‘Oh, he suspected what I might do!’

‘No,’ he replied, ‘it isn’t your death but your life which gives rise to concern. Come, explain what the relations are between you.’

‘In one word,’ said she.

The poor wench trembled at the ecclesiastic’s abrupt tone, but as a woman to whom gross incivility has long been without surprise.

‘Lucien is Lucien,’ she continued, ‘the handsomest young man, and the best of living beings; but if you know him, my love must seem to you only natural. I met him by chance, three months ago, at the Porte Saint Martin where I had gone on my day out; for we had a free day a week at Madame Mey-nardie’s where I was. Next day, you will easily understand that I broke away without permission. Love had entered my heart, and had so changed me that, returning from the theatre, I no longer recognized myself: I filled myself with horror. Lucien never knew. Instead of telling him the house I was in, I gave him the address of this lodging where a friend of mine was then living, who was kind enough to give it up to me. I give you my sacred word…’

‘You must not swear.’

‘Is it swearing to give one’s sacred word? Well, since that day I have worked in this room, like a madwoman, making shirts at twenty-eight sous on order, so as to live by honest work. For a month I lived on nothing but potatoes, to remain good and worthy of Lucien, who loves me and respects me as the most virtuous of the virtuous. I made my declaration in form to the Police, in order to resume my rights, and I am under supervision for two years. They, who are so prompt to inscribe you on the roll of infamy, show an extreme reluctance to strike your name out. All I asked heaven was to protect my resolution. I shall be nineteen in April: at that age things are easier. To me, it seems that I was only born three months ago… I prayed to God every morning, and begged Him to grant that Lucien should never learn what my life had been. I bought the Virgin you see there; I prayed to her in my own way, seeing that I don’t know any prayers; I can neither read nor write, I have never been into a church, I’ve never seen God except in processions, out of curiosity.’

‘‘And what do you say to the Virgin?’

‘I speak to her as I speak to Lucien, with those sudden impulses of the soul which make him weep.’

‘Ah,he weeps?’

‘With joy,’ she added quickly. ‘Poor lamb! we understand each other so well that it is only a single soul we share! He’s so kind, so affectionate, so gentle in heart, mind and manners…! He says he’s a poet, I say he’s God… Forgive me! but, you priests, you don’t know what love is. And then only those like me can know men well enough to appreciate a Lucien. A Lucien, I tell you, is as rare as a woman without sin; when you meet one, you can’t any longer love anybody but him: that’s all. But a man like that needs somebody like him. So I wanted to be worthy to be loved by my Lucien. That led to my downfall. Yesterday, at the Opera, I was recognized by some young men who’ve got no more heart than there is pity in tigers; I could still get on with a tiger! The veil of innocence I was wearing fell; their laughter rent head and heart. Don’t think you have saved me, I shall die of grief.’ ‘Your veil of innocence?…’ said the priest, ‘so you treated Lucien with, shall we say, a degree of severity?’

‘Oh, father, you who know him, how could you ask me such a question?’ she replied with a smile that was radiant, superb. ‘A God can’t be resisted.’

‘Do not blaspheme,’ said the ecclesiastic in a gentle voice. ‘Nobody can be like God; that kind of exaggeration ill becomes real love, it wasn’t a pure, true love you had for your idol. If you had undergone the change you lay claim to, you would have acquired the virtues of youth, you would have known the delights of chastity, the delicacy of shame, those two glories of a young girl. You are not in love.’

Esther made a frightened movement which did not escape the priest, but which in no way affected his imperturbability as confessor.

‘Yes, you love him for your own sake and not for his, for the temporal pleasures you are addicted to, not for love itself; gaining a hold on him thus, you did not display that holy trembling which inspires a being upon whom God has set the seal of the most adorable perfections: did you think how you degraded him with your past impurity, that you were corrupting a child with those fearful delights which gave you your nickname, with its infamous glory? You were inconsistent with yourself and your short-lived passion…’

‘Short-lived!’ she repeated raising her eyes.

‘How else are we to describe a love which is not eternal, which does not unite us, even to the Christian hereafter, with the one we love?’

‘Ah, I want to be a Catholic!’ she cried out in a violent, toneless voice that would have obtained Our Saviour’s grace.

‘Could a girl who received the baptism neither of the Church nor of secular knowledge, who can neither read nor write, nor pray, who can’t take a step in the street without the paving stones rising up to accuse her, remarkable only for the fugitive gift of a beauty which illness will perhaps destroy tomorrow; could so debased, degraded a creature, knowing her degradation… (unknowing and less loving, you might have been more readily excused…), could the eventual prey of suicide and damnation be a fit wife for Lucien de Rubempré?’

Each phrase was a dagger-thrust which went home. At each phrase, the despairing girl’s increased sobs and abundant tears attested the force with which light penetrated at once into her intelligence as pure as that of a savage, her soul at last awakened, her nature upon which depravity had deposited a layer of muddy ice, now melting in the sun of faith.

‘Why am I not dead!’ was the sole idea she expressed amid the torrent of ideas which streamed destructively through her brain.

‘My daughter,’ said the terrible judge, ‘there is a love un-confessed before men, which yet, confided to the angels, is welcomed by them with smiles of happiness.’

‘What love?’

‘The love which is without hope, when it is the inspiration of a life, when that life is governed by its devotion, when every action is ennobled by the thought of reaching an ideal perfection. Yes, the angels approve such a love; it leads to the knowledge of God. To perfect oneself unceasingly in order to be worthy of the loved one, to make a thousand hidden sacrifices for him, adore him from a distance, give one’s blood drop by drop, for him to destroy all self-love, all pride and anger, to spare him even the knowledge of whatever pangs of jealousy he may cause, give him whatever he wishes, even to our own detriment, love what he loves, to keep one’s face turned towards him and to follow him without him knowing; religion would have forgiven you such a love, it offended against neither human nor divine law, and led to other courses than that of your filthy pleasures.’

Upon hearing this horrible decree expressed by one word (and what a word? and pronounced in what a tone?) Esther was understandably tormented by suspicion.