A Harlot High and Low

The last opera ball of the season, and the whole room turns to look at a beautiful young man who is looking for somebody else. Lucien de Rubempre is back in Paris with money nobody can account for and a Spanish priest at his shoulder, thickset, rolling in his walk, neither Spanish nor a priest, who has decided to make of this boy's life the masterpiece his own could never be. The price is Esther. She loves Lucien with the whole of herself, which is exactly what makes her worth selling, and the buyer is a banker whose money will purchase a name, an estate and a marriage into an old family. Balzac follows the francs down out of the drawing rooms and into the cells beneath the Palais de Justice, where the prisoners speak a slang in which the word for life is grown from the word for dread. Everything in this city converts into money except what the convict feels for the boy, and that is the one thing that brings the whole edifice down.