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Father Goriot

by Honoré de Balzac · English · Gutenberg #1237 · 590,556 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Father Goriot

Author: Honoré de Balzac

Translator: Ellen Marriage


        
Release date: October 6, 2004 [eBook #1237]
                Most recently updated: April 3, 2025

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1237

Credits: Produced by Dagny, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FATHER GORIOT ***

FATHER GORIOT


By Honore De Balzac



Translated by Ellen Marriage




     To the great and illustrious Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, a token
     of admiration for his works and genius.
                                                      DE BALZAC.





FATHER GORIOT


Mme. Vauquer (_nee_ de Conflans) is an elderly person, who for the past
forty years has kept a lodging-house in the Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve,
in the district that lies between the Latin Quarter and the Faubourg
Saint-Marcel. Her house (known in the neighborhood as the _Maison
Vauquer_) receives men and women, old and young, and no word has ever
been breathed against her respectable establishment; but, at the same
time, it must be said that as a matter of fact no young woman has been
under her roof for thirty years, and that if a young man stays there for
any length of time it is a sure sign that his allowance must be of the
slenderest. In 1819, however, the time when this drama opens, there was
an almost penniless young girl among Mme. Vauquer’s boarders.

That word drama has been somewhat discredited of late; it has been
overworked and twisted to strange uses in these days of dolorous
literature; but it must do service again here, not because this story is
dramatic in the restricted sense of the word, but because some tears may
perhaps be shed _intra et extra muros_ before it is over.

Will any one without the walls of Paris understand it? It is open to
doubt. The only audience who could appreciate the results of close
observation, the careful reproduction of minute detail and local color,
are dwellers between the heights of Montrouge and Montmartre, in a vale
of crumbling stucco watered by streams of black mud, a vale of sorrows
which are real and joys too often hollow; but this audience is so
accustomed to terrible sensations, that only some unimaginable and
well-neigh impossible woe could produce any lasting impression there.
Now and again there are tragedies so awful and so grand by reason of the
complication of virtues and vices that bring them about, that egotism
and selfishness are forced to pause and are moved to pity; but the
impression that they receive is like a luscious fruit, soon consumed.
Civilization, like the car of Juggernaut, is scarcely stayed perceptibly
in its progress by a heart less easy to break than the others that lie
in its course; this also is broken, and Civilization continues on her
course triumphant. And you, too, will do the like; you who with this
book in your white hand will sink back among the cushions of your
armchair, and say to yourself, “Perhaps this may amuse me.” You will
read the story of Father Goriot’s secret woes, and, dining thereafter
with an unspoiled appetite, will lay the blame of your insensibility
upon the writer, and accuse him of exaggeration, of writing romances.
Ah! once for all, this drama is neither a fiction nor a romance! _All is
true_,--so true, that every one can discern the elements of the tragedy
in his own house, perhaps in his own heart.

The lodging-house is Mme. Vauquer’s own property. It is still standing
in the lower end of the Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve, just where the road
slopes so sharply down to the Rue de l’Arbalete, that wheeled traffic
seldom passes that way, because it is so stony and steep. This position
is sufficient to account for the silence prevalent in the streets shut
in between the dome of the Pantheon and the dome of the Val-de-Grace,
two conspicuous public buildings which give a yellowish tone to the
landscape and darken the whole district that lies beneath the shadow of
their leaden-hued cupolas.

In that district the pavements are clean and dry, there is neither mud
nor water in the gutters, grass grows in the chinks of the walls. The
most heedless passer-by feels the depressing influences of a place where
the sound of wheels creates a sensation; there is a grim look about the
houses, a suggestion of a jail about those high garden walls. A Parisian
straying into a suburb apparently composed of lodging-houses and public
institutions would see poverty and dullness, old age lying down to die,
and joyous youth condemned to drudgery. It is the ugliest quarter of
Paris, and, it may be added, the least known. But, before all things,
the Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve is like a bronze frame for a picture for
which the mind cannot be too well prepared by the contemplation of sad
hues and sober images. Even so, step by step the daylight decreases,
and the cicerone’s droning voice grows hollower as the traveler descends
into the Catacombs. The comparison holds good! Who shall say which is
more ghastly, the sight of the bleached skulls or of dried-up human
hearts?



The front of the lodging-house is at right angles to the road, and
looks out upon a little garden, so that you see the side of the house
in section, as it were, from the Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve. Beneath the
wall of the house front there lies a channel, a fathom wide, paved with
cobble-stones, and beside it runs a graveled walk bordered by geraniums
and oleanders and pomegranates set in great blue and white glazed
earthenware pots. Access into the graveled walk is afforded by a door,
above which the words MAISON VAUQUER may be read, and beneath, in rather
smaller letters, “_Lodgings for both sexes, etc._”

During the day a glimpse into the garden is easily obtained through a
wicket to which a bell is attached. On the opposite wall, at the further
end of the graveled walk, a green marble arch was painted once upon
a time by a local artist, and in this semblance of a shrine a statue
representing Cupid is installed; a Parisian Cupid, so blistered and
disfigured that he looks like a candidate for one of the adjacent
hospitals, and might suggest an allegory to lovers of symbolism. The
half-obliterated inscription on the pedestal beneath determines the date
of this work of art, for it bears witness to the widespread enthusiasm
felt for Voltaire on his return to Paris in 1777:


              “Whoe’er thou art, thy master see;
               He is, or was, or ought to be.”


At night the wicket gate is replaced by a solid door. The little garden
is no wider than the front of the house; it is shut in between the wall
of the street and the partition wall of the neighboring house. A mantle
of ivy conceals the bricks and attracts the eyes of passers-by to an
effect which is picturesque in Paris, for each of the walls is covered
with trellised vines that yield a scanty dusty crop of fruit, and
furnish besides a subject of conversation for Mme. Vauquer and her
lodgers; every year the widow trembles for her vintage.

A straight path beneath the walls on either side of the garden leads to
a clump of lime-trees at the further end of it; _line_-trees, as Mme.
Vauquer persists in calling them, in spite of the fact that she was a de
Conflans, and regardless of repeated corrections from her lodgers.

The central space between the walls is filled with artichokes and
rows of pyramid fruit-trees, and surrounded by a border of lettuce,
pot-herbs, and parsley. Under the lime-trees there are a few
green-painted garden seats and a wooden table, and hither, during the
dog-days, such of the lodgers as are rich enough to indulge in a cup
of coffee come to take their pleasure, though it is hot enough to roast
eggs even in the shade.

The house itself is three stories high, without counting the attics
under the roof. It is built of rough stone, and covered with the
yellowish stucco that gives a mean appearance to almost every house in
Paris. There are five windows in each story in the front of the house;
all the blinds visible through the small square panes are drawn up awry,
so that the lines are all at cross purposes. At the side of the house
there are but two windows on each floor, and the lowest of all are
adorned with a heavy iron grating.

Behind the house a yard extends for some twenty feet, a space inhabited
by a happy family of pigs, poultry, and rabbits; the wood-shed is
situated on the further side, and on the wall between the wood-shed and
the kitchen window hangs the meat-safe, just above the place where the
sink discharges its greasy streams. The cook sweeps all the refuse
out through a little door into the Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve, and
frequently cleanses the yard with copious supplies of water, under pain
of pestilence.

The house might have been built on purpose for its present uses. Access
is given by a French window to the first room on the ground floor, a
sitting-room which looks out upon the street through the two barred
windows already mentioned. Another door opens out of it into the
dining-room, which is separated from the kitchen by the well of the
staircase, the steps being constructed partly of wood, partly of tiles,
which are colored and beeswaxed. Nothing can be more depressing than
the sight of that sitting-room. The furniture is covered with horse hair
woven in alternate dull and glossy stripes. There is a round table in
the middle, with a purplish-red marble top, on which there stands, by
way of ornament, the inevitable white china tea-service, covered with
a half-effaced gilt network. The floor is sufficiently uneven, the
wainscot rises to elbow height, and the rest of the wall space is
decorated with a varnished paper, on which the principal scenes from
_Telemaque_ are depicted, the various classical personages being
colored. The subject between the two windows is the banquet given by
Calypso to the son of Ulysses, displayed thereon for the admiration of
the boarders, and has furnished jokes these forty years to the young
men who show themselves superior to their position by making fun of the
dinners to which poverty condemns them. The hearth is always so clean
and neat that it is evident that a fire is only kindled there on great
occasions; the stone chimney-piece is adorned by a couple of vases
filled with faded artificial flowers imprisoned under glass shades, on
either side of a bluish marble clock in the very worst taste.

The first room exhales an odor for which there is no name in the
language, and which should be called the _odeur de pension_. The damp
atmosphere sends a chill through you as you breathe it; it has a stuffy,
musty, and rancid quality; it permeates your clothing; after-dinner
scents seem to be mingled in it with smells from the kitchen and
scullery and the reek of a hospital. It might be possible to describe
it if some one should discover a process by which to distil from the
atmosphere all the nauseating elements with which it is charged by the
catarrhal exhalations of every individual lodger, young or old. Yet,
in spite of these stale horrors, the sitting-room is as charming and
as delicately perfumed as a boudoir, when compared with the adjoining
dining-room.

The paneled walls of that apartment were once painted some color, now
a matter of conjecture, for the surface is incrusted with accumulated
layers of grimy deposit, which cover it with fantastic outlines. A
collection of dim-ribbed glass decanters, metal discs with a satin sheen
on them, and piles of blue-edged earthenware plates of Touraine ware
cover the sticky surfaces of the sideboards that line the room. In a
corner stands a box containing a set of numbered pigeon-holes, in which
the lodgers’ table napkins, more or less soiled and stained with wine,
are kept. Here you see that indestructible furniture never met with
elsewhere, which finds its way into lodging-houses much as the wrecks of
our civilization drift into hospitals for incurables. You expect in such
places as these to find the weather-house whence a Capuchin issues on
wet days; you look to find the execrable engravings which spoil your
appetite, framed every one in a black varnished frame, with a gilt
beading round it; you know the sort of tortoise-shell clock-case, inlaid
with brass; the green stove, the Argand lamps, covered with oil and
dust, have met your eyes before. The oilcloth which covers the long
table is so greasy that a waggish _externe_ will write his name on the
surface, using his thumb-nail as a style. The chairs are broken-down
invalids; the wretched little hempen mats slip away from under your
feet without slipping away for good; and finally, the foot-warmers are
miserable wrecks, hingeless, charred, broken away about the holes. It
would be impossible to give an idea of the old, rotten, shaky, cranky,
worm-eaten, halt, maimed, one-eyed, rickety, and ramshackle condition of
the furniture without an exhaustive description, which would delay
the progress of the story to an extent that impatient people would not
pardon. The red tiles of the floor are full of depressions brought about
by scouring and periodical renewings of color. In short, there is
no illusory grace left to the poverty that reigns here; it is dire,
parsimonious, concentrated, threadbare poverty; as yet it has not sunk
into the mire, it is only splashed by it, and though not in rags as yet,
its clothing is ready to drop to pieces.

This apartment is in all its glory at seven o’clock in the morning,
when Mme. Vauquer’s cat appears, announcing the near approach of his
mistress, and jumps upon the sideboards to sniff at the milk in the
bowls, each protected by a plate, while he purrs his morning greeting to
the world. A moment later the widow shows her face; she is tricked out
in a net cap attached to a false front set on awry, and shuffles into
the room in her slipshod fashion. She is an oldish woman, with a bloated
countenance, and a nose like a parrot’s beak set in the middle of
it; her fat little hands (she is as sleek as a church rat) and her
shapeless, slouching figure are in keeping with the room that reeks of
misfortune, where hope is reduced to speculate for the meanest
stakes. Mme. Vauquer alone can breathe that tainted air without being
disheartened by it. Her face is as fresh as a frosty morning in autumn;
there are wrinkles about the eyes that vary in their expression from
the set smile of a ballet-dancer to the dark, suspicious scowl of
a discounter of bills; in short, she is at once the embodiment and
interpretation of her lodging-house, as surely as her lodging-house
implies the existence of its mistress. You can no more imagine the one
without the other, than you can think of a jail without a turnkey. The
unwholesome corpulence of the little woman is produced by the life she
leads, just as typhus fever is bred in the tainted air of a hospital.
The very knitted woolen petticoat that she wears beneath a skirt made
of an old gown, with the wadding protruding through the rents in the
material, is a sort of epitome of the sitting-room, the dining-room,
and the little garden; it discovers the cook, it foreshadows the
lodgers--the picture of the house is completed by the portrait of its
mistress.

Mme. Vauquer at the age of fifty is like all women who “have seen a deal
of trouble.” She has the glassy eyes and innocent air of a trafficker
in flesh and blood, who will wax virtuously indignant to obtain a higher
price for her services, but who is quite ready to betray a Georges or
a Pichegru, if a Georges or a Pichegru were in hiding and still to be
betrayed, or for any other expedient that may alleviate her lot. Still,
“she is a good woman at bottom,” said the lodgers who believed that
the widow was wholly dependent upon the money that they paid her, and
sympathized when they heard her cough and groan like one of themselves.

What had M. Vauquer been? The lady was never very explicit on this head.
How had she lost her money? “Through trouble,” was her answer. He had
treated her badly, had left her nothing but her eyes to cry over his
cruelty, the house she lived in, and the privilege of pitying nobody,
because, so she was wont to say, she herself had been through every
possible misfortune.

Sylvie, the stout cook, hearing her mistress’ shuffling footsteps,
hastened to serve the lodgers’ breakfasts. Beside those who lived in the
house, Mme. Vauquer took boarders who came for their meals; but these
_externes_ usually only came to dinner, for which they paid thirty
francs a month.

At the time when this story begins, the lodging-house contained seven
inmates. The best rooms in the house were on the first story, Mme.
Vauquer herself occupying the least important, while the rest were let
to a Mme. Couture, the widow of a commissary-general in the service of
the Republic. With her lived Victorine Taillefer, a schoolgirl, to whom
she filled the place of mother. These two ladies paid eighteen hundred
francs a year.

The two sets of rooms on the second floor were respectively occupied by
an old man named Poiret and a man of forty or thereabouts, the wearer
of a black wig and dyed whiskers, who gave out that he was a retired
merchant, and was addressed as M. Vautrin. Two of the four rooms on
the third floor were also let--one to an elderly spinster, a Mlle.
Michonneau, and the other to a retired manufacturer of vermicelli,
Italian paste and starch, who allowed the others to address him as
“Father Goriot.” The remaining rooms were allotted to various birds of
passage, to impecunious students, who like “Father Goriot” and Mlle.
Michonneau, could only muster forty-five francs a month to pay for their
board and lodging. Mme. Vauquer had little desire for lodgers of this
sort; they ate too much bread, and she only took them in default of
better.

At that time one of the rooms was tenanted by a law student, a young man
from the neighborhood of Angouleme, one of a large family who pinched
and starved themselves to spare twelve hundred francs a year for him.
Misfortune had accustomed Eugene de Rastignac, for that was his name, to
work. He belonged to the number of young men who know as children that
their parents’ hopes are centered on them, and deliberately prepare
themselves for a great career, subordinating their studies from the
first to this end, carefully watching the indications of the course of
events, calculating the probable turn that affairs will take, that they
may be the first to profit by them. But for his observant curiosity, and
the skill with which he managed to introduce himself into the salons
of Paris, this story would not have been colored by the tones of
truth which it certainly owes to him, for they are entirely due to his
penetrating sagacity and desire to fathom the mysteries of an appalling
condition of things, which was concealed as carefully by the victim as
by those who had brought it to pass.

Above the third story there was a garret where the linen was hung to
dry, and a couple of attics. Christophe, the man-of-all-work, slept in
one, and Sylvie, the stout cook, in the other. Beside the seven inmates
thus enumerated, taking one year with another, some eight law or medical
students dined in the house, as well as two or three regular comers who
lived in the neighborhood. There were usually eighteen people at dinner,
and there was room, if need be, for twenty at Mme. Vauquer’s table; at
breakfast, however, only the seven lodgers appeared. It was almost like
a family party. Every one came down in dressing-gown and slippers,
and the conversation usually turned on anything that had happened
the evening before; comments on the dress or appearance of the dinner
contingent were exchanged in friendly confidence.

These seven lodgers were Mme. Vauquer’s spoiled children. Among them
she distributed, with astronomical precision, the exact proportion of
respect and attention due to the varying amounts they paid for their
board. One single consideration influenced all these human beings thrown
together by chance. The two second-floor lodgers only paid seventy-two
francs a month. Such prices as these are confined to the Faubourg
Saint-Marcel and the district between La Bourbe and the Salpetriere;
and, as might be expected, poverty, more or less apparent, weighed upon
them all, Mme. Couture being the sole exception to the rule.

The dreary surroundings were reflected in the costumes of the inmates of
the house; all were alike threadbare. The color of the men’s coats were
problematical; such shoes, in more fashionable quarters, are only to be
seen lying in the gutter; the cuffs and collars were worn and frayed at
the edges; every limp article of clothing looked like the ghost of its
former self. The women’s dresses were faded, old-fashioned, dyed and
re-dyed; they wore gloves that were glazed with hard wear, much-mended
lace, dingy ruffles, crumpled muslin fichus. So much for their
clothing; but, for the most part, their frames were solid enough; their
constitutions had weathered the storms of life; their cold, hard faces
were worn like coins that have been withdrawn from circulation, but
there were greedy teeth behind the withered lips. Dramas brought to a
close or still in progress are foreshadowed by the sight of such actors
as these, not the dramas that are played before the footlights and
against a background of painted canvas, but dumb dramas of life,
frost-bound dramas that sere hearts like fire, dramas that do not end
with the actors’ lives.

