What Love Costs an Old Man. Honore de Balzac
I will be on the lookout, and we will go and find my mortgaged beauty, with the black hair.—Oh, she has splendid hair, has my mortgage. If she pulls out her comb, Esther is covered as if it were a pall. But though you are knowing in arithmetic, you strike me as a muff in other matters; and I advise you to hide the girl safely, for if she is found she will be clapped into Sainte-Pelagie the very next day.—And they are looking for her."
"Shall it not be possible to get holt of de bills?" said the incorrigible bill-broker.
"The bailiffs have got them—but it is impossible. The girl has had a passion, and has spent some money left in her hands, which she is now called upon to pay. By the poker!—a queer thing is a heart of two and-twenty."
"Ver' goot, ver' goot, I shall arrange all dat," said Nucingen, assuming a cunning look. "It is qvite settled dat I shall protect her."
"Well, old noodle, it is your business to make her fall in love with you, and you certainly have ample means to buy sham love as good as the real article. I will place your princess in your keeping; she is bound to stick to you, and after that I don't care.—But she is accustomed to luxury and the greatest consideration. I tell you, my boy, she is quite the lady.—If not, should I have given her twenty thousand francs?"
"Ver' goot, it is a pargain. Till dis efening."
The Baron repeated the bridal toilet he had already once achieved; but this time, being certain of success, he took a double dose of pillules.
At nine o'clock he found the dreadful woman at the appointed spot, and took her into his carriage.
"Vere to?" said the Baron.
"Where?" echoed Asie. "Rue de la Perle in the Marais—an address for the nonce; for your pearl is in the mud, but you will wash her clean."
Having reached the spot, the false Madame de Saint-Esteve said to Nucingen with a hideous smile:
"We must go a short way on foot; I am not such a fool as to have given you the right address."
"You tink of eferytink!" said the baron.
"It is my business," said she.
Asie led Nucingen to the Rue Barbette, where, in furnished lodgings kept by an upholsterer, he was led up to the fourth floor.
On finding Esther in a squalid room, dressed as a work-woman, and employed on some embroidery, the millionaire turned pale. At the end of a quarter of an hour, while Asie affected to talk in whispers to Esther, the young old man could hardly speak.
"Montemisselle," said he at length to the unhappy girl, "vill you be so goot as to let me be your protector?"
"Why, I cannot help myself, monsieur," replied Esther, letting fall two large tears.
"Do not veep. I shall make you de happiest of vomen. Only permit that I shall lof you—you shall see."
"Well, well, child, the gentleman is reasonable," said Asie. "He knows that he is more than sixty, and he will be very kind to you. You see, my beauty, I have found you quite a father—I had to say so," Asie whispered to the banker, who was not best pleased. "You cannot catch swallows by firing a pistol at them.—Come here," she went on, leading Nucingen into the adjoining room. "You remember our bargain, my angel?"
Nucingen took out his pocketbook and counted out the hundred thousand francs, which Carlos, hidden in a cupboard, was impatiently waiting for, and which the cook handed over to him.
"Here are the hundred thousand francs our man stakes on Asie. Now we must make him lay on Europe," said Carlos to his confidante when they were on the landing.
And he vanished after giving his instruction to the Malay who went back into the room. She found Esther weeping bitterly. The poor girl, like a criminal condemned to death, had woven a romance of hope, and the fatal hour had tolled.
"My dear children," said Asie, "where do you mean to go?—For the Baron de Nucingen——"
Esther looked at the great banker with a start of surprise that was admirably acted.
"Ja, mein kind, I am dat Baron von Nucingen."
"The Baron de Nucingen must not, cannot remain in such a room as this," Asie went on. "Listen to me; your former maid Eugenie."
"Eugenie, from the Rue Taitbout?" cried the Baron.
"Just so; the woman placed in possession of the furniture," replied Asie, "and who let the apartment to that handsome Englishwoman——"
"Hah! I onderstant!" said the Baron.
"Madame's former waiting-maid," Asie went on, respectfully alluding to Esther, "will receive you very comfortably this evening; and the commercial police will never think of looking for her in her old rooms which she left three months ago——"
"Feerst rate, feerst rate!" cried the Baron. "An' besides, I know dese commercial police, an' I know vat sorts shall make dem disappear."
"You will find Eugenie a sharp customer," said Asie. "I found her for madame."
"Hah! I know her!" cried the millionaire, laughing. "She haf fleeced me out of dirty tousant franc."
Esther shuddered with horror in a way that would have led a man of any feeling to trust her with his fortune.
"Oh, dat vas mein own fault," the Baron said. "I vas seeking for you."
And he related the incident that had arisen out of the letting of Esther's rooms to the Englishwoman.
"There, now, you see, madame, Eugenie never told you all that, the sly thing!" said Asie.—"Still, madame is used to the hussy," she added to the Baron. "Keep her on, all the same."
She drew Nucingen aside and said:
"If you give Eugenie five hundred francs a month, which will fill up her stocking finely, you can know everything that madame does: make her the lady's-maid. Eugenie will be all the more devoted to you since she has already done you.—Nothing attaches a woman to a man more than the fact that she has once fleeced him. But keep a tight rein on Eugenie; she will do any earthly thing for money; she is a dreadful creature!"
"An' vat of you?"
"I," said Asie, "I make both ends meet."
Nucingen, the astute financier, had a bandage over his eyes; he allowed himself to be led like a child. The sight of that spotless and adorable Esther wiping her eyes and pricking in the stitches of her embroidery as demurely as an innocent girl, revived in the amorous old man the sensations he had experienced in the Forest of Vincennes; he would have given her the key of his safe. He felt so young, his heart was so overflowing with adoration; he only waited till Asie should be gone to throw himself at the feet of this Raphael's Madonna.
This sudden blossoming of youth in the heart of a stockbroker, of an old man, is one of the social phenomena which must be left to physiology to account for. Crushed under the burden of business, stifled under endless calculations and the incessant anxieties of million-hunting, young emotions revive with their sublime illusions, sprout and flower like a forgotten cause or a forgotten seed, whose effects, whose gorgeous bloom, are the sport of chance, brought out by a late and sudden gleam of sunshine.
The Baron, a clerk by the time he was twelve years old in the ancient house of Aldrigger at Strasbourg, had never set foot in the world of sentiment. So there he stood in front of his idol, hearing in his brain a thousand modes of speech, while none came to his lips, till at length he acted on the brutal promptings of desire that betrayed a man of sixty-six.
"Vill you come to Rue Taitbout?" said he.
"Wherever you please, monsieur," said Esther, rising.
"Verever I please!" he echoed in rapture. "You are ein anchel from de sky, and I lofe you more as if I was a little man, vile I hafe gray hairs——"
"You had better say white, for they are too fine a black to be only gray," said Asie.
"Get out, foul dealer in human flesh! You hafe got your moneys; do