A Harlot High and Low

A HARLOT HIGH AND LOW

Honoré de Balzac was born at Tours in 1799, the son of a civil servant. He spent nearly six years as a boarder in a Vendôme school, then went to live in Paris, working as a lawyer’s clerk then as a hack-writer. Between 1820 and 1824 he wrote a number of novels under various pseudonyms, many of them in collaboration, after which he unsuccessfully tried his luck at publishing, printing and type-founding. At the age of thirty, heavily in debt, he returned to literature with a dedicated fury and wrote the first novel to appear under his own name, The Chouans. During the next twenty years he wrote about ninety novels and shorter stories, among them many masterpieces, to which he gave the comprehensive title The Human Comedy. He died in 1850, a few months after his marriage to Evelina Hanska, the Polish countess with whom he had maintained amorous relations for eighteen years.

Rayner Heppenstall was born in Yorkshire in 1911 and was educated locally and in Calais and Strasbourg. He was the author of eight novels, some verse, much criticism, three volumes of reminiscences, four of French criminal history and two of the Newgate Calendar. Work in translation has included Chateaubriand’s Atala and René and, in collaboration with Lindy Foord, his daughter, Impressions of Africa by Raymond Roussel. He also translated René Floriot’s book on Errors of Justice in the French Courts. During the war he served from 1940 until 1945 in the Royal Field Artillery. He resigned from the B.B.C. in 1967 where he had worked for more than twenty years as a writer-producer in the Features Department and for a short time in the Drama Department. He died in 1981, leaving a wife, two children and five grandchildren.

Honoré de Balzac

A HARLOT

HIGH AND LOW

(Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes)

TRANSLATED AND

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

RAYNER HEPPENSTALL

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Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes first published 1839–47

This edition published in Penguin Classics 1970

24

Translation and Introduction copyright © Rayner Heppenstall, 1970

All rights reserved

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 9781101491959

Introduction

IT is, I fancy, generally known that characters from one Balzac novel are likely to reappear in others. The editor of the Classiques Garnier edition lists forty-four characters in the present volume who may also be found elsewhere. Many of them are quite unimportant to the action, while the juvenile lead, Lucien Chardon, dit de Rubempré, has been met with only once before and will never be seen again for the best of reasons. The other novel of which he is the hero is Illusions perdues, and to that novel this one may, to that extent, be considered a sequel, though within the large framework of Balzac’s Comédie humaine the earlier novel is classed as one of the ‘Scenes of Provincial Life’ and the present volume as one of the ‘Scenes of Parisian Life’, a somewhat arbitrary distinction, since much of the action of Illusions perdues takes place in Paris.

In it, we find Lucien Chardon, a young man of modest origins but with some claim to nobility (and to the name ‘de Rubempré’) on his mother’s side, a poet and vain of his looks and determined to put them to use, in the southern town of Angoulême. Taken up by a local grande dame, he goes to Paris, sets foot in the literary world but sinks to the lowest depths of journalism, leaves his protectress and becomes the lover of a woman of the town, Coralie, who dies, and returns to the provinces, not merely dejected but shamed by a piece of financial trickery which has got his amiable brother-in-law into trouble. Towards the end of the book, he sets off one morning to drown himself in the Charente, but meets a Spanish priest on a diplomatic mission, who at once takes a fancy to the young man and promises him a great future. Lucien gets into the priest’s carriage, and they drive on towards Paris, Lucien’s sister presently receiving a letter from him which encloses money and says that she mustn’t worry. Lucien is all right, though he feels somewhat enslaved.

The date at the end of Illusions perdues is the late summer or early autumn of 1823. The present novel begins early the next year. If the reader wished, he might now simply read on. In the first chapter, he would be duly mystified by the powerfully built man in the domino, but so he would if he already knew Illusions perdues. If, on the other hand, he had previously read Illusions perdues, he would know that group of horrible journalists. Even an acquaintance with what is probably Balzac’s best-known novel, Le Père Goriot, might bring back memories of a young man called Rastignac at Ma Vauquer’s. Rastignac’s brief exchange with the man in the domino might, indeed, tell the reader most of what is presently to be revealed about the Spanish priest. Rastignac, it may be noted, recurs in more of Balzac’s novels than any other single character. He is said to have been based on the leading politician, Louis-Adolphe Thiers. However, that is a matter we don’t need to bother our heads with here.

In any important sense, it is only in connection with Lucien de Rubempré that we should think of Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes as a sequel to Illusions perdues. About the supposed Spanish priest, who in the end turns out to be the true protagonist of the novel, we might learn more from Le Père Goriot but do not in fact need to know more than the present volume tells us, though, if we cared to study him in depth, there is at the end of Illusions perdues a brief passage about him which has become very famous.