Mlle. Michonneau, that elderly young lady, screened her weak eyes from
the daylight by a soiled green silk shade with a rim of brass, an object
fit to scare away the Angel of Pity himself. Her shawl, with its scanty,
draggled fringe, might have covered a skeleton, so meagre and angular
was the form beneath it. Yet she must have been pretty and shapely once.
What corrosive had destroyed the feminine outlines? Was it trouble,
or vice, or greed? Had she loved too well? Had she been a second-hand
clothes dealer, a frequenter of the backstairs of great houses, or had
she been merely a courtesan? Was she expiating the flaunting triumphs
of a youth overcrowded with pleasures by an old age in which she was
shunned by every passer-by? Her vacant gaze sent a chill through you;
her shriveled face seemed like a menace. Her voice was like the shrill,
thin note of the grasshopper sounding from the thicket when winter is at
hand. She said that she had nursed an old gentleman, ill of catarrh of
the bladder, and left to die by his children, who thought that he had
nothing left. His bequest to her, a life annuity of a thousand francs,
was periodically disputed by his heirs, who mingled slander with their
persecutions. In spite of the ravages of conflicting passions, her face
retained some traces of its former fairness and fineness of tissue, some
vestiges of the physical charms of her youth still survived.

M. Poiret was a sort of automaton. He might be seen any day sailing like
a gray shadow along the walks of the Jardin des Plantes, on his head a
shabby cap, a cane with an old yellow ivory handle in the tips of his
thin fingers; the outspread skirts of his threadbare overcoat failed
to conceal his meagre figure; his breeches hung loosely on his shrunken
limbs; the thin, blue-stockinged legs trembled like those of a drunken
man; there was a notable breach of continuity between the dingy white
waistcoat and crumpled shirt frills and the cravat twisted about a
throat like a turkey gobbler’s; altogether, his appearance set people
wondering whether this outlandish ghost belonged to the audacious race
of the sons of Japhet who flutter about on the Boulevard Italien. What
devouring kind of toil could have so shriveled him? What devouring
passions had darkened that bulbous countenance, which would have seemed
outrageous as a caricature? What had he been? Well, perhaps he had been
part of the machinery of justice, a clerk in the office to which the
executioner sends in his accounts,--so much for providing black veils
for parricides, so much for sawdust, so much for pulleys and cord for
the knife. Or he might have been a receiver at the door of a public
slaughter-house, or a sub-inspector of nuisances. Indeed, the man
appeared to have been one of the beasts of burden in our great social
mill; one of those Parisian Ratons whom their Bertrands do not even know
by sight; a pivot in the obscure machinery that disposes of misery and
things unclean; one of those men, in short, at sight of whom we are
prompted to remark that, “After all, we cannot do without them.”

Stately Paris ignores the existence of these faces bleached by moral or
physical suffering; but, then, Paris is in truth an ocean that no line
can plumb. You may survey its surface and describe it; but no matter how
numerous and painstaking the toilers in this sea, there will always be
lonely and unexplored regions in its depths, caverns unknown, flowers
and pearls and monsters of the deep overlooked or forgotten by the
divers of literature. The Maison Vauquer is one of these curious
monstrosities.

Two, however, of Mme. Vauquer’s boarders formed a striking contrast to
the rest. There was a sickly pallor, such as is often seen in anaemic
girls, in Mlle. Victorine Taillefer’s face; and her unvarying expression
of sadness, like her embarrassed manner and pinched look, was in
keeping with the general wretchedness of the establishment in the Rue
Nueve-Saint-Genevieve, which forms a background to this picture; but her
face was young, there was youthfulness in her voice and elasticity
in her movements. This young misfortune was not unlike a shrub, newly
planted in an uncongenial soil, where its leaves have already begun
to wither. The outlines of her figure, revealed by her dress of the
simplest and cheapest materials, were also youthful. There was the same
kind of charm about her too slender form, her faintly colored face and
light-brown hair, that modern poets find in mediaeval statuettes; and a
sweet expression, a look of Christian resignation in the dark gray eyes.
She was pretty by force of contrast; if she had been happy, she would
have been charming. Happiness is the poetry of woman, as the toilette
is her tinsel. If the delightful excitement of a ball had made the pale
face glow with color; if the delights of a luxurious life had brought
the color to the wan cheeks that were slightly hollowed already; if love
had put light into the sad eyes, then Victorine might have ranked among
the fairest; but she lacked the two things which create woman a second
time--pretty dresses and love-letters.

A book might have been made of her story. Her father was persuaded that
he had sufficient reason for declining to acknowledge her, and allowed
her a bare six hundred francs a year; he had further taken measures
to disinherit his daughter, and had converted all his real estate into
personalty, that he might leave it undivided to his son. Victorine’s
mother had died broken-hearted in Mme. Couture’s house; and the
latter, who was a near relation, had taken charge of the little orphan.
Unluckily, the widow of the commissary-general to the armies of the
Republic had nothing in the world but her jointure and her widow’s
pension, and some day she might be obliged to leave the helpless,
inexperienced girl to the mercy of the world. The good soul, therefore,
took Victorine to mass every Sunday, and to confession once a fortnight,
thinking that, in any case, she would bring up her ward to be devout.
She was right; religion offered a solution of the problem of the
young girl’s future. The poor child loved the father who refused to
acknowledge her. Once every year she tried to see him to deliver her
mother’s message of forgiveness, but every year hitherto she had knocked
at that door in vain; her father was inexorable. Her brother, her only
means of communication, had not come to see her for four years, and had
sent her no assistance; yet she prayed to God to unseal her father’s
eyes and to soften her brother’s heart, and no accusations mingled with
her prayers. Mme. Couture and Mme. Vauquer exhausted the vocabulary
of abuse, and failed to find words that did justice to the banker’s
iniquitous conduct; but while they heaped execrations on the
millionaire, Victorine’s words were as gentle as the moan of the wounded
dove, and affection found expression even in the cry drawn from her by
pain.

Eugene de Rastignac was a thoroughly southern type; he had a fair
complexion, blue eyes, black hair. In his figure, manner, and his whole
bearing it was easy to see that he had either come of a noble family,
or that, from his earliest childhood, he had been gently bred. If he
was careful of his wardrobe, only taking last year’s clothes into
daily wear, still upon occasion he could issue forth as a young man of
fashion. Ordinarily he wore a shabby coat and waistcoat, the limp black
cravat, untidily knotted, that students affect, trousers that matched
the rest of his costume, and boots that had been resoled.

Vautrin (the man of forty with the dyed whiskers) marked a transition
stage between these two young people and the others. He was the kind of
man that calls forth the remark: “He looks a jovial sort!” He had
broad shoulders, a well-developed chest, muscular arms, and strong
square-fisted hands; the joints of his fingers were covered with tufts
of fiery red hair. His face was furrowed by premature wrinkles; there
was a certain hardness about it in spite of his bland and insinuating
manner. His bass voice was by no means unpleasant, and was in keeping
with his boisterous laughter. He was always obliging, always in good
spirits; if anything went wrong with one of the locks, he would soon
unscrew it, take it to pieces, file it, oil and clean and set it in
order, and put it back in its place again; “I am an old hand at it,”
 he used to say. Not only so, he knew all about ships, the sea, France,
foreign countries, men, business, law, great houses and prisons,--there
was nothing that he did not know. If any one complained rather more than
usual, he would offer his services at once. He had several times lent
money to Mme. Vauquer, or to the boarders; but, somehow, those whom he
obliged felt that they would sooner face death than fail to repay him; a
certain resolute look, sometimes seen on his face, inspired fear of him,
for all his appearance of easy good-nature. In the way he spat there was
an imperturbable coolness which seemed to indicate that this was a
man who would not stick at a crime to extricate himself from a false
position. His eyes, like those of a pitiless judge, seemed to go to
the very bottom of all questions, to read all natures, all feelings and
thoughts. His habit of life was very regular; he usually went out after
breakfast, returning in time for dinner, and disappeared for the rest
of the evening, letting himself in about midnight with a latch key, a
privilege that Mme. Vauquer accorded to no other boarder. But then he
was on very good terms with the widow; he used to call her “mamma,” and
put his arm round her waist, a piece of flattery perhaps not appreciated
to the full! The worthy woman might imagine this to be an easy feat;
but, as a matter of fact, no arm but Vautrin’s was long enough to
encircle her.

It was a characteristic trait of his generously to pay fifteen francs a
month for the cup of coffee with a dash of brandy in it, which he took
after dinner. Less superficial observers than young men engulfed by the
whirlpool of Parisian life, or old men, who took no interest in anything
that did not directly concern them, would not have stopped short at the
vaguely unsatisfactory impression that Vautrin made upon them. He knew
or guessed the concerns of every one about him; but none of them had
been able to penetrate his thoughts, or to discover his occupation. He
had deliberately made his apparent good-nature, his unfailing readiness
to oblige, and his high spirits into a barrier between himself and the
rest of them, but not seldom he gave glimpses of appalling depths
of character. He seemed to delight in scourging the upper classes of
society with the lash of his tongue, to take pleasure in convicting it
of inconsistency, in mocking at law and order with some grim jest worthy
of Juvenal, as if some grudge against the social system rankled in him,
as if there were some mystery carefully hidden away in his life.

Mlle. Taillefer felt attracted, perhaps unconsciously, by the strength
of the one man, and the good looks of the other; her stolen glances and
secret thoughts were divided between them; but neither of them seemed
to take any notice of her, although some day a chance might alter her
position, and she would be a wealthy heiress. For that matter, there was
not a soul in the house who took any trouble to investigate the various
chronicles of misfortunes, real or imaginary, related by the rest. Each
one regarded the others with indifference, tempered by suspicion; it was
a natural result of their relative positions. Practical assistance not
one could give, this they all knew, and they had long since exhausted
their stock of condolence over previous discussions of their grievances.
They were in something the same position as an elderly couple who have
nothing left to say to each other. The routine of existence kept them in
contact, but they were parts of a mechanism which wanted oil. There was
not one of them but would have passed a blind man begging in the street,
not one that felt moved to pity by a tale of misfortune, not one who
did not see in death the solution of the all-absorbing problem of misery
which left them cold to the most terrible anguish in others.

The happiest of these hapless beings was certainly Mme. Vauquer, who
reigned supreme over this hospital supported by voluntary contributions.
For her, the little garden, which silence, and cold, and rain, and
drought combined to make as dreary as an Asian _steppe_, was a pleasant
shaded nook; the gaunt yellow house, the musty odors of a back shop had
charms for her, and for her alone. Those cells belonged to her. She fed
those convicts condemned to penal servitude for life, and her authority
was recognized among them. Where else in Paris would they have found
wholesome food in sufficient quantity at the prices she charged them,
and rooms which they were at liberty to make, if not exactly elegant or
comfortable, at any rate clean and healthy? If she had committed some
flagrant act of injustice, the victim would have borne it in silence.

Such a gathering contained, as might have been expected, the elements
out of which a complete society might be constructed. And, as in a
school, as in the world itself, there was among the eighteen men and
women who met round the dinner table a poor creature, despised by
all the others, condemned to be the butt of all their jokes. At the
beginning of Eugene de Rastignac’s second twelvemonth, this figure
suddenly started out into bold relief against the background of human
forms and faces among which the law student was yet to live for
another two years to come. This laughing-stock was the retired
vermicelli-merchant, Father Goriot, upon whose face a painter, like the
historian, would have concentrated all the light in his picture.

How had it come about that the boarders regarded him with a
half-malignant contempt? Why did they subject the oldest among their
number to a kind of persecution, in which there was mingled some pity,
but no respect for his misfortunes? Had he brought it on himself by some
eccentricity or absurdity, which is less easily forgiven or forgotten
than more serious defects? The question strikes at the root of many a
social injustice. Perhaps it is only human nature to inflict suffering
on anything that will endure suffering, whether by reason of its genuine
humility, or indifference, or sheer helplessness. Do we not, one and
all, like to feel our strength even at the expense of some one or of
something? The poorest sample of humanity, the street arab, will pull
the bell handle at every street door in bitter weather, and scramble up
to write his name on the unsullied marble of a monument.

In the year 1813, at the age of sixty-nine or thereabouts, “Father
Goriot” had sold his business and retired--to Mme. Vauquer’s boarding
house. When he first came there he had taken the rooms now occupied by
Mme. Couture; he had paid twelve hundred francs a year like a man to
whom five louis more or less was a mere trifle. For him Mme. Vauquer had
made various improvements in the three rooms destined for his use, in
consideration of a certain sum paid in advance, so it was said, for the
miserable furniture, that is to say, for some yellow cotton curtains, a
few chairs of stained wood covered with Utrecht velvet, several wretched
colored prints in frames, and wall papers that a little suburban tavern
would have disdained. Possibly it was the careless generosity with which
Father Goriot allowed himself to be overreached at this period of his
life (they called him Monsieur Goriot very respectfully then) that gave
Mme. Vauquer the meanest opinion of his business abilities; she looked
on him as an imbecile where money was concerned.

Goriot had brought with him a considerable wardrobe, the gorgeous
outfit of a retired tradesman who denies himself nothing. Mme. Vauquer’s
astonished eyes beheld no less than eighteen cambric-fronted shirts, the
splendor of their fineness being enhanced by a pair of pins each bearing
a large diamond, and connected by a short chain, an ornament which
adorned the vermicelli-maker’s shirt front. He usually wore a coat of
corn-flower blue; his rotund and portly person was still further set
off by a clean white waistcoat, and a gold chain and seals which dangled
over that broad expanse. When his hostess accused him of being “a bit
of a beau,” he smiled with the vanity of a citizen whose foible is
gratified. His cupboards (_ormoires_, as he called them in the popular
dialect) were filled with a quantity of plate that he brought with him.
The widow’s eyes gleamed as she obligingly helped him to unpack the
soup ladles, table-spoons, forks, cruet-stands, tureens, dishes,
and breakfast services--all of silver, which were duly arranged upon
shelves, besides a few more or less handsome pieces of plate, all
weighing no inconsiderable number of ounces; he could not bring himself
to part with these gifts that reminded him of past domestic festivals.

“This was my wife’s present to me on the first anniversary of our
wedding day,” he said to Mme. Vauquer, as he put away a little silver
posset dish, with two turtle-doves billing on the cover. “Poor dear! she
spent on it all the money she had saved before we were married. Do
you know, I would sooner scratch the earth with my nails for a living,
madame, than part with that. But I shall be able to take my coffee out
of it every morning for the rest of my days, thank the Lord! I am not to
be pitied. There’s not much fear of my starving for some time to come.”

Finally, Mme. Vauquer’s magpie’s eye had discovered and read certain
entries in the list of shareholders in the funds, and, after a rough
calculation, was disposed to credit Goriot (worthy man) with something
like ten thousand francs a year. From that day forward Mme. Vauquer
(_nee_ de Conflans), who, as a matter of fact, had seen forty-eight
summers, though she would only own to thirty-nine of them--Mme. Vauquer
had her own ideas. Though Goriot’s eyes seemed to have shrunk in their
sockets, though they were weak and watery, owing to some glandular
affection which compelled him to wipe them continually, she considered
him to be a very gentlemanly and pleasant-looking man. Moreover, the
widow saw favorable indications of character in the well-developed
calves of his legs and in his square-shaped nose, indications still
further borne out by the worthy man’s full-moon countenance and look
of stupid good-nature. This, in all probability, was a strongly-build
animal, whose brains mostly consisted in a capacity for affection. His
hair, worn in _ailes de pigeon_, and duly powdered every morning by the
barber from the Ecole Polytechnique, described five points on his low
forehead, and made an elegant setting to his face. Though his manners
were somewhat boorish, he was always as neat as a new pin and he took
his snuff in a lordly way, like a man who knows that his snuff-box is
always likely to be filled with maccaboy, so that when Mme. Vauquer lay
down to rest on the day of M. Goriot’s installation, her heart, like a
larded partridge, sweltered before the fire of a burning desire to shake
off the shroud of Vauquer and rise again as Goriot. She would marry
again, sell her boarding-house, give her hand to this fine flower of
citizenship, become a lady of consequence in the quarter, and ask for
subscriptions for charitable purposes; she would make little Sunday
excursions to Choisy, Soissy, Gentilly; she would have a box at the
theatre when she liked, instead of waiting for the author’s tickets that
one of her boarders sometimes gave her, in July; the whole Eldorado of
a little Parisian household rose up before Mme. Vauquer in her
dreams. Nobody knew that she herself possessed forty thousand francs,
accumulated _sou by sou_, that was her secret; surely as far as money
was concerned she was a very tolerable match. “And in other respects,
I am quite his equal,” she said to herself, turning as if to assure
herself of the charms of a form that the portly Sylvie found moulded in
down feathers every morning.

For three months from that day Mme. Veuve Vauquer availed herself of
the services of M. Goriot’s coiffeur, and went to some expense over her
toilette, expense justifiable on the ground that she owed it to herself
and her establishment to pay some attention to appearances when such
highly-respectable persons honored her house with their presence. She
expended no small amount of ingenuity in a sort of weeding process of
her lodgers, announcing her intention of receiving henceforward none but
people who were in every way select. If a stranger presented himself,
she let him know that M. Goriot, one of the best known and most
highly-respected merchants in Paris, had singled out her boarding-house
for a residence. She drew up a prospectus headed MAISON VAUQUER, in
which it was asserted that hers was “_one of the oldest and most highly
recommended boarding-houses in the Latin Quarter_.” “From the windows
of the house,” thus ran the prospectus, “there is a charming view of
the Vallee des Gobelins (so there is--from the third floor), and a
_beautiful_ garden, _extending_ down to _an avenue of lindens_ at the
further end.” Mention was made of the bracing air of the place and its
quiet situation.

