I had trouble with the word ‘police’ itself, more often meaning police work or police methods than a simple collectivity of policemen, but that needn’t bother the reader.

Nor, I hope, need that classification of the types of harlotry, that pornotypology, which so occupied writers in Balzac’s time. It was the simplest and most general word of all, ‘fille’, which gave me most trouble. We have no word which may equally mean a common prostitute, a serving woman, in certain contexts a nun, and at the same time a daughter of even the most respectable or noble family, and it is with the large general category of ‘les filles’ that Balzac’s sociology and psychology are concerned. His generalizations are all about what ‘les filles’ think, feel and do, not with the possibly more specific thoughts, emotions and actions of ‘courtisanes’, ‘lorettes’, ‘rats’ and ‘filles soumises’, let alone with those of little seamstresses or grisettes. The cruellest deed ever performed by Vautrin was, I feel sure, suggested to Balzac’s mind by the simple linguistic fact that a ‘fille’ was also a daughter and that nothing renders a man so vulnerable as a cherished daughter, who may be turned overnight into a fille publique. The same thing might occur in an English novel, but the language itself would not bring this about.

The totally inescapable snag was more specific, and there was nothing my conscience would let me do to conceal it. While I was known to be translating this book, a question I was asked by both French and knowledgeable English admirers of Balzac was what I proposed to do about Esther’s nickname. The reader would not have been long in finding out, and I fancy he might have been jolted. The English translator of Félicien Marceau’s still-quite-recent book on the world of Balzac has, I see, let the name stand in French as ‘ la Torpille’. I have been bolder. I have allowed Esther to be referred to as ‘the Torpedo’, fully aware that this lends her associations we might nowadays think more characteristic of some blonde bombshell, Esther being neither a bombshell nor (except on an early page, through Balzac’s forgetfulness) blonde. The word‘torpille’ is French for a numb-fish, cramp-fish or electric ray (not to be confused with the sting ray). ‘Torpedo’ was the Latin word for this fish. When moored or floating mines were devised as an instrument of naval warfare, we and the French both named them after it. You touched them and got a shock. The French and ourselves now both reserve the designation ‘ torpille’ or ‘torpedo’ to the self-propelled weapon originally called a ‘torpille locomotrice’ or ‘locomotive torpedo’. Neither we nor they now think of a moored or floating mine as a torpedo. The word ‘torpille’, it is true, may still be used in French for a numb-fish, cramp-fish or electric ray, but the fact seems to be unknown to most Frenchmen, except perhaps on the Mediterranean. I have certainly found it to be unknown to a university-educated young Breton. The fish itself is, I dare say, less common in our waters.

RAYNER HEPPENSTALL

Contents

PART ONE

ESTHER’S HAPPIEST DAYS

PART TWO

WHAT LOVE MAY COST AN OLD MAN

PART THREE

WHERE EVIL WAYS LEAD

PART FOUR

THE LAST INCARNATION OF VAUTRIN

PART ONE

ESTHER’S HAPPIEST DAYS

A view of the Opera ball

IN 1824, at the last Opera ball, a number of maskers were taken with the good looks of a young man walking about the corridors and the crush-room, with the air of somebody waiting for a woman kept at home by unforeseen circumstances. The meaning of this way of moving about, by turns indolent and hurried, is clear only to old ladies and confirmed loungers. In that enormous meeting-place, the crowd pays little attention to the crowd, people are only concerned with their own affairs, even idleness is somehow preoccupied. The young dandy was so engrossed by his own uneasy quest that he did not notice the success he was having: the jocularly admiring exclamations of some maskers, the solemn questioning of others, the biting witticisms and jeers, the sweet words, went all unheard, all unseen, by him. Though by appearance one of those exceptional people who go to the Opera ball with the idea of starting an adventure, which they expect as one might have expected a lucky number at roulette in Fras-cati’s time, he seemed complacently sure of what the evening held in store for him; was no doubt the hero in one of those mysterious little plays for three characters which are the whole life of an Opera fancy-dress ball, but which only those with parts in them know of; so that to oung women who come only to be able to say they’ve seen it, to country cousins, inexperienced young men and foreigners, the Opera at such times must appear to be simply the court of boredom and fatigue. To them, this black, creeping, hurried crowd, coming, going, twisting and turning, returning, climbing, descending, like ants on a woodpile, is no more comprehensible than the stock exchange to a peasant from Brittany who never heard of the Great Book of the Public Debt. With rare exceptions, in Paris, the men are not masked: a man in a domino looks ridiculous. This shows the national genius. People who wish to hide their happiness may set out for the Opera ball but fail to arrive, while the maskers absolutely forced to go in soon leave. A particularly amusing spectacle, from the moment the ball starts, is that of the flood of those escaping and those wishing to go in jammed at the door. The men in masks are thus either jealous husbands who have come to spy on their wives, or husbands with a good reason not to be spied on, both situations equally laughable.