Esther had ceased to listen to Europe-Eugenie-Prudence Servien.  The will of a man gifted with the genius of corruption had thrown Esther back into the mud with as much force as he had used to drag her out of it.

Those who know love in its infinitude know that those who do not accept its virtues do not experience its pleasures.  Since the scene in the den in the Rue de Langlade, Esther had utterly forgotten her former existence.  She had since lived very virtuously, cloistered by her passion.  Hence, to avoid any obstacle, the skilful fiend had been clever enough to lay such a train that the poor girl, prompted by her devotion, had merely to utter her consent to swindling actions already done, or on the point of accomplishment.  This subtlety, revealing the mastery of the tempter, also characterized the methods by which he had subjugated Lucien.  He created a terrible situation, dug a mine, filled it with powder, and at the critical moment said to his accomplice, “You have only to nod, and the whole will explode!”

Esther of old, knowing only the morality peculiar to courtesans, thought all these attentions so natural, that she measured her rivals only by what they could get men to spend on them.  Ruined fortunes are the conduct-stripes of these creatures.  Carlos, in counting on Esther’s memory, had not calculated wrongly.

These tricks of warfare, these stratagems employed a thousand times, not only by these women, but by spendthrifts too, did not disturb Esther’s mind.  She felt nothing but her personal degradation; she loved Lucien, she was to be the Baron de Nucingen’s mistress “by appointment”; this was all she thought of.  The supposed Spaniard might absorb the earnest-money, Lucien might build up his fortune with the stones of her tomb, a single night of pleasure might cost the old banker so many thousand-franc notes more or less, Europe might extract a few hundred thousand francs by more or less ingenious trickery, —­none of these things troubled the enamored girl; this alone was the canker that ate into her heart.  For five years she had looked upon herself as being as white as an angel.  She loved, she was happy, she had never committed the smallest infidelity.  This beautiful pure love was now to be defiled.

There was, in her mind, no conscious contrasting of her happy isolated past and her foul future life.  It was neither interest nor sentiment that moved her, only an indefinable and all powerful feeling that she had been white and was now black, pure and was now impure, noble and was now ignoble.  Desiring to be the ermine, moral taint seemed to her unendurable.  And when the Baron’s passion had threatened her, she had really thought of throwing herself out of the window.  In short, she loved Lucien wholly, and as women very rarely love a man.  Women who say they love, who often think they love best, dance, waltz, and flirt with other men, dress for the world, and look for a harvest of concupiscent glances; but Esther, without any sacrifice, had achieved miracles of true love.  She had loved Lucien for six years as actresses love and courtesans—­women who, having rolled in mire and impurity, thirst for something noble, for the self-devotion of true love, and who practice exclusiveness—­the only word for an idea so little known in real life.