It was this prospectus that attracted Mme. la Comtesse de l’Ambermesnil,
a widow of six and thirty, who was awaiting the final settlement of her
husband’s affairs, and of another matter regarding a pension due to her
as the wife of a general who had died “on the field of battle.” On this
Mme. Vauquer saw to her table, lighted a fire daily in the sitting-room
for nearly six months, and kept the promise of her prospectus, even
going to some expense to do so. And the Countess, on her side, addressed
Mme. Vauquer as “my dear,” and promised her two more boarders, the
Baronne de Vaumerland and the widow of a colonel, the late Comte de
Picquoisie, who were about to leave a boarding-house in the Marais,
where the terms were higher than at the Maison Vauquer. Both these
ladies, moreover, would be very well to do when the people at the
War Office had come to an end of their formalities. “But Government
departments are always so dilatory,” the lady added.

After dinner the two widows went together up to Mme. Vauquer’s room, and
had a snug little chat over some cordial and various delicacies reserved
for the mistress of the house. Mme. Vauquer’s ideas as to Goriot were
cordially approved by Mme. de l’Ambermesnil; it was a capital notion,
which for that matter she had guessed from the very first; in her
opinion the vermicelli maker was an excellent man.

“Ah! my dear lady, such a well-preserved man of his age, as sound as my
eyesight--a man who might make a woman happy!” said the widow.

The good-natured Countess turned to the subject of Mme. Vauquer’s dress,
which was not in harmony with her projects. “You must put yourself on a
war footing,” said she.

After much serious consideration the two widows went shopping
together--they purchased a hat adorned with ostrich feathers and a cap
at the Palais Royal, and the Countess took her friend to the Magasin de
la Petite Jeannette, where they chose a dress and a scarf. Thus equipped
for the campaign, the widow looked exactly like the prize animal hung
out for a sign above an a la mode beef shop; but she herself was so much
pleased with the improvement, as she considered it, in her appearance,
that she felt that she lay under some obligation to the Countess; and,
though by no means open-handed, she begged that lady to accept a hat
that cost twenty francs. The fact was that she needed the Countess’
services on the delicate mission of sounding Goriot; the countess must
sing her praises in his ears. Mme. de l’Ambermesnil lent herself very
good-naturedly to this manoeuvre, began her operations, and succeeded in
obtaining a private interview; but the overtures that she made, with a
view to securing him for herself, were received with embarrassment, not
to say a repulse. She left him, revolted by his coarseness.

“My angel,” said she to her dear friend, “you will make nothing of that
man yonder. He is absurdly suspicious, and he is a mean curmudgeon, an
idiot, a fool; you would never be happy with him.”

After what had passed between M. Goriot and Mme. de l’Ambermesnil, the
Countess would no longer live under the same roof. She left the next
day, forgot to pay for six months’ board, and left behind her wardrobe,
cast-off clothing to the value of five francs. Eagerly and persistently
as Mme. Vauquer sought her quondam lodger, the Comtesse de l’Ambermesnil
was never heard of again in Paris. The widow often talked of this
deplorable business, and regretted her own too confiding disposition. As
a matter of fact, she was as suspicious as a cat; but she was like many
other people, who cannot trust their own kin and put themselves at the
mercy of the next chance comer--an odd but common phenomenon, whose
causes may readily be traced to the depths of the human heart.

Perhaps there are people who know that they have nothing more to look
for from those with whom they live; they have shown the emptiness of
their hearts to their housemates, and in their secret selves they are
conscious that they are severely judged, and that they deserve to
be judged severely; but still they feel an unconquerable craving for
praises that they do not hear, or they are consumed by a desire to
appear to possess, in the eyes of a new audience, the qualities which
they have not, hoping to win the admiration or affection of strangers at
the risk of forfeiting it again some day. Or, once more, there are other
mercenary natures who never do a kindness to a friend or a relation
simply because these have a claim upon them, while a service done to a
stranger brings its reward to self-love. Such natures feel but little
affection for those who are nearest to them; they keep their kindness
for remoter circles of acquaintance, and show most to those who dwell on
its utmost limits. Mme. Vauquer belonged to both these essentially mean,
false, and execrable classes.

“If I had been there at the time,” Vautrin would say at the end of the
story, “I would have shown her up, and that misfortune would not have
befallen you. I know that kind of phiz!”

Like all narrow natures, Mme. Vauquer was wont to confine her attention
to events, and did not go very deeply into the causes that brought them
about; she likewise preferred to throw the blame of her own mistakes on
other people, so she chose to consider that the honest vermicelli maker
was responsible for her misfortune. It had opened her eyes, so she said,
with regard to him. As soon as she saw that her blandishments were in
vain, and that her outlay on her toilette was money thrown away, she was
not slow to discover the reason of his indifference. It became plain
to her at once that there was _some other attraction_, to use her own
expression. In short, it was evident that the hope she had so fondly
cherished was a baseless delusion, and that she would “never make
anything out of that man yonder,” in the Countess’ forcible phrase.
The Countess seemed to have been a judge of character. Mme. Vauquer’s
aversion was naturally more energetic than her friendship, for her
hatred was not in proportion to her love, but to her disappointed
expectations. The human heart may find here and there a resting-place
short of the highest height of affection, but we seldom stop in the
steep, downward slope of hatred. Still, M. Goriot was a lodger, and
the widow’s wounded self-love could not vent itself in an explosion of
wrath; like a monk harassed by the prior of his convent, she was forced
to stifle her sighs of disappointment, and to gulp down her craving for
revenge. Little minds find gratification for their feelings, benevolent
or otherwise, by a constant exercise of petty ingenuity. The widow
employed her woman’s malice to devise a system of covert persecution.
She began by a course of retrenchment--various luxuries which had found
their way to the table appeared there no more.

“No more gherkins, no more anchovies; they have made a fool of me!” she
said to Sylvie one morning, and they returned to the old bill of fare.

The thrifty frugality necessary to those who mean to make their way in
the world had become an inveterate habit of life with M. Goriot. Soup,
boiled beef, and a dish of vegetables had been, and always would be, the
dinner he liked best, so Mme. Vauquer found it very difficult to annoy
a boarder whose tastes were so simple. He was proof against her malice,
and in desperation she spoke to him and of him slightingly before the
other lodgers, who began to amuse themselves at his expense, and so
gratified her desire for revenge.

Towards the end of the first year the widow’s suspicions had reached
such a pitch that she began to wonder how it was that a retired merchant
with a secure income of seven or eight thousand livres, the owner of
such magnificent plate and jewelry handsome enough for a kept mistress,
should be living in her house. Why should he devote so small a
proportion of his money to his expenses? Until the first year was nearly
at an end, Goriot had dined out once or twice every week, but these
occasions came less frequently, and at last he was scarcely absent from
the dinner-table twice a month. It was hardly expected that Mme. Vauquer
should regard the increased regularity of her boarder’s habits with
complacency, when those little excursions of his had been so much to her
interest. She attributed the change not so much to a gradual diminution
of fortune as to a spiteful wish to annoy his hostess. It is one of the
most detestable habits of a Liliputian mind to credit other people with
its own malignant pettiness.

Unluckily, towards the end of the second year, M. Goriot’s conduct gave
some color to the idle talk about him. He asked Mme. Vauquer to give him
a room on the second floor, and to make a corresponding reduction in
her charges. Apparently, such strict economy was called for, that he did
without a fire all through the winter. Mme. Vauquer asked to be paid in
advance, an arrangement to which M. Goriot consented, and thenceforward
she spoke of him as “Father Goriot.”

What had brought about this decline and fall? Conjecture was keen, but
investigation was difficult. Father Goriot was not communicative; in
the sham countess’ phrase he was “a curmudgeon.” Empty-headed people who
babble about their own affairs because they have nothing else to occupy
them, naturally conclude that if people say nothing of their doings it
is because their doings will not bear being talked about; so the highly
respectable merchant became a scoundrel, and the late beau was an old
rogue. Opinion fluctuated. Sometimes, according to Vautrin, who came
about this time to live in the Maison Vauquer, Father Goriot was a man
who went on ‘Change and _dabbled_ (to use the sufficiently expressive
language of the Stock Exchange) in stocks and shares after he had ruined
himself by heavy speculation. Sometimes it was held that he was one of
those petty gamblers who nightly play for small stakes until they win a
few francs. A theory that he was a detective in the employ of the Home
Office found favor at one time, but Vautrin urged that “Goriot was not
sharp enough for one of that sort.” There were yet other solutions;
Father Goriot was a skinflint, a shark of a money-lender, a man
who lived by selling lottery tickets. He was by turns all the most
mysterious brood of vice and shame and misery; yet, however vile his
life might be, the feeling of repulsion which he aroused in others was
not so strong that he must be banished from their society--he paid
his way. Besides, Goriot had his uses, every one vented his spleen or
sharpened his wit on him; he was pelted with jokes and belabored with
hard words. The general consensus of opinion was in favor of a theory
which seemed the most likely; this was Mme. Vauquer’s view. According
to her, the man so well preserved at his time of life, as sound as her
eyesight, with whom a woman might be very happy, was a libertine who had
strange tastes. These are the facts upon which Mme. Vauquer’s slanders
were based.

Early one morning, some few months after the departure of the unlucky
Countess who had managed to live for six months at the widow’s expense,
Mme. Vauquer (not yet dressed) heard the rustle of a silk dress and
a young woman’s light footstep on the stair; some one was going to
Goriot’s room. He seemed to expect the visit, for his door stood ajar.
The portly Sylvie presently came up to tell her mistress that a girl too
pretty to be honest, “dressed like a goddess,” and not a speck of mud
on her laced cashmere boots, had glided in from the street like a snake,
had found the kitchen, and asked for M. Goriot’s room. Mme. Vauquer
and the cook, listening, overheard several words affectionately spoken
during the visit, which lasted for some time. When M. Goriot went
downstairs with the lady, the stout Sylvie forthwith took her basket
and followed the lover-like couple, under pretext of going to do her
marketing.

“M. Goriot must be awfully rich, all the same, madame,” she reported
on her return, “to keep her in such style. Just imagine it! There was a
splendid carriage waiting at the corner of the Place de l’Estrapade, and
_she_ got into it.”

While they were at dinner that evening, Mme. Vauquer went to the window
and drew the curtain, as the sun was shining into Goriot’s eyes.

“You are beloved of fair ladies, M. Goriot--the sun seeks you out,” she
said, alluding to his visitor. “_Peste!_ you have good taste; she was
very pretty.”

“That was my daughter,” he said, with a kind of pride in his voice, and
the rest chose to consider this as the fatuity of an old man who wishes
to save appearances.

A month after this visit M. Goriot received another. The same daughter
who had come to see him that morning came again after dinner, this time
in evening dress. The boarders, in deep discussion in the dining-room,
caught a glimpse of a lovely, fair-haired woman, slender, graceful, and
much too distinguished-looking to be a daughter of Father Goriot’s.

“Two of them!” cried the portly Sylvie, who did not recognize the lady
of the first visit.

A few days later, and another young lady--a tall, well-moulded brunette,
with dark hair and bright eyes--came to ask for M. Goriot.

“Three of them!” said Sylvie.

Then the second daughter, who had first come in the morning to see her
father, came shortly afterwards in the evening. She wore a ball dress,
and came in a carriage.

“Four of them!” commented Mme. Vauquer and her plump handmaid. Sylvie
saw not a trace of resemblance between this great lady and the girl in
her simple morning dress who had entered her kitchen on the occasion of
her first visit.

At that time Goriot was paying twelve hundred francs a year to his
landlady, and Mme. Vauquer saw nothing out of the common in the fact
that a rich man had four or five mistresses; nay, she thought it very
knowing of him to pass them off as his daughters. She was not at all
inclined to draw a hard-and-fast line, or to take umbrage at his sending
for them to the Maison Vauquer; yet, inasmuch as these visits explained
her boarder’s indifference to her, she went so far (at the end of the
second year) as to speak of him as an “ugly old wretch.” When at length
her boarder declined to nine hundred francs a year, she asked him very
insolently what he took her house to be, after meeting one of these
ladies on the stairs. Father Goriot answered that the lady was his
eldest daughter.

“So you have two or three dozen daughters, have you?” said Mme. Vauquer
sharply.

“I have only two,” her boarder answered meekly, like a ruined man who is
broken in to all the cruel usage of misfortune.



Towards the end of the third year Father Goriot reduced his expenses
still further; he went up to the third story, and now paid forty-five
francs a month. He did without snuff, told his hairdresser that he no
longer required his services, and gave up wearing powder. When Goriot
appeared for the first time in this condition, an exclamation of
astonishment broke from his hostess at the color of his hair--a dingy
olive gray. He had grown sadder day by day under the influence of some
hidden trouble; among all the faces round the table, his was the
most woe-begone. There was no longer any doubt. Goriot was an elderly
libertine, whose eyes had only been preserved by the skill of the
physician from the malign influence of the remedies necessitated by the
state of his health. The disgusting color of his hair was a result of
his excesses and of the drugs which he had taken that he might continue
his career. The poor old man’s mental and physical condition afforded
some grounds for the absurd rubbish talked about him. When his outfit
was worn out, he replaced the fine linen by calico at fourteen _sous_
the ell. His diamonds, his gold snuff-box, watch-chain and trinkets,
disappeared one by one. He had left off wearing the corn-flower blue
coat, and was sumptuously arrayed, summer as well as winter, in a coarse
chestnut-brown coat, a plush waistcoat, and doeskin breeches. He grew
thinner and thinner; his legs were shrunken, his cheeks, once so puffed
out by contented bourgeois prosperity, were covered with wrinkles, and
the outlines of the jawbones were distinctly visible; there were deep
furrows in his forehead. In the fourth year of his residence in the Rue
Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve he was no longer like his former self. The hale
vermicelli manufacturer, sixty-two years of age, who had looked scarce
forty, the stout, comfortable, prosperous tradesman, with an almost
bucolic air, and such a brisk demeanor that it did you good to look at
him; the man with something boyish in his smile, had suddenly sunk into
his dotage, and had become a feeble, vacillating septuagenarian.

The keen, bright blue eyes had grown dull, and faded to a steel-gray
color; the red inflamed rims looked as though they had shed tears of
blood. He excited feelings of repulsion in some, and of pity in others.
The young medical students who came to the house noticed the drooping
of his lower lip and the conformation of the facial angle; and, after
teasing him for some time to no purpose, they declared that cretinism
was setting in.

One evening after dinner Mme. Vauquer said half banteringly to him, “So
those daughters of yours don’t come to see you any more, eh?” meaning to
imply her doubts as to his paternity; but Father Goriot shrank as if his
hostess had touched him with a sword-point.

“They come sometimes,” he said in a tremulous voice.

“Aha! you still see them sometimes?” cried the students. “Bravo, Father
Goriot!”

The old man scarcely seemed to hear the witticisms at his expense that
followed on the words; he had relapsed into the dreamy state of mind
that these superficial observers took for senile torpor, due to his lack
of intelligence. If they had only known, they might have been deeply
interested by the problem of his condition; but few problems were more
obscure. It was easy, of course, to find out whether Goriot had really
been a vermicelli manufacturer; the amount of his fortune was readily
discoverable; but the old people, who were most inquisitive as to his
concerns, never went beyond the limits of the Quarter, and lived in
the lodging-house much as oysters cling to a rock. As for the rest, the
current of life in Paris daily awaited them, and swept them away with
it; so soon as they left the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve, they forgot the
existence of the old man, their butt at dinner. For those narrow souls,
or for careless youth, the misery in Father Goriot’s withered face
and its dull apathy were quite incompatible with wealth or any sort of
intelligence. As for the creatures whom he called his daughters, all
Mme. Vauquer’s boarders were of her opinion. With the faculty for severe
logic sedulously cultivated by elderly women during long evenings of
gossip till they can always find an hypothesis to fit all circumstances,
she was wont to reason thus:

“If Father Goriot had daughters of his own as rich as those ladies who
came here seemed to be, he would not be lodging in my house, on the
third floor, at forty-five francs a month; and he would not go about
dressed like a poor man.”

No objection could be raised to these inferences. So by the end of
the month of November 1819, at the time when the curtain rises on this
drama, every one in the house had come to have a very decided opinion as
to the poor old man. He had never had either wife or daughter; excesses
had reduced him to this sluggish condition; he was a sort of human
mollusk who should be classed among the capulidoe, so one of the dinner
contingent, an _employe_ at the Museum, who had a pretty wit of his own.
Poiret was an eagle, a gentleman, compared with Goriot. Poiret would
join the talk, argue, answer when he was spoken to; as a matter of
fact, his talk, arguments, and responses contributed nothing to the
conversation, for Poiret had a habit of repeating what the others said
in different words; still, he did join in the talk; he was alive, and
seemed capable of feeling; while Father Goriot (to quote the Museum
official again) was invariably at zero degrees--Reaumur.

Eugene de Rastignac had just returned to Paris in a state of mind not
unknown to young men who are conscious of unusual powers, and to those
whose faculties are so stimulated by a difficult position, that for the
time being they rise above the ordinary level.

