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He seemed in a hurry to sweep everything away, down to the ruins of the old tower built by a Vandeuvres under Philip Augustus. He was mad for ruin and thought it a great thing to leave the last golden bezants of his coat of arms in the grasp of this courtesan, whom the world of Paris desired.
Just as a courtesan divides her favours among many men, so that no one of her friends is without some proof of her affection, so let him who wishes his benefits to be prized consider how he may at the same time gratify many men, and nevertheless give each one of them some especial mark of favour to distinguish him from the rest.
Before the world she displayed the attractive combination of modest and pensive innocence, of irreproachable propriety, with a bright humor enhanced by the suppleness, the grace and softness of the Creole; but in a tete-a-tete she would outdo any courtesan; she was audacious, amusing, and full of original inventiveness.
"There is a woman whose career is, I believe, at this moment revived into fresh notoriety as the heroine of some drama on the stage of Paris a woman who, when years paled her fame and reft her spoils, as a courtesan renowned for the fools she had beggared, for the young hearts she had corrupted, sought plunder still by crimes, to which law is less lenient; charged with swindling, with fraud, with forgery, and at last more than suspected as a practised poisoner, she escaped by suicide the judgment of human tribunals."
"But, little goose," said Lucien, "did you not understand that my life is at stake?" At these words, which he chose on purpose, Esther started up like a wild animal, her hair fell, tumbling about her excited face like wreaths of foliage. She looked steadily at Lucien. "Your life?" she cried, throwing up her arms, and letting them drop with a gesture known only to a courtesan in peril.
But to love, with our heads up, in defiance of law; to die for the idol we have chosen, with the sheets of our bed for a shroud; to lay earth and heaven at his feet, robbing the Almighty of his right to make a god, and never to betray that man, never, never, even for virtue's sake, for, to refuse him anything in the name of duty is to devote ourselves to something that is not he, and let that something be a man or an idea, it is betrayal all the same, these are heights to which common women cannot attain; they know but two matter-of-fact ways; the great high-road of virtue, or the muddy path of the courtesan."
Determined to become his mistress, she desired to fall in the guise of a woman madly in love, and not as an ordinary courtesan. With any other man than Vaudrey, she would, perhaps, have yielded more quickly. But she acted with Vaudrey as formerly she had done with Rosas.
The author has sought his end by means of a fictitious autobiography. This was of course. No unusual faculty in the selection of methods was necessary to the choice; for only in the autobiographical form could the inner life of a courtesan be so revealed as to present a truthful and living picture of her soul's experience.
Like Montespan, also a courtesan of high order, she often went in these dark days to cast a loving look upon the solitary park in the maze of the Trianon. Yet she was particularly happy at Lucienne. I have compared her to Manon Lescaut, and I believe her to have been also a sister to Ganesin. All three were destroyed by passion.
Then the virtuous wife would be a Homeric meal, flesh laid on hot cinders. The courtesan, on the contrary, is a dish by Careme, with its condiments, spices, and elegant arrangement. The Baroness could not did not know how to serve up her fair bosom in a lordly dish of lace, after the manner of Madame Marneffe. She knew nothing of the secrets of certain attitudes.