allowed Lucien to talk. They thus walked on as far as the village of Grez. It was now eight o'clock, and there Clotilde dismissed Lucien.

"Well, my friend," said she, closing this long interview with much dignity, "I never shall marry any one but you. I would rather believe in you than in other men, in my father and mother--no woman ever gave greater proof of attachment surely?--Now, try to counteract the fatal prejudices which militate against you."

Just then the tramp of galloping horses was heard, and, to the great amazement of the ladies, a force of gendarmes surrounded the little party.

"What do you want?" said Lucien, with the arrogance of a dandy.

"Are you Monsieur Lucien de Rubempre?" asked the public prosecutor of Fontainebleau.

"Yes, monsieur."

"You will spend to-night in La Force," said he. "I have a warrant for the detention of your person."

"Who are these ladies?" asked the sergeant.

"To be sure.--Excuse me, ladies--your passports? For Monsieur Lucien, as I am instructed, had acquaintances among the fair sex, who for him would----"

"Do you take the Duchesse de Lenoncourt-Chaulieu for a prostitute?" said Madeleine, with a magnificent flash at the public prosecutor.

"You are handsome enough to excuse the error," the magistrate very cleverly retorted.

"Baptiste, produce the passports," said the young Duchess with a smile.

"And with what crime is Monsieur de Rubempre charged?" asked Clotilde, whom the Duchess wished to see safe in the carriage.

"Of being accessory to a robbery and murder," replied the sergeant of gendarmes.

Baptiste lifted Mademoiselle de Grandlieu into the chaise in a dead faint.


By midnight Lucien was entering La Force, a prison situated between the Rue Payenne and the Rue des Ballets, where he was placed in solitary confinement.

The Abbe Carlos Herrera was also there, having been arrested that evening.


THE END OF EVIL WAYS

At six o'clock next morning two vehicles with postilions, prison vans, called in the vigorous language of the populace, _paniers a salade_, came out of La Force to drive to the Conciergerie by the Palais de Justice.

Few loafers in Paris can have failed to meet this prison cell on wheels; still, though most stories are written for Parisian readers, strangers will no doubt be satisfied to have a description of this formidable machine. Who knows? A police of Russia, Germany, or Austria, the legal body of countries to whom the "Salad-basket" is an unknown machine, may profit by it; and in several foreign countries there can be no doubt that an imitation of this vehicle would be a boon to prisoners.

This ignominious conveyance, yellow-bodied, on high wheels, and lined with sheet-iron, is divided into two compartments. In front is a box-seat, with leather cushions and an apron. This is the free seat of the van, and accommodates a sheriff's officer and a gendarme. A strong iron trellis, reaching to the top, separates this sort of cab-front from the back division, in which there are two wooden seats placed sideways, as