Rastignac’s first year of study for the preliminary examinations in law
had left him free to see the sights of Paris and to enjoy some of its
amusements. A student has not much time on his hands if he sets himself
to learn the repertory of every theatre, and to study the ins and outs
of the labyrinth of Paris. To know its customs; to learn the language,
and become familiar with the amusements of the capital, he must explore
its recesses, good and bad, follow the studies that please him best, and
form some idea of the treasures contained in galleries and museums.

At this stage of his career a student grows eager and excited about all
sorts of follies that seem to him to be of immense importance. He has
his hero, his great man, a professor at the College de France, paid
to talk down to the level of his audience. He adjusts his cravat, and
strikes various attitudes for the benefit of the women in the first
galleries at the Opera-Comique. As he passes through all these
successive initiations, and breaks out of his sheath, the horizons of
life widen around him, and at length he grasps the plan of society with
the different human strata of which it is composed.

If he begins by admiring the procession of carriages on sunny afternoons
in the Champs-Elysees, he soon reaches the further stage of envying
their owners. Unconsciously, Eugene had served his apprenticeship before
he went back to Angouleme for the long vacation after taking his degrees
as bachelor of arts and bachelor of law. The illusions of childhood had
vanished, so also had the ideas he brought with him from the provinces;
he had returned thither with an intelligence developed, with loftier
ambitions, and saw things as they were at home in the old manor house.
His father and mother, his two brothers and two sisters, with an aged
aunt, whose whole fortune consisted in annuities, lived on the little
estate of Rastignac. The whole property brought in about three thousand
francs; and though the amount varied with the season (as must always
be the case in a vine-growing district), they were obliged to spare an
unvarying twelve hundred francs out of their income for him. He saw
how constantly the poverty, which they had generously hidden from him,
weighed upon them; he could not help comparing the sisters, who had
seemed so beautiful to his boyish eyes, with women in Paris, who had
realized the beauty of his dreams. The uncertain future of the whole
family depended upon him. It did not escape his eyes that not a crumb
was wasted in the house, nor that the wine they drank was made from the
second pressing; a multitude of small things, which it is useless to
speak of in detail here, made him burn to distinguish himself, and his
ambition to succeed increased tenfold.

He meant, like all great souls, that his success should be owing
entirely to his merits; but his was pre-eminently a southern
temperament, the execution of his plans was sure to be marred by the
vertigo that seizes on youth when youth sees itself alone in a wide sea,
uncertain how to spend its energies, whither to steer its course, how
to adapt its sails to the winds. At first he determined to fling himself
heart and soul into his work, but he was diverted from this purpose by
the need of society and connections; then he saw how great an influence
women exert in social life, and suddenly made up his mind to go out
into this world to seek a protectress there. Surely a clever and
high-spirited young man, whose wit and courage were set off to advantage
by a graceful figure and the vigorous kind of beauty that readily
strikes a woman’s imagination, need not despair of finding a
protectress. These ideas occurred to him in his country walks with his
sisters, whom he had once joined so gaily. The girls thought him very
much changed.

His aunt, Mme. de Marcillac, had been presented at court, and had moved
among the brightest heights of that lofty region. Suddenly the young
man’s ambition discerned in those recollections of hers, which had been
like nursery fairy tales to her nephews and nieces, the elements of
a social success at least as important as the success which he had
achieved at the Ecole de Droit. He began to ask his aunt about those
relations; some of the old ties might still hold good. After much
shaking of the branches of the family tree, the old lady came to the
conclusion that of all persons who could be useful to her nephew among
the selfish genus of rich relations, the Vicomtesse de Beauseant was
the least likely to refuse. To this lady, therefore, she wrote in the
old-fashioned style, recommending Eugene to her; pointing out to
her nephew that if he succeeded in pleasing Mme. de Beauseant, the
Vicomtesse would introduce him to other relations. A few days after his
return to Paris, therefore, Rastignac sent his aunt’s letter to Mme.
de Beauseant. The Vicomtesse replied by an invitation to a ball for
the following evening. This was the position of affairs at the Maison
Vauquer at the end of November 1819.

A few days later, after Mme. de Beauseant’s ball, Eugene came in at two
o’clock in the morning. The persevering student meant to make up for the
lost time by working until daylight. It was the first time that he had
attempted to spend the night in this way in that silent quarter. The
spell of a factitious energy was upon him; he had beheld the pomp and
splendor of the world. He had not dined at the Maison Vauquer; the
boarders probably would think that he would walk home at daybreak from
the dance, as he had done sometimes on former occasions, after a fete at
the Prado, or a ball at the Odeon, splashing his silk stockings thereby,
and ruining his pumps.

It so happened that Christophe took a look into the street before
drawing the bolts of the door; and Rastignac, coming in at that
moment, could go up to his room without making any noise, followed by
Christophe, who made a great deal. Eugene exchanged his dress suit for a
shabby overcoat and slippers, kindled a fire with some blocks of patent
fuel, and prepared for his night’s work in such a sort that the faint
sounds he made were drowned by Christophe’s heavy tramp on the stairs.

Eugene sat absorbed in thought for a few moments before plunging into
his law books. He had just become aware of the fact that the Vicomtesse
de Beauseant was one of the queens of fashion, that her house was
thought to be the pleasantest in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. And not
only so, she was, by right of her fortune, and the name she bore, one of
the most conspicuous figures in that aristocratic world. Thanks to the
aunt, thanks to Mme. de Marcillac’s letter of introduction, the poor
student had been kindly received in that house before he knew the extent
of the favor thus shown to him. It was almost like a patent of nobility
to be admitted to those gilded salons; he had appeared in the most
exclusive circle in Paris, and now all doors were open for him. Eugene
had been dazzled at first by the brilliant assembly, and had scarcely
exchanged a few words with the Vicomtesse; he had been content to single
out a goddess among this throng of Parisian divinities, one of those
women who are sure to attract a young man’s fancy.

The Comtesse Anastasie de Restaud was tall and gracefully made; she
had one of the prettiest figures in Paris. Imagine a pair of great dark
eyes, a magnificently moulded hand, a shapely foot. There was a fiery
energy in her movements; the Marquis de Ronquerolles had called her “a
thoroughbred,” “a pure pedigree,” these figures of speech have replaced
the “heavenly angel” and Ossianic nomenclature; the old mythology of
love is extinct, doomed to perish by modern dandyism. But for Rastignac,
Mme. Anastasie de Restaud was the woman for whom he had sighed. He had
contrived to write his name twice upon the list of partners upon her
fan, and had snatched a few words with her during the first quadrille.

“Where shall I meet you again, Madame?” he asked abruptly, and the tones
of his voice were full of the vehement energy that women like so well.

“Oh, everywhere!” said she, “in the Bois, at the Bouffons, in my own
house.”

With the impetuosity of his adventurous southern temper, he did all he
could to cultivate an acquaintance with this lovely countess, making the
best of his opportunities in the quadrille and during a waltz that she
gave him. When he told her that he was a cousin of Mme. de Beauseant’s,
the Countess, whom he took for a great lady, asked him to call at her
house, and after her parting smile, Rastignac felt convinced that he
must make this visit. He was so lucky as to light upon some one who did
not laugh at his ignorance, a fatal defect among the gilded and insolent
youth of that period; the coterie of Maulincourts, Maximes de Trailles,
de Marsays, Ronquerolles, Ajuda-Pintos, and Vandenesses who shone there
in all the glory of coxcombry among the best-dressed women of fashion
in Paris--Lady Brandon, the Duchesse de Langeais, the Comtesse de
Kergarouet, Mme. de Serizy, the Duchesse de Carigliano, the Comtesse
Ferraud, Mme. de Lanty, the Marquise d’Aiglemont, Mme. Firmiani,
the Marquise de Listomere and the Marquise d’Espard, the Duchesse de
Maufrigneuse and the Grandlieus. Luckily, therefore, for him, the novice
happened upon the Marquis de Montriveau, the lover of the Duchesse de
Langeais, a general as simple as a child; from him Rastignac learned
that the Comtesse lived in the Rue du Helder.

Ah, what it is to be young, eager to see the world, greedily on the
watch for any chance that brings you nearer the woman of your dreams,
and behold two houses open their doors to you! To set foot in the
Vicomtesse de Beauseant’s house in the Faubourg Saint-Germain; to fall
on your knees before a Comtesse de Restaud in the Chaussee d’Antin;
to look at one glance across a vista of Paris drawing-rooms, conscious
that, possessing sufficient good looks, you may hope to find aid and
protection there in a feminine heart! To feel ambitious enough to spurn
the tight-rope on which you must walk with the steady head of an acrobat
for whom a fall is impossible, and to find in a charming woman the best
of all balancing poles.

He sat there with his thoughts for a while, Law on the one hand, and
Poverty on the other, beholding a radiant vision of a woman rise above
the dull, smouldering fire. Who would not have paused and questioned
the future as Eugene was doing? who would not have pictured it full of
success? His wondering thoughts took wings; he was transported out
of the present into that blissful future; he was sitting by Mme. de
Restaud’s side, when a sort of sigh, like the grunt of an overburdened
St. Joseph, broke the silence of the night. It vibrated through the
student, who took the sound for a death groan. He opened his door
noiselessly, went out upon the landing, and saw a thin streak of light
under Father Goriot’s door. Eugene feared that his neighbor had been
taken ill; he went over and looked through the keyhole; the old man
was busily engaged in an occupation so singular and so suspicious that
Rastignac thought he was only doing a piece of necessary service
to society to watch the self-styled vermicelli maker’s nocturnal
industries.

The table was upturned, and Goriot had doubtless in some way secured a
silver plate and cup to the bar before knotting a thick rope round them;
he was pulling at this rope with such enormous force that they were
being crushed and twisted out of shape; to all appearance he meant to
convert the richly wrought metal into ingots.

“_Peste!_ what a man!” said Rastignac, as he watched Goriot’s muscular
arms; there was not a sound in the room while the old man, with the aid
of the rope, was kneading the silver like dough. “Was he then, indeed,
a thief, or a receiver of stolen goods, who affected imbecility and
decrepitude, and lived like a beggar that he might carry on his pursuits
the more securely?” Eugene stood for a moment revolving these questions,
then he looked again through the keyhole.

Father Goriot had unwound his coil of rope; he had covered the table
with a blanket, and was now employed in rolling the flattened mass
of silver into a bar, an operation which he performed with marvelous
dexterity.

“Why, he must be as strong as Augustus, King of Poland!” said Eugene to
himself when the bar was nearly finished.

Father Goriot looked sadly at his handiwork, tears fell from his
eyes, he blew out the dip which had served him for a light while he
manipulated the silver, and Eugene heard him sigh as he lay down again.

“He is mad,” thought the student.

“_Poor child!_” Father Goriot said aloud. Rastignac, hearing those
words, concluded to keep silence; he would not hastily condemn his
neighbor. He was just in the doorway of his room when a strange sound
from the staircase below reached his ears; it might have been made
by two men coming up in list slippers. Eugene listened; two men there
certainly were, he could hear their breathing. Yet there had been no
sound of opening the street door, no footsteps in the passage. Suddenly,
too, he saw a faint gleam of light on the second story; it came from M.
Vautrin’s room.

“There are a good many mysteries here for a lodging-house!” he said to
himself.

He went part of the way downstairs and listened again. The rattle of
gold reached his ears. In another moment the light was put out, and
again he distinctly heard the breathing of two men, but no sound of a
door being opened or shut. The two men went downstairs, the faint sounds
growing fainter as they went.

“Who is there?” cried Mme. Vauquer out of her bedroom window.

“I, Mme. Vauquer,” answered Vautrin’s deep bass voice. “I am coming in.”

“That is odd! Christophe drew the bolts,” said Eugene, going back to his
room. “You have to sit up at night, it seems, if you really mean to know
all that is going on about you in Paris.”

These incidents turned his thought from his ambitious dreams; he betook
himself to his work, but his thought wandered back to Father Goriot’s
suspicious occupation; Mme. de Restaud’s face swam again and again
before his eyes like a vision of a brilliant future; and at last he lay
down and slept with clenched fists. When a young man makes up his mind
that he will work all night, the chances are that seven times out of
ten he will sleep till morning. Such vigils do not begin before we are
turned twenty.

The next morning Paris was wrapped in one of the dense fogs that throw
the most punctual people out in their calculations as to the time; even
the most business-like folk fail to keep their appointments in such
weather, and ordinary mortals wake up at noon and fancy it is eight
o’clock. On this morning it was half-past nine, and Mme. Vauquer
still lay abed. Christophe was late, Sylvie was late, but the two sat
comfortably taking their coffee as usual. It was Sylvie’s custom to take
the cream off the milk destined for the boarders’ breakfast for her
own, and to boil the remainder for some time, so that madame should not
discover this illegal exaction.

“Sylvie,” said Christophe, as he dipped a piece of toast into the
coffee, “M. Vautrin, who is not such a bad sort, all the same, had two
people come to see him again last night. If madame says anything, mind
you say nothing about it.”

“Has he given you something?”

“He gave me a five-franc piece this month, which is as good as saying,
‘Hold your tongue.’”

“Except him and Mme. Couture, who doesn’t look twice at every penny,
there’s no one in the house that doesn’t try to get back with the left
hand all that they give with the right at New Year,” said Sylvie.

“And, after all,” said Christophe, “what do they give you? A miserable
five-franc piece. There is Father Goriot, who has cleaned his shoes
himself these two years past. There is that old beggar Poiret, who goes
without blacking altogether; he would sooner drink it than put it on his
boots. Then there is that whipper-snapper of a student, who gives me a
couple of francs. Two francs will not pay for my brushes, and he sells
his old clothes, and gets more for them than they are worth. Oh! they’re
a shabby lot!”

“Pooh!” said Sylvie, sipping her coffee, “our places are the best in the
Quarter, that I know. But about that great big chap Vautrin, Christophe;
has any one told you anything about him?”

“Yes. I met a gentleman in the street a few days ago; he said to me,
‘There’s a gentleman in your place, isn’t there? a tall man that dyes
his whiskers?’ I told him, ‘No, sir; they aren’t dyed. A gay fellow
like him hasn’t the time to do it.’ And when I told M. Vautrin about
it afterwards, he said, ‘Quite right, my boy. That is the way to
answer them. There is nothing more unpleasant than to have your little
weaknesses known; it might spoil many a match.’”

“Well, and for my part,” said Sylvie, “a man tried to humbug me at the
market wanting to know if I had seen him put on his shirt. Such bosh!
There,” she cried, interrupting herself, “that’s a quarter to ten
striking at the Val-de-Grace, and not a soul stirring!”

“Pooh! they are all gone out. Mme. Couture and the girl went out at
eight o’clock to take the wafer at Saint-Etienne. Father Goriot started
off somewhere with a parcel, and the student won’t be back from his
lecture till ten o’clock. I saw them go while I was sweeping the stairs;
Father Goriot knocked up against me, and his parcel was as hard as iron.
What is the old fellow up to, I wonder? He is as good as a plaything for
the rest of them; they can never let him alone; but he is a good man,
all the same, and worth more than all of them put together. He doesn’t
give you much himself, but he sometimes sends you with a message to
ladies who fork out famous tips; they are dressed grandly, too.”

“His daughters, as he calls them, eh? There are a dozen of them.”

“I have never been to more than two--the two who came here.”

“There is madame moving overhead; I shall have to go, or she will raise
a fine racket. Just keep an eye on the milk, Christophe; don’t let the
cat get at it.”

Sylvie went up to her mistress’ room.

“Sylvie! How is this? It’s nearly ten o’clock, and you let me sleep like
a dormouse! Such a thing has never happened before.”

“It’s the fog; it is that thick, you could cut it with a knife.”

“But how about breakfast?”

“Bah! the boarders are possessed, I’m sure. They all cleared out before
there was a wink of daylight.”

“Do speak properly, Sylvie,” Mme. Vauquer retorted; “say a blink of
daylight.”

“Ah, well, madame, whichever you please. Anyhow, you can have breakfast
at ten o’clock. La Michonnette and Poiret have neither of them stirred.
There are only those two upstairs, and they are sleeping like the logs
they are.”

“But, Sylvie, you put their names together as if----”

“As if what?” said Sylvie, bursting into a guffaw. “The two of them make
a pair.”

“It is a strange thing, isn’t it, Sylvie, how M. Vautrin got in last
night after Christophe had bolted the door?”

“Not at all, madame. Christophe heard M. Vautrin, and went down and
undid the door. And here are you imagining that----?”

“Give me my bodice, and be quick and get breakfast ready. Dish up the
rest of the mutton with the potatoes, and you can put the stewed pears
on the table, those at five a penny.”

A few moments later Mme. Vauquer came down, just in time to see the cat
knock down a plate that covered a bowl of milk, and begin to lap in all
haste.

“Mistigris!” she cried.

The cat fled, but promptly returned to rub against her ankles.

“Oh! yes, you can wheedle, you old hypocrite!” she said. “Sylvie!
Sylvie!”

“Yes, madame; what is it?”

“Just see what the cat has done!”

“It is all that stupid Christophe’s fault. I told him to stop and lay
the table. What has become of him? Don’t you worry, madame; Father
Goriot shall have it. I will fill it up with water, and he won’t know
the difference; he never notices anything, not even what he eats.”

“I wonder where the old heathen can have gone?” said Mme. Vauquer,
setting the plates round the table.

“Who knows? He is up to all sorts of tricks.”

“I have overslept myself,” said Mme. Vauquer.

“But madame looks as fresh as a rose, all the same.”

The door bell rang at that moment, and Vautrin came through the
sitting-room, singing loudly:

  “‘Tis the same old story everywhere,
   A roving heart and a roving glance..

