A Harlot High and Low

Continuing where Lost Illusions had left off, this novel follows Lucien as he rebounds into Parisian society with the help of a certain diabolical ally from Père Goriot: crime incarnate Vautrin. Together, the two set out to rebuild Lucien’s status and influence, with Lucien being the shining front-man and Vautrin orchestrating the dirty things that need to be done behind the scenes. All doesn’t go to plan when Lucien falls in love with a courtesan named Esther, who likewise falls for Lucien and becomes her whole world. Lucien’s love heals Esther from her ugly past as a common harlot - but however beautiful their mutual love was, Vautrin’s quest for Lucien’s ascendancy meant that their love came second to pursuing money and status, and Vautrin’s machinations drive the story to some of its most poignant tragedies. Overall, the novel is generous with its poetry around love and its ennoblements, as it is in the sober detailings of ubiquitous corruption and vice. It marks the unofficial end of a realist trilogy that provided closure for some key characters from Père Goriot and Lost Illusions.

Esther is by far the most developed and complex character in the novel, and in so many ways she is the chaotic juxtaposition of all that’s beautiful with all that’s ugly. In the beginning she was abandoned by fate to be a prostitute, and was hardened and tempered by the cruelty of the world around her. When she meets her one true love Lucien, the love in her heart softened all that was hard, and to Lucien, she was as innocent and tender as a maiden. Their love would not last as Vautrin uses Esther to fleece a rich old banker Nucingen in order to finance the exorbitant costs for Lucien’s ascendancy in society. Esther becomes torn between the true love she feels with Lucien and the transactional, harlot sexuality that Nucingen demanded - in short, torn between spiritual salvation and perdition. Just like Dostoevsky writing of the highest heavens and the lowest abysses in The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, Balzac’s Esther showed the same duality and her story is mourning song to innocence, love, and a soul of beauty, both lost and regained.