“As for you, after rising for a time to the level of a sphere of elegance, you will presently sink back to your former life, for you have not in you the strength bestowed by a good education to enable you to resist vice and think of the future.  You would no more be able to break with the women of your own class than you have broken with the men who shamed you at the opera this morning.  Lucien’s true friends, alarmed by his passion for you, have dogged his steps and know all.  Filled with horror, they have sent me to you to sound your views and decide your fate; but though they are powerful enough to clear a stumbling-stone out of the young man’s way, they are merciful.  Understand this, child:  a girl whom Lucien loves has claims on their regard, as a true Christian worships the slough on which, by chance, the divine light falls.  I came to be the instrument of a beneficent purpose;—­still, if I had found you utterly reprobate, armed with effrontery and astuteness, corrupt to the marrow, deaf to the voice of repentance, I should have abandoned you to their wrath.

“The release, civil and political, which it is so hard to win, which the police is so right to withhold for a time in the interests of society, and which I heard you long for with all the ardor of true repentance—­is here,” said the priest, taking an official-looking paper out of his belt.  “You were seen yesterday, this letter of release is dated to-day.  You see how powerful the people are who take an interest in Lucien.”

At the sight of this document Esther was so ingenuously overcome by the convulsive agitation produced by unlooked-for joy, that a fixed smile parted her lips, like that of a crazy creature.  The priest paused, looking at the girl to see whether, when once she had lost the horrible strength which corrupt natures find in corruption itself, and was thrown back on her frail and delicate primitive nature, she could endure so much excitement.  If she had been a deceitful courtesan, Esther would have acted a part; but now that she was innocent and herself once more, she might perhaps die, as a blind man cured may lose his sight again if he is exposed to too bright a light.  At this moment this man looked into the very depths of human nature, but his calmness was terrible in its rigidity; a cold alp, snow-bound and near to heaven, impenetrable and frowning, with flanks of granite, and yet beneficent.

Such women are essentially impressionable beings, passing without reason from the most idiotic distrust to absolute confidence.  In this respect they are lower than animals.  Extreme in everything—­in their joy and despair, in their religion and irreligion—­they would almost all go mad if they were not decimated by the mortality peculiar to their class, and if happy chances did not lift one now and then from the slough in which they dwell.  To understand the very depths of the wretchedness of this horrible existence, one must know how far in madness a creature can go without