“Oh! Mamma Vauquer! good-morning!” he cried at the sight of his hostess,
and he put his arm gaily round her waist.

“There! have done----”

“‘Impertinence!’ Say it!” he answered. “Come, say it! Now, isn’t that
what you really mean? Stop a bit, I will help you to set the table. Ah!
I am a nice man, am I not?

  “For the locks of brown and the golden hair
     A sighing lover...

“Oh! I have just seen something so funny----

                  .... led by chance.”

“What?” asked the widow.

“Father Goriot in the goldsmith’s shop in the Rue Dauphine at half-past
eight this morning. They buy old spoons and forks and gold lace there,
and Goriot sold a piece of silver plate for a good round sum. It had
been twisted out of shape very neatly for a man that’s not used to the
trade.”

“Really? You don’t say so?”

“Yes. One of my friends is expatriating himself; I had been to see him
off on board the Royal Mail steamer, and was coming back here. I waited
after that to see what Father Goriot would do; it is a comical affair.
He came back to this quarter of the world, to the Rue des Gres, and went
into a money-lender’s house; everybody knows him, Gobseck, a stuck-up
rascal, that would make dominoes out of his father’s bones, a Turk,
a heathen, an old Jew, a Greek; it would be a difficult matter to rob
_him_, for he puts all his coin into the Bank.”

“Then what was Father Goriot doing there?”

“Doing?” said Vautrin. “Nothing; he was bent on his own undoing. He is a
simpleton, stupid enough to ruin himself by running after----”

“There he is!” cried Sylvie.

“Christophe,” cried Father Goriot’s voice, “come upstairs with me.”

Christophe went up, and shortly afterwards came down again.

“Where are you going?” Mme. Vauquer asked of her servant.

“Out on an errand for M. Goriot.”

“What may that be?” said Vautrin, pouncing on a letter in Christophe’s
hand. “_Mme. la Comtesse Anastasie de Restaud_,” he read. “Where are you
going with it?” he added, as he gave the letter back to Christophe.

“To the Rue du Helder. I have orders to give this into her hands
myself.”

“What is there inside it?” said Vautrin, holding the letter up to the
light. “A banknote? No.” He peered into the envelope. “A receipted
account!” he cried. “My word! ‘tis a gallant old dotard. Off with you,
old chap,” he said, bringing down a hand on Christophe’s head, and
spinning the man round like a thimble; “you will have a famous tip.”

By this time the table was set. Sylvie was boiling the milk, Mme.
Vauquer was lighting a fire in the stove with some assistance from
Vautrin, who kept humming to himself:

  “The same old story everywhere,
   A roving heart and a roving glance.”

When everything was ready, Mme. Couture and Mlle. Taillefer came in.

“Where have you been this morning, fair lady?” said Mme. Vauquer,
turning to Mme. Couture.

“We have just been to say our prayers at Saint-Etienne du Mont. To-day
is the day when we must go to see M. Taillefer. Poor little thing! She
is trembling like a leaf,” Mme. Couture went on, as she seated herself
before the fire and held the steaming soles of her boots to the blaze.

“Warm yourself, Victorine,” said Mme. Vauquer.

“It is quite right and proper, mademoiselle, to pray to Heaven to soften
your father’s heart,” said Vautrin, as he drew a chair nearer to the
orphan girl; “but that is not enough. What you want is a friend who
will give the monster a piece of his mind; a barbarian that has three
millions (so they say), and will not give you a dowry; and a pretty girl
needs a dowry nowadays.”

“Poor child!” said Mme. Vauquer. “Never mind, my pet, your wretch of a
father is going just the way to bring trouble upon himself.”

Victorine’s eyes filled with tears at the words, and the widow checked
herself at a sign from Mme. Couture.

“If we could only see him!” said the Commissary-General’s widow; “if I
could speak to him myself and give him his wife’s last letter! I
have never dared to run the risk of sending it by post; he knew my
handwriting----”

“‘Oh woman, persecuted and injured innocent!’” exclaimed Vautrin,
breaking in upon her. “So that is how you are, is it? In a few days’
time I will look into your affairs, and it will be all right, you shall
see.”

“Oh! sir,” said Victorine, with a tearful but eager glance at Vautrin,
who showed no sign of being touched by it, “if you know of any way
of communicating with my father, please be sure and tell him that his
affection and my mother’s honor are more to me than all the money in the
world. If you can induce him to relent a little towards me, I will pray
to God for you. You may be sure of my gratitude----”

“_The same old story everywhere_,” sang Vautrin, with a satirical
intonation. At this juncture, Goriot, Mlle. Michonneau, and Poiret came
downstairs together; possibly the scent of the gravy which Sylvie was
making to serve with the mutton had announced breakfast. The seven
people thus assembled bade each other good-morning, and took their
places at the table; the clock struck ten, and the student’s footstep
was heard outside.

“Ah! here you are, M. Eugene,” said Sylvie; “every one is breakfasting
at home to-day.”

The student exchanged greetings with the lodgers, and sat down beside
Goriot.

“I have just met with a queer adventure,” he said, as he helped himself
abundantly to the mutton, and cut a slice of bread, which Mme. Vauquer’s
eyes gauged as usual.

“An adventure?” queried Poiret.

“Well, and what is there to astonish you in that, old boy?” Vautrin
asked of Poiret. “M. Eugene is cut out for that kind of thing.”

Mlle. Taillefer stole a timid glance at the young student.

“Tell us about your adventure!” demanded M. Vautrin.

“Yesterday evening I went to a ball given by a cousin of mine, the
Vicomtesse de Beauseant. She has a magnificent house; the rooms are hung
with silk--in short, it was a splendid affair, and I was as happy as a
king---”

“Fisher,” put in Vautrin, interrupting.

“What do you mean, sir?” said Eugene sharply.

“I said ‘fisher,’ because kingfishers see a good deal more fun than
kings.”

“Quite true; I would much rather be the little careless bird than a
king,” said Poiret the ditto-ist, “because----”

“In fact”--the law-student cut him short--“I danced with one of the
handsomest women in the room, a charming countess, the most exquisite
creature I have ever seen. There was peach blossom in her hair, and she
had the loveliest bouquet of flowers--real flowers, that scented the
air----but there! it is no use trying to describe a woman glowing with
the dance. You ought to have seen her! Well, and this morning I met this
divine countess about nine o’clock, on foot in the Rue de Gres. Oh! how
my heart beat! I began to think----”

“That she was coming here,” said Vautrin, with a keen look at the
student. “I expect that she was going to call on old Gobseck, a
money-lender. If ever you explore a Parisian woman’s heart, you will
find the money-lender first, and the lover afterwards. Your countess is
called Anastasie de Restaud, and she lives in the Rue du Helder.”

The student stared hard at Vautrin. Father Goriot raised his head at the
words, and gave the two speakers a glance so full of intelligence and
uneasiness that the lodgers beheld him with astonishment.

“Then Christophe was too late, and she must have gone to him!” cried
Goriot, with anguish in his voice.

“It is just as I guessed,” said Vautrin, leaning over to whisper in Mme.
Vauquer’s ear.

Goriot went on with his breakfast, but seemed unconscious of what he was
doing. He had never looked more stupid nor more taken up with his own
thoughts than he did at that moment.

“Who the devil could have told you her name, M. Vautrin?” asked Eugene.

“Aha! there you are!” answered Vautrin. “Old Father Goriot there knew it
quite well! and why should I not know it too?”

“M. Goriot?” the student cried.

“What is it?” asked the old man. “So she was very beautiful, was she,
yesterday night?”

“Who?”

“Mme. de Restaud.”

“Look at the old wretch,” said Mme. Vauquer, speaking to Vautrin; “how
his eyes light up!”

“Then does he really keep her?” said Mlle. Michonneau, in a whisper to
the student.

“Oh! yes, she was tremendously pretty,” Eugene answered. Father Goriot
watched him with eager eyes. “If Mme. de Beauseant had not been there,
my divine countess would have been the queen of the ball; none of the
younger men had eyes for any one else. I was the twelfth on her list,
and she danced every quadrille. The other women were furious. She must
have enjoyed herself, if ever creature did! It is a true saying
that there is no more beautiful sight than a frigate in full sail, a
galloping horse, or a woman dancing.”

“So the wheel turns,” said Vautrin; “yesterday night at a duchess’
ball, this morning in a money-lender’s office, on the lowest rung of the
ladder--just like a Parisienne! If their husbands cannot afford to pay
for their frantic extravagance, they will sell themselves. Or if
they cannot do that, they will tear out their mothers’ hearts to find
something to pay for their splendor. They will turn the world upside
down. Just a Parisienne through and through!”

Father Goriot’s face, which had shone at the student’s words like the
sun on a bright day, clouded over all at once at this cruel speech of
Vautrin’s.

“Well,” said Mme. Vauquer, “but where is your adventure? Did you speak
to her? Did you ask her if she wanted to study law?”

“She did not see me,” said Eugene. “But only think of meeting one of the
prettiest women in Paris in the Rue des Gres at nine o’clock! She could
not have reached home after the ball till two o’clock this morning.
Wasn’t it queer? There is no place like Paris for this sort of
adventures.”

“Pshaw! much funnier things than _that_ happen here!” exclaimed Vautrin.

Mlle. Taillefer had scarcely heeded the talk, she was so absorbed by the
thought of the new attempt that she was about to make. Mme. Couture made
a sign that it was time to go upstairs and dress; the two ladies went
out, and Father Goriot followed their example.

“Well, did you see?” said Mme. Vauquer, addressing Vautrin and the rest
of the circle. “He is ruining himself for those women, that is plain.”

“Nothing will ever make me believe that that beautiful Comtesse de
Restaud is anything to Father Goriot,” cried the student.

“Well, and if you don’t,” broke in Vautrin, “we are not set on
convincing you. You are too young to know Paris thoroughly yet; later on
you will find out that there are what we call men with a passion----”

Mlle. Michonneau gave Vautrin a quick glance at these words. They seemed
to be like the sound of a trumpet to a trooper’s horse. “Aha!” said
Vautrin, stopping in his speech to give her a searching glance, “so we
have had our little experiences, have we?”

The old maid lowered her eyes like a nun who sees a statue.

“Well,” he went on, “when folk of that kind get a notion into their
heads, they cannot drop it. They must drink the water from some
particular spring--it is stagnant as often as not; but they will sell
their wives and families, they will sell their own souls to the devil to
get it. For some this spring is play, or the stock-exchange, or music,
or a collection of pictures or insects; for others it is some woman who
can give them the dainties they like. You might offer these last all the
women on earth--they would turn up their noses; they will have the only
one who can gratify their passion. It often happens that the woman
does not care for them at all, and treats them cruelly; they buy their
morsels of satisfaction very dear; but no matter, the fools are never
tired of it; they will take their last blanket to the pawnbroker’s to
give their last five-franc piece to her. Father Goriot here is one of
that sort. He is discreet, so the Countess exploits him--just the way of
the gay world. The poor old fellow thinks of her and of nothing else.
In all other respects you see he is a stupid animal; but get him on
that subject, and his eyes sparkle like diamonds. That secret is not
difficult to guess. He took some plate himself this morning to the
melting-pot, and I saw him at Daddy Gobseck’s in the Rue des Gres. And
now, mark what follows--he came back here, and gave a letter for the
Comtesse de Restaud to that noodle of a Christophe, who showed us the
address; there was a receipted bill inside it. It is clear that it was
an urgent matter if the Countess also went herself to the old money
lender. Father Goriot has financed her handsomely. There is no need to
tack a tale together; the thing is self-evident. So that shows you, sir
student, that all the time your Countess was smiling, dancing, flirting,
swaying her peach-flower crowned head, with her gown gathered into her
hand, her slippers were pinching her, as they say; she was thinking of
her protested bills, or her lover’s protested bills.”

“You have made me wild to know the truth,” cried Eugene; “I will go to
call on Mme. de Restaud to-morrow.”

“Yes,” echoed Poiret; “you must go and call on Mme. de Restaud.”

“And perhaps you will find Father Goriot there, who will take payment
for the assistance he politely rendered.”

Eugene looked disgusted. “Why, then, this Paris of yours is a slough.”

“And an uncommonly queer slough, too,” replied Vautrin. “The mud
splashes you as you drive through it in your carriage--you are a
respectable person; you go afoot and are splashed--you are a scoundrel.
You are so unlucky as to walk off with something or other belonging
to somebody else, and they exhibit you as a curiosity in the Place du
Palais-de-Justice; you steal a million, and you are pointed out in every
salon as a model of virtue. And you pay thirty millions for the police
and the courts of justice, for the maintenance of law and order! A
pretty slate of things it is!”

“What,” cried Mme. Vauquer, “has Father Goriot really melted down his
silver posset-dish?”

“There were two turtle-doves on the lid, were there not?” asked Eugene.

“Yes, that there were.”

“Then, was he fond of it?” said Eugene. “He cried while he was breaking
up the cup and plate. I happened to see him by accident.”

“It was dear to him as his own life,” answered the widow.

“There! you see how infatuated the old fellow is!” cried Vautrin. “The
woman yonder can coax the soul out of him.”

The student went up to his room. Vautrin went out, and a few moments
later Mme. Couture and Victorine drove away in a cab which Sylvie had
called for them. Poiret gave his arm to Mlle. Michonneau, and they went
together to spend the two sunniest hours of the day in the Jardin des
Plantes.

“Well, those two are as good as married,” was the portly Sylvie’s
comment. “They are going out together to-day for the first time. They
are such a couple of dry sticks that if they happen to strike against
each other they will draw sparks like flint and steel.”

“Keep clear of Mlle. Michonneau’s shawl, then,” said Mme. Vauquer,
laughing; “it would flare up like tinder.”

At four o’clock that evening, when Goriot came in, he saw, by the light
of two smoky lamps, that Victorine’s eyes were red. Mme. Vauquer was
listening to the history of the visit made that morning to M. Taillefer;
it had been made in vain. Taillefer was tired of the annual application
made by his daughter and her elderly friend; he gave them a personal
interview in order to arrive at an understanding with them.

“My dear lady,” said Mme. Couture, addressing Mme. Vauquer, “just
imagine it; he did not even ask Victorine to sit down, she was standing
the whole time. He said to me quite coolly, without putting himself in a
passion, that we might spare ourselves the trouble of going there; that
the young lady (he would not call her his daughter) was injuring her
cause by importuning him (_importuning!_ once a year, the wretch!); that
as Victorine’s mother had nothing when he married her, Victorine ought
not to expect anything from him; in fact, he said the most cruel things,
that made the poor child burst out crying. The little thing threw
herself at her father’s feet and spoke up bravely; she said that she
only persevered in her visits for her mother’s sake; that she would
obey him without a murmur, but that she begged him to read her poor dead
mother’s farewell letter. She took it up and gave it to him, saying the
most beautiful things in the world, most beautifully expressed; I do not
know where she learned them; God must have put them into her head, for
the poor child was inspired to speak so nicely that it made me cry like
a fool to hear her talk. And what do you think the monster was doing all
the time? Cutting his nails! He took the letter that poor Mme. Taillefer
had soaked with tears, and flung it on to the chimney-piece. ‘That is
all right,’ he said. He held out his hands to raise his daughter, but
she covered them with kisses, and he drew them away again. Scandalous,
isn’t it? And his great booby of a son came in and took no notice of his
sister.”

“What inhuman wretches they must be!” said Father Goriot.

“And then they both went out of the room,” Mme. Couture went on, without
heeding the worthy vermicelli maker’s exclamation; “father and son bowed
to me, and asked me to excuse them on account of urgent business! That
is the history of our call. Well, he has seen his daughter at any rate.
How he can refuse to acknowledge her I cannot think, for they are as
alike as two peas.”

The boarders dropped in one after another, interchanging greetings and
empty jokes that certain classes of Parisians regard as humorous and
witty. Dulness is their prevailing ingredient, and the whole point
consists in mispronouncing a word or a gesture. This kind of argot is
always changing. The essence of the jest consists in some catchword
suggested by a political event, an incident in the police courts, a
street song, or a bit of burlesque at some theatre, and forgotten in a
month. Anything and everything serves to keep up a game of battledore
and shuttlecock with words and ideas. The diorama, a recent invention,
which carried an optical illusion a degree further than panoramas, had
given rise to a mania among art students for ending every word with
_rama_. The Maison Vauquer had caught the infection from a young artist
among the boarders.

“Well, Monsieur-r-r Poiret,” said the _employe_ from the Museum, “how
is your health-orama?” Then, without waiting for an answer, he turned to
Mme. Couture and Victorine with a “Ladies, you seem melancholy.”

“Is dinner ready?” cried Horace Bianchon, a medical student, and a
friend of Rastignac’s; “my stomach is sinking _usque ad talones_.”

“There is an uncommon _frozerama_ outside,” said Vautrin. “Make room
there, Father Goriot! Confound it, your foot covers the whole front of
the stove.”

“Illustrious M. Vautrin,” put in Bianchon, “why do you say _frozerama_?
It is incorrect; it should be _frozenrama_.”

“No, it shouldn’t,” said the official from the Museum; “_frozerama_ is
right by the same rule that you say ‘My feet are _froze_.’”

“Ah! ah!”

“Here is his Excellency the Marquis de Rastignac, Doctor of the Law of
Contraries,” cried Bianchon, seizing Eugene by the throat, and almost
throttling him.

“Hallo there! hallo!”

Mlle. Michonneau came noiselessly in, bowed to the rest of the party,
and took her place beside the three women without saying a word.

