Balzac's Lives by Peter Brooks

Author:Peter Brooks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2020-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

Nucingen vs. Collin in Dubious Battle

The second part of Harlot, subtitled “How Much Love Costs Old Men,” follows the shadowy and sordid battle between Collin’s and Nucingen’s agents in almost too great detail. A range of characters from the fringes of society (some from Balzac’s earlier novel, A Murky Business [Une ténébreuse affaire]), Contenson, Corentin, Peyrade, shady types capable of multiple disguises, enter the story as Collin tantalizes and leads on his prey, Nucingen. He plans to make up the million francs in several installments. He has Esther’s maid promise the banker a night with her mistress for 30,000 francs, only to produce instead Lucien’s blue-eyed, blond Englishwoman, not at all what Nucingen wants. Esther is said to be hiding from the law because she is deeply in debt. Another rendezvous, arranged for 100,000 francs, brings Esther and Nucingen together, but she postpones sex with him, and in the morning a gang of thugs, backed up by gendarmes, comes to arrest Esther for the feigned debt of 300,000 francs. Nucingen is obliged to come up with the sum (plus expenses) to keep Esther out of prison. Collin’s inventive schemes continue. Nucingen is persuaded to purchase Esther a town house and to furnish it sumptuously, with the promise that as soon as she moves there, she will be his.

When Collin divines Esther’s suicidal intentions, he rebukes her for her fainthearted love of Lucien, unlike his own: “I crowned him king, my Lucien! You could rivet me for the rest of my days back to my old chain, I think I could be peaceful still in saying to myself: ‘He is at the ball, he is at court.’ My soul and my thought would triumph while my carcass was in the hands of the cops! You’re only a miserable female, you love like a female!” (P 207/P 6:613) Esther, stung by these words, sends Nucingen another letter in which she signs herself: “Your pleasure machine.” She emerges as an exceptional figure even among Balzac’s remarkable cast of prostitutes. As the moment of her sacrifice approaches, she lives with a kind of double consciousness, holding in herself the ideal of her pure love for Lucien at the same moment she expresses contempt for “the infamous and odious role played by the body in the presence of the soul.” At once “spectator and actor, judge and accused,” she realizes the myth found in Arabian tales of the sublime being hidden in a degraded envelope. (P 239/P 6:643) She lives with full, ironic awareness of who she wants to be and what she is forced to be.

Meanwhile, Nucingen’s and Collin’s agents circle round each other, disguised variously as mulattoes, English nabobs, justices of the peace, this last one of Collin’s own impersonations. (There is a love of disguise for its own sake on Balzac’s part: he delights in detailing the costumes and manners adopted by his characters to simulate other kinds of characters, as if his own acts of creation were proliferating.) Contenson succeeds in

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