Alone in her lodge, the caretaker wished she had been able to go up to the fourth floor,. where Mademoiselle Esther lodged. Just as she decided to leave her lodge in charge of the tinsmith’s son, the said lodge being a mere recess in the wall off the tinsmith’s landing, a cab arrived. A man enveloped from head to foot in a cloak, with the evident intention of concealing his costume and station, got out and asked for Mademoiselle Esther. This wholly reassured the caretaker, to whom it fully explained the silence and tranquillity of the recluse. As the visitor climbed the steps above her lodge, the caretaker noticed silver buckles on his shoes and fancied she had glimpsed the black fringe of the sash about a cassock; she went down and asked the cabman, who replied without speaking, in a manner the caretaker understood. The priest knocked, received no answer, heard a quiet sighing from within, and shouldered the door open with a vigour doubtless to be attributed to the power of Christian charity, though in another man it might have seemed mere habit. He hurried through to the second room, and there saw, before a Virgin in coloured plaster, poor Esther not so much kneeling as collapsed in a heap with hands together. The ‘little milliner’ was dying. Cinders in the grate told the story of that dreadful morning. The hood and mantle of the domino lay on the floor. The bed had not been slept in. The poor creature, stricken to the heart with a mortal wound, had without doubt arranged all on her return from the Opera. The wick of a candle, set hard in the sconce of a candlestick, showed how completely Esther had been absorbed in her last reflections. A handkerchief soaked with tears proved the sincerity of the despair of this Mary Magdalene, whose classic pose was that of the harlot without religion. This final repentance made the priest smile. Inexpert at dying, Esther had left the inner door open without calculating that the air in the two rooms needed a greater quantity of coal to make it unbreathable; the fumes had merely dazed her; colder air from the staircase now brought her slowly back to an appreciation of her woes. The priest remained standing, lost in gloomy meditation, untouched by the divine beauty of the young prostitute, watching her first movements as though it had been some animal. His eyes travelled from the barely animate body to objects in the room with apparent indifference. He studied the furnishings of this room, whose cold, worn red tiles were barely hidden by a wretched, threadbare carpet. An old-fashioned cot in painted wood, surrounded by curtains of yellow-brown calico with a dull-red rose-pattern; a single armchair and two painted wooden chairs, covered with the same calico, with which also the windows were curtained; a grey wallpaper speckled with flowers, blackened and greasy with age; a mahogany worktable; the fireplace cluttered with kitchen utensils of the cheapest kind, two large bundles of firewood broken apart, a stone mantelpiece on which a few glass ornaments stood, with bits of jewellery and scissors; a card of dirty thread, white, scented gloves, a delicious hat propped on the water jug, a Ternaux shawl stuffing a crack in the window, an elegant dress hanging on a nail, a little, uncomfortable sofa without cushions; broken clogs and pretty shoes, laced half-boots fit for a queen, china plates chipped and cracked, the remains of a meal among cutlery of German nickel, the silverware of the Parisian poor; a basket full of potatoes and dirty linen, a clean gauze bonnet on top; a hideous wardrobe, its glass doors open, empty, on its shelves a selection of pawnshop tickets: such was the array of joyous and dismal, wretched and expensive objects which met the eye. These luxuries among the broken fragments, this household so appropriate to the Bohemian life of the limp, half-dressed wench sunk down like a horse dead in its harness, pinned by a broken shaft, caught in the reins, did this curious spectacle give the priest pause? Did he say to himself that at any rate that lost creature was acting disinterestedly to love a rich young man and at the same time live in such poverty? Did he ascribe the disorder in the room to a disordered life? Was his feeling one of pity, or of fear? Was his charity stirred? Whoever had seen him, arms folded, forehead creased with thought, tight-lipped, eye scathing, would have thought him possessed by contradictory impulses and thoughts in which a gloomy distaste and baleful intentions predominated. He was, certainly, insensible to the pretty, round breasts half-flattened against the knees and the delicious forms of a crouching Venus revealed beneath the black material of the skirt, so tensely was the dying woman coiled upon herself; the abandon of this head, which, seen from behind, displayed its white, supple, vulnerable nape, the beautiful shoulders of a nature boldly developed, did not move him; he did not raise Esther up, he did not seem to hear the heartbreaking inhalations by which the return to life was accomplished: it needed a dreadful sob and the terrifying look which the girl cast upon him before he deigned to raise her and carry her to the bed with an ease which betrayed prodigious strength.

‘Lucien!’ she murmured.

‘Love returns, the woman is not far behind,’ said the priest with a sort of bitterness.

The victim of Parisian depravity then perceived her rescuer’s style of dress, and said, with the smile of a child grasping at something long desired: ‘I shan’t die, then, without being reconciled to heaven!’

‘You will be able to expiate your faults,’ said the priest, bathing her forehead with water and holding under her nose a vinegar bottle he found in a corner.

‘I feel life not leaving but flowing back into me,’ she said after receiving the priest’s attentions and expressing her gratitude to him with expressions of unaffected simplicity.

This engaging pantomime, which the Graces themselves, bent on pleasing, could scarcely have bettered, might have been thought at least partly to explain the girl’s curious nickname.

‘Do you feel better?’ asked the ecclesiastic, giving her a glass of sugar and water to drink.

The man seemed to know his way about households of this kind, he knew where everything was. He had made himself at home. This gift of being everywhere at home belongs only to kings, light women and thieves.

A rat’s confession

‘WHEN you have fully recovered,’ the singular priest went on after a pause, ‘you will tell me the reasons which led you to commit this latest crime, your attempt at suicide.’

‘My story is a simple one, father,’ she replied. ‘Three months ago, I was living in the disorder to which I was born. I was the lowest and most infamous of creatures, now I am only the unhappiest. Permit me to say nothing about my poor mother, who died murdered…’

‘By a captain, in a house of ill fame,’ said the priest interrupting his penitent… ‘I know your origins, and know that if one of your sex may ever be excused for leading a life of shame, it is you, who lacked good example.’

‘Alas! I was not baptised, and haven’t received the teachings of any religion.’

‘Then everything can be put right,’ the priest went on, ‘so long as your faith, your repentance, are sincere and without reservation.’

‘Lucien and God fill my heart,’ said she with a touching ingenuousness.

‘You might have said God and Lucien,’ the priest replied smiling. ‘You remind me of the object of my visit. Omit nothing concerning this young man.’

‘You come on his behalf?’ she asked with a loving expression which would have melted the heart of any other priest.