“That old bat always makes me shudder,” said Bianchon in a low voice,
indicating Mlle. Michonneau to Vautrin. “I have studied Gall’s system,
and I am sure she has the bump of Judas.”

“Then you have seen a case before?” said Vautrin.

“Who has not?” answered Bianchon. “Upon my word, that ghastly old maid
looks just like one of the long worms that will gnaw a beam through,
give them time enough.”

“That is the way, young man,” returned he of the forty years and the
dyed whiskers:

  “The rose has lived the life of a rose--
   A morning’s space.”

“Aha! here is a magnificent _soupe-au-rama_,” cried Poiret as Christophe
came in bearing the soup with cautious heed.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” said Mme. Vauquer; “it is _soupe aux choux_.”

All the young men roared with laughter.

“Had you there, Poiret!”

“Poir-r-r-rette! she had you there!”

“Score two points to Mamma Vauquer,” said Vautrin.

“Did any of you notice the fog this morning?” asked the official.

“It was a frantic fog,” said Bianchon, “a fog unparalleled, doleful,
melancholy, sea-green, asthmatical--a Goriot of a fog!”

“A Goriorama,” said the art student, “because you couldn’t see a thing
in it.”

“Hey! Milord Gaoriotte, they air talking about yoo-o-ou!”

Father Goriot, seated at the lower end of the table, close to the door
through which the servant entered, raised his face; he had smelt at a
scrap of bread that lay under his table napkin, an old trick acquired in
his commercial capacity, that still showed itself at times.

“Well,” Madame Vauquer cried in sharp tones, that rang above the rattle
of spoons and plates and the sound of other voices, “and is there
anything the matter with the bread?”

“Nothing whatever, madame,” he answered; “on the contrary, it is made of
the best quality of corn; flour from Etampes.”

“How could you tell?” asked Eugene.

“By the color, by the flavor.”

“You knew the flavor by the smell, I suppose,” said Mme. Vauquer. “You
have grown so economical, you will find out how to live on the smell of
cooking at last.”

“Take out a patent for it, then,” cried the Museum official; “you would
make a handsome fortune.”

“Never mind him,” said the artist; “he does that sort of thing to delude
us into thinking that he was a vermicelli maker.”

“Your nose is a corn-sampler, it appears?” inquired the official.

“Corn _what_?” asked Bianchon.

“Corn-el.”

“Corn-et.”

“Corn-elian.”

“Corn-ice.”

“Corn-ucopia.”

“Corn-crake.”

“Corn-cockle.”

“Corn-orama.”

The eight responses came like a rolling fire from every part of the
room, and the laughter that followed was the more uproarious because
poor Father Goriot stared at the others with a puzzled look, like a
foreigner trying to catch the meaning of words in a language which he
does not understand.

“Corn?...” he said, turning to Vautrin, his next neighbor.

“Corn on your foot, old man!” said Vautrin, and he drove Father Goriot’s
cap down over his eyes by a blow on the crown.

The poor old man thus suddenly attacked was for a moment too bewildered
to do anything. Christophe carried off his plate, thinking that he had
finished his soup, so that when Goriot had pushed back his cap from his
eyes his spoon encountered the table. Every one burst out laughing. “You
are a disagreeable joker, sir,” said the old man, “and if you take any
further liberties with me----”

“Well, what then, old boy?” Vautrin interrupted.

“Well, then, you shall pay dearly for it some day----”

“Down below, eh?” said the artist, “in the little dark corner where they
put naughty boys.”

“Well, mademoiselle,” Vautrin said, turning to Victorine, “you are
eating nothing. So papa was refractory, was he?”

“A monster!” said Mme. Couture.

“Mademoiselle might make application for aliment pending her suit; she
is not eating anything. Eh! eh! just see how Father Goriot is staring at
Mlle. Victorine.”

The old man had forgotten his dinner, he was so absorbed in gazing at
the poor girl; the sorrow in her face was unmistakable,--the slighted
love of a child whose father would not recognize her.

“We are mistaken about Father Goriot, my dear boy,” said Eugene in a low
voice. “He is not an idiot, nor wanting in energy. Try your Gall system
on him, and let me know what you think. I saw him crush a silver dish
last night as if it had been made of wax; there seems to be something
extraordinary going on in his mind just now, to judge by his face. His
life is so mysterious that it must be worth studying. Oh! you may laugh,
Bianchon; I am not joking.”

“The man is a subject, is he?” said Bianchon; “all right! I will dissect
him, if he will give me the chance.”

“No; feel his bumps.”

“Hm!--his stupidity might perhaps be contagious.”



The next day Rastignac dressed himself very elegantly, and about three
o’clock in the afternoon went to call on Mme. de Restaud. On the way
thither he indulged in the wild intoxicating dreams which fill a young
head so full of delicious excitement. Young men at his age take
no account of obstacles nor of dangers; they see success in every
direction; imagination has free play, and turns their lives into a
romance; they are saddened or discouraged by the collapse of one of the
visionary schemes that have no existence save in their heated fancy. If
youth were not ignorant and timid, civilization would be impossible.

Eugene took unheard-of pains to keep himself in a spotless condition,
but on his way through the streets he began to think about Mme. de
Restaud and what he should say to her. He equipped himself with wit,
rehearsed repartees in the course of an imaginary conversation, and
prepared certain neat speeches a la Talleyrand, conjuring up a series of
small events which should prepare the way for the declaration on which
he had based his future; and during these musings the law student was
bespattered with mud, and by the time he reached the Palais Royal he was
obliged to have his boots blacked and his trousers brushed.

“If I were rich,” he said, as he changed the five-franc piece he had
brought with him in case anything might happen, “I would take a cab,
then I could think at my ease.”

At last he reached the Rue du Helder, and asked for the Comtesse de
Restaud. He bore the contemptuous glances of the servants, who had seen
him cross the court on foot, with the cold fury of a man who knows that
he will succeed some day. He understood the meaning of their glances at
once, for he had felt his inferiority as soon as he entered the court,
where a smart cab was waiting. All the delights of life in Paris
seemed to be implied by this visible and manifest sign of luxury and
extravagance. A fine horse, in magnificent harness, was pawing the
ground, and all at once the law student felt out of humor with himself.
Every compartment in his brain which he had thought to find so full of
wit was bolted fast; he grew positively stupid. He sent up his name
to the Countess, and waited in the ante-chamber, standing on one foot
before a window that looked out upon the court; mechanically he leaned
his elbow against the sash, and stared before him. The time seemed long;
he would have left the house but for the southern tenacity of purpose
which works miracles when it is single-minded.

“Madame is in her boudoir, and cannot see any one at present, sir,”
 said the servant. “She gave me no answer; but if you will go into the
dining-room, there is some one already there.”

Rastignac was impressed with a sense of the formidable power of the
lackey who can accuse or condemn his masters by a word; he coolly opened
the door by which the man had just entered the ante-chamber, meaning,
no doubt, to show these insolent flunkeys that he was familiar with the
house; but he found that he had thoughtlessly precipitated himself into
a small room full of dressers, where lamps were standing, and hot-water
pipes, on which towels were being dried; a dark passage and a back
staircase lay beyond it. Stifled laughter from the ante-chamber added to
his confusion.

“This way to the drawing-room, sir,” said the servant, with the
exaggerated respect which seemed to be one more jest at his expense.

Eugene turned so quickly that he stumbled against a bath. By good luck,
he managed to keep his hat on his head, and saved it from immersion in
the water; but just as he turned, a door opened at the further end of
the dark passage, dimly lighted by a small lamp. Rastignac heard voices
and the sound of a kiss; one of the speakers was Mme. de Restaud,
the other was Father Goriot. Eugene followed the servant through the
dining-room into the drawing-room; he went to a window that looked
out into the courtyard, and stood there for a while. He meant to know
whether this Goriot was really the Goriot that he knew. His heart
beat unwontedly fast; he remembered Vautrin’s hideous insinuations. A
well-dressed young man suddenly emerged from the room almost as Eugene
entered it, saying impatiently to the servant who stood at the door: “I
am going, Maurice. Tell Madame la Comtesse that I waited more than half
an hour for her.”

Whereupon this insolent being, who, doubtless, had a right to be
insolent, sang an Italian trill, and went towards the window where
Eugene was standing, moved thereto quite as much by a desire to see the
student’s face as by a wish to look out into the courtyard.

“But M. le Comte had better wait a moment longer; madame is disengaged,”
 said Maurice, as he returned to the ante-chamber.

Just at that moment Father Goriot appeared close to the gate; he had
emerged from a door at the foot of the back staircase. The worthy soul
was preparing to open his umbrella regardless of the fact that the great
gate had opened to admit a tilbury, in which a young man with a ribbon
at his button-hole was seated. Father Goriot had scarcely time to start
back and save himself. The horse took fright at the umbrella, swerved,
and dashed forward towards the flight of steps. The young man looked
round in annoyance, saw Father Goriot, and greeted him as he went out
with constrained courtesy, such as people usually show to a money-lender
so long as they require his services, or the sort of respect they feel
it necessary to show for some one whose reputation has been blown upon,
so that they blush to acknowledge his acquaintance. Father Goriot gave
him a little friendly nod and a good-natured smile. All this happened
with lightning speed. Eugene was so deeply interested that he forgot
that he was not alone till he suddenly heard the Countess’ voice.

“Oh! Maxime, were you going away?” she said reproachfully, with a shade
of pique in her manner. The Countess had not seen the incident nor the
entrance of the tilbury. Rastignac turned abruptly and saw her standing
before him, coquettishly dressed in a loose white cashmere gown with
knots of rose-colored ribbon here and there; her hair was carelessly
coiled about her head, as is the wont of Parisian women in the morning;
there was a soft fragrance about her--doubtless she was fresh from
a bath;--her graceful form seemed more flexible, her beauty more
luxuriant. Her eyes glistened. A young man can see everything at a
glance; he feels the radiant influence of woman as a plant discerns and
absorbs its nutriment from the air; he did not need to touch her hands
to feel their cool freshness. He saw faint rose tints through the
cashmere of the dressing gown; it had fallen slightly open, giving
glimpses of a bare throat, on which the student’s eyes rested. The
Countess had no need of the adventitious aid of corsets; her girdle
defined the outlines of her slender waist; her throat was a challenge
to love; her feet, thrust into slippers, were daintily small. As Maxime
took her hand and kissed it, Eugene became aware of Maxime’s existence,
and the Countess saw Eugene.

“Oh! is that you M. de Rastignac? I am very glad to see you,” she said,
but there was something in her manner that a shrewd observer would have
taken as a hint to depart.

Maxime, as the Countess Anastasie had called the young man with the
haughty insolence of bearing, looked from Eugene to the lady, and from
the lady to Eugene; it was sufficiently evident that he wished to be rid
of the latter. An exact and faithful rendering of the glance might be
given in the words: “Look here, my dear; I hope you intend to send this
little whipper-snapper about his business.”

The Countess consulted the young man’s face with an intent
submissiveness that betrays all the secrets of a woman’s heart, and
Rastignac all at once began to hate him violently. To begin with, the
sight of the fair carefully arranged curls on the other’s comely
head had convinced him that his own crop was hideous; Maxime’s boots,
moreover, were elegant and spotless, while his own, in spite of all
his care, bore some traces of his recent walk; and, finally, Maxime’s
overcoat fitted the outline of his figure gracefully, he looked like a
pretty woman, while Eugene was wearing a black coat at half-past two.
The quick-witted child of the Charente felt the disadvantage at which he
was placed beside this tall, slender dandy, with the clear gaze and
the pale face, one of those men who would ruin orphan children without
scruple. Mme. de Restaud fled into the next room without waiting for
Eugene to speak; shaking out the skirts of her dressing-gown in her
flight, so that she looked like a white butterfly, and Maxime hurried
after her. Eugene, in a fury, followed Maxime and the Countess, and
the three stood once more face to face by the hearth in the large
drawing-room. The law student felt quite sure that the odious Maxime
found him in the way, and even at the risk of displeasing Mme. de
Restaud, he meant to annoy the dandy. It had struck him all at once that
he had seen the young man before at Mme. de Beauseant’s ball; he guessed
the relation between Maxime and Mme. de Restaud; and with the youthful
audacity that commits prodigious blunders or achieves signal success, he
said to himself, “This is my rival; I mean to cut him out.”

Rash resolve! He did not know that M. le Comte Maxime de Trailles would
wait till he was insulted, so as to fire first and kill his man. Eugene
was a sportsman and a good shot, but he had not yet hit the bulls’s eye
twenty times out of twenty-two. The young Count dropped into a low chair
by the hearth, took up the tongs, and made up the fire so violently and
so sulkily, that Anastasie’s fair face suddenly clouded over. She turned
to Eugene, with a cool, questioning glance that asked plainly, “Why do
you not go?” a glance which well-bred people regard as a cue to make
their exit.

Eugene assumed an amiable expression.

“Madame,” he began, “I hastened to call upon you----”

He stopped short. The door opened, and the owner of the tilbury suddenly
appeared. He had left his hat outside, and did not greet the Countess;
he looked meditatively at Rastignac, and held out his hand to Maxime
with a cordial “Good morning,” that astonished Eugene not a little. The
young provincial did not understand the amenities of a triple alliance.

“M. de Restaud,” said the Countess, introducing her husband to the law
student.

Eugene bowed profoundly.

“This gentleman,” she continued, presenting Eugene to her husband,
“is M. de Rastignac; he is related to Mme. la Vicomtesse de Beauseant
through the Marcillacs; I had the pleasure of meeting him at her last
ball.”

_Related to Mme. la Vicomtesse de Beauseant through the Marcillacs!_
These words, on which the countess threw ever so slight an emphasis, by
reason of the pride that the mistress of a house takes in showing
that she only receives people of distinction as visitors in her house,
produced a magical effect. The Count’s stiff manner relaxed at once as
he returned the student’s bow.

“Delighted to have an opportunity of making your acquaintance,” he said.

Maxime de Trailles himself gave Eugene an uneasy glance, and suddenly
dropped his insolent manner. The mighty name had all the power of a
fairy’s wand; those closed compartments in the southern brain flew open
again; Rastignac’s carefully drilled faculties returned. It was as if a
sudden light had pierced the obscurity of this upper world of Paris, and
he began to see, though everything was indistinct as yet. Mme. Vauquer’s
lodging-house and Father Goriot were very far remote from his thoughts.

“I thought that the Marcillacs were extinct,” the Comte de Restaud said,
addressing Eugene.

“Yes, they are extinct,” answered the law student. “My great-uncle, the
Chevalier de Rastignac, married the heiress of the Marcillac family.
They had only one daughter, who married the Marechal de Clarimbault,
Mme. de Beauseant’s grandfather on the mother’s side. We are the younger
branch of the family, and the younger branch is all the poorer because
my great-uncle, the Vice-Admiral, lost all that he had in the King’s
service. The Government during the Revolution refused to admit our
claims when the Compagnie des Indes was liquidated.”

“Was not your great-uncle in command of the _Vengeur_ before 1789?”

“Yes.”

“Then he would be acquainted with my grandfather, who commanded the
_Warwick_.”

Maxime looked at Mme. de Restaud and shrugged his shoulders, as who
should say, “If he is going to discuss nautical matters with that
fellow, it is all over with us.” Anastasie understood the glance that M.
de Trailles gave her. With a woman’s admirable tact, she began to smile
and said:

“Come with me, Maxime; I have something to say to you. We will leave
you two gentlemen to sail in company on board the _Warwick_ and the
_Vengeur_.”

She rose to her feet and signed to Maxime to follow her, mirth and
mischief in her whole attitude, and the two went in the direction of the
boudoir. The _morganatic_ couple (to use a convenient German expression
which has no exact equivalent) had reached the door, when the Count
interrupted himself in his talk with Eugene.

“Anastasie!” he cried pettishly, “just stay a moment, dear; you know
very well that----”

“I am coming back in a minute,” she interrupted; “I have a commission
for Maxime to execute, and I want to tell him about it.”

She came back almost immediately. She had noticed the inflection in her
husband’s voice, and knew that it would not be safe to retire to the
boudoir; like all women who are compelled to study their husbands’
characters in order to have their own way, and whose business it is
to know exactly how far they can go without endangering a good
understanding, she was very careful to avoid petty collisions in
domestic life. It was Eugene who had brought about this untoward
incident; so the Countess looked at Maxime and indicated the law student
with an air of exasperation. M. de Trailles addressed the Count, the
Countess, and Eugene with the pointed remark, “You are busy, I do not
want to interrupt you; good-day,” and he went.

“Just wait a moment, Maxime!” the Count called after him.

“Come and dine with us,” said the Countess, leaving Eugene and her
husband together once more. She followed Maxime into the little
drawing-room, where they sat together sufficiently long to feel sure
that Rastignac had taken his leave.

The law student heard their laughter, and their voices, and the pauses
in their talk; he grew malicious, exerted his conversational powers for
M. de Restaud, flattered him, and drew him into discussions, to the
end that he might see the Countess again and discover the nature of her
relations with Father Goriot. This Countess with a husband and a lover,
for Maxime clearly was her lover, was a mystery. What was the secret tie
that bound her to the old tradesman? This mystery he meant to penetrate,
hoping by its means to gain a sovereign ascendency over this fair
typical Parisian.

“Anastasie!” the Count called again to his wife.

“Poor Maxime!” she said, addressing the young man. “Come, we must resign
ourselves. This evening----”

“I hope, Nasie,” he said in her ear, “that you will give orders not to
admit that youngster, whose eyes light up like live coals when he looks
at you. He will make you a declaration, and compromise you, and then you
will compel me to kill him.”

