joy and pride if we succeed! How noble a task is that which has no instrument but love!
Such alliances, made famous by the example of Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Alcibiades, Cethegus, and Pompey, and yet so monstrous in the eyes of the vulgar, are based on the same feeling that prompted Louis XIV. to build Versailles, or that makes men rush into any ruinous enterprise – into converting the miasma of a marsh into a mass of fragrance surrounded by living waters; placing a lake at the top of a hill, as the Prince de Conti did at Nointel; or producing Swiss scenery at Cassan, like Bergeret, the farmer-general. In short, it is the application of art in the realm of morals.
The priest, ashamed of having yielded to this weakness, hastily pushed Esther away, and she sat down quite abashed, for he said:
“You are still the courtesan.” And he calmly replaced the paper in his sash.
Esther, like a child who has a single wish in its head, kept her eyes fixed on the spot where the document lay hidden.
“My child,” the priest went on after a pause, “your mother was a Jewess, and you have not been baptized; but, on the other hand, you have never been taken to the synagogue. You are in the limbo where little children are – ”
“Little children!” she echoed, in a tenderly pathetic tone.
“As you are on the books of the police, a cipher outside the pale of social beings,” the priest went on, unmoved. “If love, seen as it swept past, led you to believe three months since that you were then born, you must feel that since that day you have been really an infant. You must, therefore, be led as if you were a child; you must be completely changed, and I will undertake to make you unrecognizable. To begin with, you must forget Lucien.”
The words crushed the poor girl’s heart; she raised her eyes to the priest and shook her head; she could not speak, finding the executioner in the deliverer again.
“At any rate, you must give up seeing him,” he went on. “I will take you to a religious house where young girls of the best families are educated; there you will become a Catholic, you will be trained in the practice of Christian exercises, you will be taught religion. You may come out an accomplished young lady, chaste, pure, well brought up, if – ” The man lifted up a finger and paused.
“If,” he went on, “you feel brave enough to leave the ‘Torpille’ behind you here.”
“Ah!” cried the poor thing, to whom each word had been like a note of some melody to which the gates of Paradise were slowly opening. “Ah! if it were possible to shed all my blood here and have it renewed!”
“Listen to me.”
She was silent.
“Your future fate depends on your power of forgetting. Think of the extent to which you pledge yourself. A word, a gesture, which betrays La Torpille will kill Lucien’s wife. A word murmured in a dream, an involuntary thought, an immodest glance, a gesture of impatience, a reminiscence of dissipation, an omission, a shake of the head that might reveal what you know, or what is known about you for your woes – ”
“Yes, yes, Father,” said the girl, with the exaltation of a saint. “To walk in shoes of red-hot iron and smile, to live in a pair of stays set with nails and maintain the grace of a dancer, to eat bread salted with ashes, to drink wormwood, – all will be sweet and easy!”
She fell again on her knees, she kissed the priest’s shoes, she melted into tears that wetted them, she clasped his knees, and clung to them, murmuring foolish words as she wept for joy. Her long and beautiful light hair waved to the ground, a sort of carpet under the feet of the celestial messenger, whom she saw as gloomy and hard as ever when she lifted herself up and looked at him.
“What have I done to offend you?” cried she, quite frightened. “I have heard of a woman, such as I am, who washed the feet of Jesus with perfumes. Alas! virtue has made me so poor that I have nothing but tears to offer you.”
“Have you not understood?” he answered, in a cruel voice. “I tell you, you must be able to come out of the house to which I shall take you so completely changed, physically and morally, that no man or woman you have ever known will be able to call you ‘Esther’ and make you look round. Yesterday your love could not give you strength enough so completely to bury the prostitute that she could never reappear; and again to-day she revives in adoration which is due to none but God.”
“Was it not He who sent you to me?” said she.
“If during the course of your education you should even see Lucien, all would be lost,” he went on; “remember that.”
“Who will comfort him?” said she.
“What was it that you comforted him for?” asked the priest, in a tone in which, for the first time during this scene, there was a nervous quaver.
“I do not know; he was often sad when he came.”
“Sad!” said the priest. “Did he tell you why?”
“Never,” answered she.
“He was sad at loving such a girl as you!” exclaimed he.
“Alas! and well he might be,” said she, with deep humility. “I am the most despicable creature of my sex, and I could find favor in his eyes only by the greatness of my love.”
“That love must give you the courage to obey me blindly. If I were to take you straight from hence to the house where you are to be educated, everybody here would tell Lucien that you had gone away to-day, Sunday, with a priest; he might follow in your tracks. In the course of a week, the portress, not seeing me again, might suppose me to be what I am not. So, one evening – this day week – at seven o’clock, go out quietly and get into a cab that will be waiting for you at the bottom of the Rue des Frondeurs. During this week avoid Lucien, find excuses, have him sent from the door, and if he should come in, go up to some friend’s room. I shall know if you have seen him, and in that event all will be at an end. I shall not even come back. These eight days you will need to make up some suitable clothing and to hide your look of a prostitute,” said he, laying a purse on the chimney-shelf. “There is something in your manner, in your clothes – something indefinable which is well known to Parisians, and proclaims you what you are. Have you never met in the streets or on the Boulevards a modest and virtuous girl walking with her mother?”
“Oh yes, to my sorrow! The sight of a mother and daughter is one of our most cruel punishments; it arouses the remorse that lurks in the innermost folds of our hearts, and that is consuming us. – I know too well all I lack.”
“Well, then, you know how you should look next Sunday,” said the priest, rising.
“Oh!” said she, “teach me one real prayer before you go, that I may pray to God.”
It was a touching thing to see the priest making this girl repeat Ave Maria and Paternoster in French.
“That is very fine!” said Esther, when she had repeated these two grand and universal utterances of the Catholic faith without making a mistake.
“What is your name?” she asked the priest when he took leave of her.
“Carlos Herrera; I am a Spaniard banished from my country.”
Esther took his hand and kissed it. She was no longer the courtesan; she was an angel rising after a fall.
In