“Are you mad, Maxime?” she said. “A young lad of a student is, on the
contrary, a capital lightning-conductor; is not that so? Of course, I
mean to make Restaud furiously jealous of him.”

Maxime burst out laughing, and went out, followed by the Countess, who
stood at the window to watch him into his carriage; he shook his whip,
and made his horse prance. She only returned when the great gate had
been closed after him.

“What do you think, dear?” cried the Count, her husband, “this
gentleman’s family estate is not far from Verteuil, on the Charente; his
great-uncle and my grandfather were acquainted.”

“Delighted to find that we have acquaintances in common,” said the
Countess, with a preoccupied manner.

“More than you think,” said Eugene, in a low voice.

“What do you mean?” she asked quickly.

“Why, only just now,” said the student, “I saw a gentleman go out at
the gate, Father Goriot, my next door neighbor in the house where I am
lodging.”

At the sound of this name, and the prefix that embellished it, the
Count, who was stirring the fire, let the tongs fall as though they had
burned his fingers, and rose to his feet.

“Sir,” he cried, “you might have called him ‘Monsieur Goriot’!”

The Countess turned pale at first at the sight of her husband’s
vexation, then she reddened; clearly she was embarrassed, her answer
was made in a tone that she tried to make natural, and with an air of
assumed carelessness:

“You could not know any one who is dearer to us both...”

She broke off, glanced at the piano as if some fancy had crossed her
mind, and asked, “Are you fond of music, M. de Rastignac?”

“Exceedingly,” answered Eugene, flushing, and disconcerted by a dim
suspicion that he had somehow been guilty of a clumsy piece of folly.

“Do you sing?” she cried, going to the piano, and, sitting down before
it, she swept her fingers over the keyboard from end to end. R-r-r-rah!

“No, madame.”

The Comte de Restaud walked to and fro.

“That is a pity; you are without one great means of success.--_Ca-ro,
ca-a-ro, ca-a-a-ro, non du-bi-ta-re_,” sang the Countess.

Eugene had a second time waved a magic wand when he uttered Goriot’s
name, but the effect seemed to be entirely opposite to that produced by
the formula “related to Mme. de Beauseant.” His position was not
unlike that of some visitor permitted as a favor to inspect a private
collection of curiosities, when by inadvertence he comes into collision
with a glass case full of sculptured figures, and three or four heads,
imperfectly secured, fall at the shock. He wished the earth would open
and swallow him. Mme. de Restaud’s expression was reserved and chilly,
her eyes had grown indifferent, and sedulously avoided meeting those of
the unlucky student of law.

“Madame,” he said, “you wish to talk with M. de Restaud; permit me to
wish you good-day----”

The Countess interrupted him by a gesture, saying hastily, “Whenever you
come to see us, both M. de Restaud and I shall be delighted to see you.”

Eugene made a profound bow and took his leave, followed by M. de
Restaud, who insisted, in spite of his remonstrances, on accompanying
him into the hall.

“Neither your mistress nor I are at home to that gentleman when he
calls,” the Count said to Maurice.

As Eugene set foot on the steps, he saw that it was raining.

“Come,” said he to himself, “somehow I have just made a mess of it, I
do not know how. And now I am going to spoil my hat and coat into the
bargain. I ought to stop in my corner, grind away at law, and never
look to be anything but a boorish country magistrate. How can I go
into society, when to manage properly you want a lot of cabs, varnished
boots, gold watch chains, and all sorts of things; you have to wear
white doeskin gloves that cost six francs in the morning, and primrose
kid gloves every evening? A fig for that old humbug of a Goriot!”

When he reached the street door, the driver of a hackney coach, who had
probably just deposited a wedding party at their door, and asked nothing
better than a chance of making a little money for himself without his
employer’s knowledge, saw that Eugene had no umbrella, remarked his
black coat, white waistcoat, yellow gloves, and varnished boots, and
stopped and looked at him inquiringly. Eugene, in the blind desperation
that drives a young man to plunge deeper and deeper into an abyss, as if
he might hope to find a fortunate issue in its lowest depths, nodded
in reply to the driver’s signal, and stepped into the cab; a few stray
petals of orange blossom and scraps of wire bore witness to its recent
occupation by a wedding party.

“Where am I to drive, sir?” demanded the man, who, by this time, had
taken off his white gloves.

“Confound it!” Eugene said to himself, “I am in for it now, and at least
I will not spend cab-hire for nothing!--Drive to the Hotel Beauseant,”
 he said aloud.

“Which?” asked the man, a portentous word that reduced Eugene to
confusion. This young man of fashion, species incerta, did not know that
there were two Hotels Beauseant; he was not aware how rich he was in
relations who did not care about him.

“The Vicomte de Beauseant, Rue----”

“De Grenelle,” interrupted the driver, with a jerk of his head. “You
see, there are the hotels of the Marquis and Comte de Beauseant in the
Rue Saint-Dominique,” he added, drawing up the step.

“I know all about that,” said Eugene, severely.--“Everybody is laughing
at me to-day, it seems!” he said to himself, as he deposited his hat on
the opposite seat. “This escapade will cost me a king’s ransom, but,
at any rate, I shall call on my so-called cousin in a thoroughly
aristocratic fashion. Goriot has cost me ten francs already, the old
scoundrel. My word! I will tell Mme. de Beauseant about my adventure;
perhaps it may amuse her. Doubtless she will know the secret of the
criminal relation between that handsome woman and the old rat without a
tail. It would be better to find favor in my cousin’s eyes than to
come in contact with that shameless woman, who seems to me to have very
expensive tastes. Surely the beautiful Vicomtesse’s personal interest
would turn the scale for me, when the mere mention of her name produces
such an effect. Let us look higher. If you set yourself to carry the
heights of heaven, you must face God.”

The innumerable thoughts that surged through his brain might be summed
up in these phrases. He grew calmer, and recovered something of his
assurance as he watched the falling rain. He told himself that though
he was about to squander two of the precious five-franc pieces that
remained to him, the money was well laid out in preserving his coat,
boots, and hat; and his cabman’s cry of “Gate, if you please,” almost
put him in spirits. A Swiss, in scarlet and gold, appeared, the great
door groaned on its hinges, and Rastignac, with sweet satisfaction,
beheld his equipage pass under the archway and stop before the flight
of steps beneath the awning. The driver, in a blue-and-red greatcoat,
dismounted and let down the step. As Eugene stepped out of the cab, he
heard smothered laughter from the peristyle. Three or four lackeys
were making merry over the festal appearance of the vehicle. In
another moment the law student was enlightened as to the cause of their
hilarity; he felt the full force of the contrast between his equipage
and one of the smartest broughams in Paris; a coachman, with powdered
hair, seemed to find it difficult to hold a pair of spirited horses, who
stood chafing the bit. In Mme. de Restaud’s courtyard, in the Chaussee
d’Antin, he had seen the neat turnout of a young man of six-and-twenty;
in the Faubourg Saint-Germain he found the luxurious equipage of a man
of rank; thirty thousand francs would not have purchased it.

“Who can be here?” said Eugene to himself. He began to understand,
though somewhat tardily, that he must not expect to find many women in
Paris who were not already appropriated, and that the capture of one
of these queens would be likely to cost something more than bloodshed.
“Confound it all! I expect my cousin also has her Maxime.”

He went up the steps, feeling that he was a blighted being. The glass
door was opened for him; the servants were as solemn as jackasses under
the curry comb. So far, Eugene had only been in the ballroom on the
ground floor of the Hotel Beauseant; the fete had followed so closely on
the invitation, that he had not had time to call on his cousin, and had
therefore never seen Mme. de Beauseant’s apartments; he was about to
behold for the first time a great lady among the wonderful and elegant
surroundings that reveal her character and reflect her daily life.
He was the more curious, because Mme. de Restaud’s drawing-room had
provided him with a standard of comparison.

At half-past four the Vicomtesse de Beauseant was visible. Five minutes
earlier she would not have received her cousin, but Eugene knew nothing
of the recognized routine of various houses in Paris. He was conducted
up the wide, white-painted, crimson-carpeted staircase, between the
gilded balusters and masses of flowering plants, to Mme. de Beauseant’s
apartments. He did not know the rumor current about Mme. de Beauseant,
one of the biographies told, with variations, in whispers, every evening
in the salons of Paris.

For three years past her name had been spoken of in connection with
that of one of the most wealthy and distinguished Portuguese nobles,
the Marquis d’Ajuda-Pinto. It was one of those innocent _liaisons_ which
possess so much charm for the two thus attached to each other that
they find the presence of a third person intolerable. The Vicomte de
Beauseant, therefore, had himself set an example to the rest of the
world by respecting, with as good a grace as might be, this morganatic
union. Any one who came to call on the Vicomtesse in the early days of
this friendship was sure to find the Marquis d’Ajuda-Pinto there. As,
under the circumstances, Mme. de Beauseant could not very well shut her
door against these visitors, she gave them such a cold reception, and
showed so much interest in the study of the ceiling, that no one could
fail to understand how much he bored her; and when it became known in
Paris that Mme. de Beauseant was bored by callers between two and four
o’clock, she was left in perfect solitude during that interval. She
went to the Bouffons or to the Opera with M. de Beauseant and M.
d’Ajuda-Pinto; and M. de Beauseant, like a well-bred man of the world,
always left his wife and the Portuguese as soon as he had installed
them. But M. d’Ajuda-Pinto must marry, and a Mlle. de Rochefide was the
young lady. In the whole fashionable world there was but one person who
as yet knew nothing of the arrangement, and that was Mme. de Beauseant.
Some of her friends had hinted at the possibility, and she had laughed
at them, believing that envy had prompted those ladies to try to make
mischief. And now, though the bans were about to be published, and
although the handsome Portuguese had come that day to break the news to
the Vicomtesse, he had not found courage as yet to say one word about
his treachery. How was it? Nothing is doubtless more difficult than the
notification of an ultimatum of this kind. There are men who feel more
at their ease when they stand up before another man who threatens their
lives with sword or pistol than in the presence of a woman who, after
two hours of lamentations and reproaches, falls into a dead swoon and
requires salts. At this moment, therefore, M. d’Ajuda-Pinto was on
thorns, and anxious to take his leave. He told himself that in some
way or other the news would reach Mme. de Beauseant; he would write, it
would be much better to do it by letter, and not to utter the words that
should stab her to the heart.

So when the servant announced M. Eugene de Rastignac, the Marquis
d’Ajuda-Pinto trembled with joy. To be sure, a loving woman shows even
more ingenuity in inventing doubts of her lover than in varying the
monotony of his happiness; and when she is about to be forsaken, she
instinctively interprets every gesture as rapidly as Virgil’s courser
detected the presence of his companion by snuffing the breeze. It was
impossible, therefore, that Mme. de Beauseant should not detect that
involuntary thrill of satisfaction; slight though it was, it was
appalling in its artlessness.

Eugene had yet to learn that no one in Paris should present himself in
any house without first making himself acquainted with the whole history
of its owner, and of its owner’s wife and family, so that he may avoid
making any of the terrible blunders which in Poland draw forth the
picturesque exclamation, “Harness five bullocks to your cart!” probably
because you will need them all to pull you out of the quagmire into
which a false step has plunged you. If, down to the present day, our
language has no name for these conversational disasters, it is probably
because they are believed to be impossible, the publicity given in Paris
to every scandal is so prodigious. After the awkward incident at Mme. de
Restaud’s, no one but Eugene could have reappeared in his character
of bullock-driver in Mme. de Beauseant’s drawing-room. But if Mme. de
Restaud and M. de Trailles had found him horribly in the way, M. d’Ajuda
hailed his coming with relief.

“Good-bye,” said the Portuguese, hurrying to the door, as Eugene made
his entrance into a dainty little pink-and-gray drawing-room, where
luxury seemed nothing more than good taste.

“Until this evening,” said Mme. de Beauseant, turning her head to give
the Marquis a glance. “We are going to the Bouffons, are we not?”

“I cannot go,” he said, with his fingers on the door handle.

Mme. de Beauseant rose and beckoned to him to return. She did not
pay the slightest attention to Eugene, who stood there dazzled by the
sparkling marvels around him; he began to think that this was some story
out of the Arabian Nights made real, and did not know where to hide
himself, when the woman before him seemed to be unconscious of his
existence. The Vicomtesse had raised the forefinger of her right hand,
and gracefully signed to the Marquis to seat himself beside her. The
Marquis felt the imperious sway of passion in her gesture; he came back
towards her. Eugene watched him, not without a feeling of envy.

“That is the owner of the brougham!” he said to himself. “But is it
necessary to have a pair of spirited horses, servants in livery, and
torrents of gold to draw a glance from a woman here in Paris?”

The demon of luxury gnawed at his heart, greed burned in his veins, his
throat was parched with the thirst of gold.

He had a hundred and thirty francs every quarter. His father, mother,
brothers, sisters, and aunt did not spend two hundred francs a month
among them. This swift comparison between his present condition and the
aims he had in view helped to benumb his faculties.

“Why not?” the Vicomtesse was saying, as she smiled at the Portuguese.
“Why cannot you come to the Italiens?”

“Affairs! I am to dine with the English Ambassador.”

“Throw him over.”

When a man once enters on a course of deception, he is compelled to
add lie to lie. M. d’Ajuda therefore said, smiling, “Do you lay your
commands on me?”

“Yes, certainly.”

“That was what I wanted to have you say to me,” he answered, dissembling
his feelings in a glance which would have reassured any other woman.

He took the Vicomtesse’s hand, kissed it, and went.

Eugene ran his fingers through his hair, and constrained himself to bow.
He thought that now Mme. de Beauseant would give him her attention;
but suddenly she sprang forward, rushed to a window in the gallery, and
watched M. d’Ajuda step into his carriage; she listened to the order
that he gave, and heard the Swiss repeat it to the coachman:

“To M. de Rochefide’s house.”

Those words, and the way in which M. d’Ajuda flung himself back in the
carriage, were like a lightning flash and a thunderbolt for her; she
walked back again with a deadly fear gnawing at her heart. The most
terrible catastrophes only happen among the heights. The Vicomtesse
went to her own room, sat down at a table, and took up a sheet of dainty
notepaper.


  “When, instead of dining with the English Ambassador,”
    she wrote, “you go to the Rochefides, you owe me an
   explanation, which I am waiting to hear.”


She retraced several of the letters, for her hand was trembling so that
they were indistinct; then she signed the note with an initial C for
“Claire de Bourgogne,” and rang the bell.

“Jacques,” she said to the servant, who appeared immediately, “take
this note to M. de Rochefide’s house at half-past seven and ask for the
Marquis d’Ajuda. If M. d’Ajuda is there, leave the note without waiting
for an answer; if he is not there, bring the note back to me.”

“Madame la Vicomtess, there is a visitor in the drawing-room.”

“Ah! yes, of course,” she said, opening the door.

Eugene was beginning to feel very uncomfortable, but at last the
Vicomtesse appeared; she spoke to him, and the tremulous tones of her
voice vibrated through his heart.

“Pardon me, monsieur,” she said; “I had a letter to write. Now I am
quite at liberty.”

She scarcely knew what she was saying, for even as she spoke she
thought, “Ah! he means to marry Mlle. de Rochefide? But is he still
free? This evening the marriage shall be broken off, or else... But
before to-morrow I shall know.”

“Cousin...” the student replied.

“Eh?” said the Countess, with an insolent glance that sent a cold
shudder through Eugene; he understood what that “Eh?” meant; he had
learned a great deal in three hours, and his wits were on the alert. He
reddened:

“Madame...” he began; he hesitated a moment, and then went on.
“Pardon me; I am in such need of protection that the nearest scrap of
relationship could do me no harm.”

Mme. de Beauseant smiled but there was sadness in her smile; even now
she felt forebodings of the coming pain, the air she breathed was heavy
with the storm that was about to burst.

“If you knew how my family are situated,” he went on, “you would love to
play the part of a beneficent fairy godmother who graciously clears the
obstacles from the path of her protege.”

“Well, cousin,” she said, laughing, “and how can I be of service to
you?”

“But do I know even that? I am distantly related to you, and this
obscure and remote relationship is even now a perfect godsend to me. You
have confused my ideas; I cannot remember the things that I meant to say
to you. I know no one else here in Paris.... Ah! if I could only ask you
to counsel me, ask you to look upon me as a poor child who would fain
cling to the hem of your dress, who would lay down his life for you.”

“Would you kill a man for me?”

“Two,” said Eugene.

“You, child. Yes, you are a child,” she said, keeping back the tears
that came to her eyes; “you would love sincerely.”

“Oh!” he cried, flinging up his head.

The audacity of the student’s answer interested the Vicomtesse in him.
The southern brain was beginning to scheme for the first time. Between
Mme. de Restaud’s blue boudoir and Mme. de Beauseant’s rose-colored
drawing-room he had made a three years’ advance in a kind of law which
is not a recognized study in Paris, although it is a sort of higher
jurisprudence, and, when well understood, is a highroad to success of
every kind.

“Ah! that is what I meant to say!” said Eugene. “I met Mme. de Restaud
at your ball, and this morning I went to see her.

“You must have been very much in the way,” said Mme. de Beauseant,
smiling as she spoke.

“Yes, indeed. I am a novice, and my blunders will set every one against
me, if you do not give me your counsel. I believe that in Paris it is
very difficult to meet with a young, beautiful, and wealthy woman of
fashion who would be willing to teach me, what you women can explain so
well--life. I shall find a M. de Trailles everywhere. So I have come to
you to ask you to give me a key to a puzzle, to entreat you to tell me
what sort of blunder I made this morning. I mentioned an old man----”

“Madame la Duchess de Langeais,” Jacques cut the student short; Eugene
gave expression to his intense annoyance by a gesture.

“If you mean to succeed,” said the Vicomtesse in a low voice, “in the
first place you must not be so demonstrative.”

“Ah! good morning, dear,” she continued, and rising and crossing the
room, she grasped the Duchess’ hands as affectionately as if they had
been sisters; the Duchess responded in the prettiest and most gracious
way.

“Two intimate friends!” said Rastignac to himself. “Henceforward I shall
have two protectresses; those two women are great friends, no doubt, and
this newcomer will doubtless interest herself in her friend’s cousin.”

“To what happy inspiration do I owe this piece of good fortune, dear
Antoinette?” asked Mme. de Beauseant.

“Well, I saw M. d’Ajuda-Pinto at M. de Rochefide’s door, so I thought
that if I came I should find you alone.”

Mme. de Beauseant’s mouth did not tighten, her color did not rise, her
expression did not alter, or rather, her brow seemed to clear as the
Duchess uttered those deadly words.

“If I had known that you were engaged----” the speaker added, glancing
at Eugene.

“This gentleman is M. Eugene de Rastignac, one of my cousins,” said the
Vicomtesse. “Have you any news of General de Montriveau?” she continued.
“Serizy told me yesterday that he never goes anywhere now; has he been
to see you to-day?”

It was believed that the Duchess was desperately in love with M. de
Montriveau, and that he was a faithless lover; she felt the question in
her very heart, and her face flushed as she answered:

“He was at the Elysee yesterday.”

“In attendance?”

“Claire,” returned the Duchess, and hatred overflowed in the glances she
threw at Mme. de Beauseant; “of course you know that M. d’Ajuda-Pinto
is going to marry Mlle. de Rochefide; the bans will be published
to-morrow.”

This thrust was too cruel; the Vicomtesse’s face grew white, but she
answered, laughing, “One of those rumors that fools amuse themselves
with. What should induce M. d’Ajuda to take one of the noblest names
in Portugal to the Rochefides? The Rochefides were only ennobled
yesterday.”

“But Bertha will have two hundred thousand livres a year, they say.”

“M. d’Ajuda is too wealthy to marry for money.”

“But, my dear, Mlle. de Rochefide is a charming girl.”

“Indeed?”

“And, as a matter of fact, he is dining with them to-day; the thing
is settled. It is very surprising to me that you should know so little
about it.”

Mme. de Beauseant turned to Rastignac. “What was the blunder that you
made, monsieur?” she asked. “The poor boy is only just launched into the
world, Antoinette, so that he understands nothing of all this that
we are speaking of. Be merciful to him, and let us finish our talk
to-morrow. Everything will be announced to-morrow, you know, and
your kind informal communication can be accompanied by official
confirmation.”

The Duchess gave Eugene one of those insolent glances that measure a man
from head to foot, and leave him crushed and annihilated.

“Madame, I have unwittingly plunged a dagger into Mme. de Restaud’s
heart; unwittingly--therein lies my offence,” said the student of law,
whose keen brain had served him sufficiently well, for he had detected
the biting epigrams that lurked beneath this friendly talk. “You
continue to receive, possibly you fear, those who know the amount of
pain that they deliberately inflict; but a clumsy blunderer who has no
idea how deeply he wounds is looked upon as a fool who does not know how
to make use of his opportunities, and every one despises him.”

Mme. de Beauseant gave the student a glance, one of those glances in
which a great soul can mingle dignity and gratitude. It was like balm
to the law student, who was still smarting under the Duchess’ insolent
scrutiny; she had looked at him as an auctioneer might look at some
article to appraise its value.

“Imagine, too, that I had just made some progress with the Comte de
Restaud; for I should tell you, madame,” he went on, turning to the
Duchess with a mixture of humility and malice in his manner, “that as
yet I am only a poor devil of a student, very much alone in the world,
and very poor----”

“You should not tell us that, M. de Rastignac. We women never care about
anything that no one else will take.”

“Bah!” said Eugene. “I am only two-and-twenty, and I must make up my
mind to the drawbacks of my time of life. Besides, I am confessing
my sins, and it would be impossible to kneel in a more charming
confessional; you commit your sins in one drawing-room, and receive
absolution for them in another.”

The Duchess’ expression grew colder, she did not like the flippant tone
of these remarks, and showed that she considered them to be in bad
taste by turning to the Vicomtesse with--“This gentleman has only just
come----”

Mme. de Beauseant began to laugh outright at her cousin and at the
Duchess both.

“He has only just come to Paris, dear, and is in search of some one who
will give him lessons in good taste.”

“Mme. la Duchesse,” said Eugene, “is it not natural to wish to be
initiated into the mysteries which charm us?” (“Come, now,” he said to
himself, “my language is superfinely elegant, I’m sure.”)

“But Mme. de Restaud is herself, I believe, M. de Trailles’ pupil,” said
the Duchess.

“Of that I had no idea, madame,” answered the law student, “so I rashly
came between them. In fact, I got on very well with the lady’s husband,
and his wife tolerated me for a time until I took it into my head to
tell them that I knew some one of whom I had just caught a glimpse as he
went out by a back staircase, a man who had given the Countess a kiss at
the end of a passage.”

“Who was it?” both women asked together.

“An old man who lives at the rate of two louis a month in the Faubourg
Saint-Marceau, where I, a poor student, lodge likewise. He is a truly
unfortunate creature, everybody laughs at him--we all call him ‘Father
Goriot.’”

“Why, child that you are,” cried the Vicomtesse, “Mme. de Restaud was a
Mlle. Goriot!”

“The daughter of a vermicelli manufacturer,” the Duchess added; “and
when the little creature went to Court, the daughter of a pastry-cook
was presented on the same day. Do you remember, Claire? The King began
to laugh, and made some joke in Latin about flour. People--what was
it?--people----”

“_Ejusdem farinoe_,” said Eugene.

“Yes, that was it,” said the Duchess.

“Oh! is that her father?” the law student continued, aghast.

“Yes, certainly; the old man had two daughters; he dotes on them, so to
speak, though they will scarcely acknowledge him.”

“Didn’t the second daughter marry a banker with a German name?” the
Vicomtesse asked, turning to Mme. de Langeais, “a Baron de Nucingen? And
her name is Delphine, is it not? Isn’t she a fair-haired woman who has
a side-box at the Opera? She comes sometimes to the Bouffons, and laughs
loudly to attract attention.”

The Duchess smiled and said:

“I wonder at you, dear. Why do you take so much interest in people of
that kind? One must have been as madly in love as Restaud was, to be
infatuated with Mlle. Anastasie and her flour sacks. Oh! he will not
find her a good bargain! She is in M. de Trailles’ hands, and he will
ruin her.”

“And they do not acknowledge their father!” Eugene repeated.

“Oh! well, yes, their father, the father, a father,” replied the
Vicomtesse, “a kind father who gave them each five or six hundred
thousand francs, it is said, to secure their happiness by marrying
them well; while he only kept eight or ten thousand livres a year for
himself, thinking that his daughters would always be his daughters,
thinking that in them he would live his life twice over again, that
in their houses he should find two homes, where he would be loved
and looked up to, and made much of. And in two years’ time both his
sons-in-law had turned him out of their houses as if he were one of the
lowest outcasts.”

Tears came into Eugene’s eyes. He was still under the spell of youthful
beliefs, he had just left home, pure and sacred feelings had been
stirred within him, and this was his first day on the battlefield of
civilization in Paris. Genuine feeling is so infectious that for a
moment the three looked at each other in silence.

“_Eh, mon Dieu!_” said Mme. de Langeais; “yes, it seems very horrible,
and yet we see such things every day. Is there not a reason for it?
Tell me, dear, have you ever really thought what a son-in-law is? A
son-in-law is the man for whom we bring up, you and I, a dear little
one, bound to us very closely in innumerable ways; for seventeen years
she will be the joy of her family, its ‘white soul,’ as Lamartine says,
and suddenly she will become its scourge. When HE comes and takes her
from us, his love from the very beginning is like an axe laid to the
root of all the old affection in our darling’s heart, and all the ties
that bound her to her family are severed. But yesterday our little
daughter thought of no one but her mother and father, as we had no
thought that was not for her; by to-morrow she will have become a
hostile stranger. The tragedy is always going on under our eyes. On the
one hand you see a father who has sacrificed himself to his son, and
his daughter-in-law shows him the last degree of insolence. On the other
hand, it is the son-in-law who turns his wife’s mother out of the house.
I sometimes hear it said that there is nothing dramatic about society in
these days; but the Drama of the Son-in-law is appalling, to say nothing
of our marriages, which have come to be very poor farces. I can explain
how it all came about in the old vermicelli maker’s case. I think I
recollect that Foriot----”

“Goriot, madame.”

“Yes, that Moriot was once President of his Section during the
Revolution. He was in the secret of the famous scarcity of grain, and
laid the foundation of his fortune in those days by selling flour for
ten times its cost. He had as much flour as he wanted. My grandmother’s
steward sold him immense quantities. No doubt Noriot shared the plunder
with the Committee of Public Salvation, as that sort of person always
did. I recollect the steward telling my grandmother that she might live
at Grandvilliers in complete security, because her corn was as good as
a certificate of civism. Well, then, this Loriot, who sold corn to
those butchers, has never had but one passion, they say--he idolizes his
daughters. He settled one of them under Restaud’s roof, and grafted the
other into the Nucingen family tree, the Baron de Nucingen being a rich
banker who had turned Royalist. You can quite understand that so long as
Bonaparte was Emperor, the two sons-in-law could manage to put up with
the old Ninety-three; but after the restoration of the Bourbons, M. de
Restaud felt bored by the old man’s society, and the banker was still
more tired of it. His daughters were still fond of him; they wanted
‘to keep the goat and the cabbage,’ so they used to see Joriot whenever
there was no one there, under pretence of affection. ‘Come to-day, papa,
we shall have you all to ourselves, and that will be much nicer!’
and all that sort of thing. As for me, dear, I believe that love has
second-sight: poor Ninety-three; his heart must have bled. He saw that
his daughters were ashamed of him, that if they loved their husbands
his visits must make mischief. So he immolated himself. He made the
sacrifice because he was a father; he went into voluntary exile. His
daughters were satisfied, so he thought that he had done the best thing
he could; but it was a family crime, and father and daughters were
accomplices. You see this sort of thing everywhere. What could this old
Doriot have been but a splash of mud in his daughters’ drawing-rooms? He
would only have been in the way, and bored other people, besides being
bored himself. And this that happened between father and daughters may
happen to the prettiest woman in Paris and the man she loves the best;
if her love grows tiresome, he will go; he will descend to the basest
trickery to leave her. It is the same with all love and friendship. Our
heart is a treasury; if you pour out all its wealth at once, you are
bankrupt. We show no more mercy to the affection that reveals its utmost
extent than we do to another kind of prodigal who has not a penny left.
Their father had given them all he had. For twenty years he had given
his whole heart to them; then, one day, he gave them all his fortune
too. The lemon was squeezed; the girls left the rest in the gutter.”

“The world is very base,” said the Vicomtesse, plucking at the threads
of her shawl. She did not raise her head as she spoke; the words that
Mme. de Langeais had meant for her in the course of her story had cut
her to the quick.

“Base? Oh, no,” answered the Duchess; “the world goes its own way, that
is all. If I speak in this way, it is only to show that I am not duped
by it. I think as you do,” she said, pressing the Vicomtesse’s hand.
“The world is a slough; let us try to live on the heights above it.”

She rose to her feet and kissed Mme. de Beauseant on the forehead as
she said: “You look very charming to-day, dear. I have never seen such a
lovely color in your cheeks before.”

Then she went out with a slight inclination of the head to the cousin.

“Father Goriot is sublime!” said Eugene to himself, as he remembered how
he had watched his neighbor work the silver vessel into a shapeless mass
that night.

Mme. de Beauseant did not hear him; she was absorbed in her own
thoughts. For several minutes the silence remained unbroken till the
law student became almost paralyzed with embarrassment, and was equally
afraid to go or stay or speak a word.

“The world is basely ungrateful and ill-natured,” said the Vicomtesse
at last. “No sooner does a trouble befall you than a friend is ready
to bring the tidings and to probe your heart with the point of a
dagger while calling on you to admire the handle. Epigrams and sarcasms
already! Ah! I will defend myself!”

She raised her head like the great lady that she was, and lightnings
flashed from her proud eyes.

“Ah!” she said, as she saw Eugene, “are you there?”

“Still,” he said piteously.

“Well, then, M. de Rastignac, deal with the world as it deserves. You
are determined to succeed? I will help you. You shall sound the depths
of corruption in woman; you shall measure the extent of man’s pitiful
vanity. Deeply as I am versed in such learning, there were pages in the
book of life that I had not read. Now I know all. The more cold-blooded
your calculations, the further you will go. Strike ruthlessly; you will
be feared. Men and women for you must be nothing more than post-horses;
take a fresh relay, and leave the last to drop by the roadside; in this
way you will reach the goal of your ambition. You will be nothing here,
you see, unless a woman interests herself in you; and she must be young
and wealthy, and a woman of the world. Yet, if you have a heart, lock
it carefully away like a treasure; do not let any one suspect it, or you
will be lost; you would cease to be the executioner, you would take
the victim’s place. And if ever you should love, never let your secret
escape you! Trust no one until you are very sure of the heart to which
you open your heart. Learn to mistrust every one; take every precaution
for the sake of the love which does not exist as yet. Listen,
Miguel”--the name slipped from her so naturally that she did not
notice her mistake--“there is something still more appalling than the
ingratitude of daughters who have cast off their old father and wish
that he were dead, and that is a rivalry between two sisters. Restaud
comes of a good family, his wife has been received into their circle;
she has been presented at court; and her sister, her wealthy sister,
Mme. Delphine de Nucingen, the wife of a great capitalist, is consumed
with envy, and ready to die of spleen. There is gulf set between the
sisters--indeed, they are sisters no longer--the two women who refuse
to acknowledge their father do not acknowledge each other. So Mme. de
Nucingen would lap up all the mud that lies between the Rue Saint-Lazare
and the Rue de Grenelle to gain admittance to my salon. She fancied
that she should gain her end through de Marsay; she has made herself
de Marsay’s slave, and she bores him. De Marsay cares very little about
her. If you will introduce her to me, you will be her darling, her
Benjamin; she will idolize you. If, after that, you can love her, do so;
if not, make her useful. I will ask her to come once or twice to one of
my great crushes, but I will never receive her here in the morning. I
will bow to her when I see her, and that will be quite sufficient.
You have shut the Comtesse de Restaud’s door against you by mentioning
Father Goriot’s name. Yes, my good friend, you may call at her house
twenty times, and every time out of the twenty you will find that she
is not at home. The servants have their orders, and will not admit you.
Very well, then, now let Father Goriot gain the right of entry into her
sister’s house for you. The beautiful Mme. de Nucingen will give the
signal for a battle. As soon as she singles you out, other women will
begin to lose their heads about you, and her enemies and rivals and
intimate friends will all try to take you from her. There are women who
will fall in love with a man because another woman has chosen him; like
the city madams, poor things, who copy our millinery, and hope thereby
to acquire our manners. You will have a success, and in Paris success is
everything; it is the key of power. If the women credit you with wit and
talent, the men will follow suit so long as you do not undeceive them
yourself. There will be nothing you may not aspire to; you will go
everywhere, and you will find out what the world is--an assemblage of
fools and knaves. But you must be neither the one nor the other. I am
giving you my name like Ariadne’s clue of thread to take with you into
the labyrinth; make no unworthy use of it,” she said, with a queenly
glance and curve of her throat; “give it back to me unsullied. And now,
go; leave me. We women also have our battles to fight.”

“And if you should ever need some one who would gladly set a match to a
train for you----”

“Well?” she asked.

He tapped his heart, smiled in answer to his cousin’s smile, and went.

It was five o’clock, and Eugene was hungry; he was afraid lest he should
not be in time for dinner, a misgiving which made him feel that it was
pleasant to be borne so quickly across Paris. This sensation of physical
comfort left his mind free to grapple with the thoughts that assailed
him. A mortification usually sends a young man of his age into a furious
rage; he shakes his fist at society, and vows vengeance when his belief
in himself is shaken. Just then Rastignac was overwhelmed by the words,
“You have shut the Countess’ door against you.”

“I shall call!” he said to himself, “and if Mme. de Beauseant is right,
if I never find her at home--I... well, Mme. de Restaud shall meet me
in every salon in Paris. I will learn to fence and have some pistol
practice, and kill that Maxime of hers!”

“And money?” cried an inward monitor. “How about money, where is that
to come from?” And all at once the wealth displayed in the Countess de
Restaud’s drawing-room rose before his eyes. That was the luxury which
Goriot’s daughter had loved too well, the gilding, the ostentatious
splendor, the unintelligent luxury of the parvenu, the riotous
extravagance of a courtesan. Then the attractive vision suddenly went
under an eclipse as he remembered the stately grandeur of the Hotel de
Beauseant. As his fancy wandered among these lofty regions in the great
world of Paris, innumerable dark thoughts gathered in his heart; his
ideas widened, and his conscience grew more elastic. He saw the world as
it is; saw how the rich lived beyond the jurisdiction of law and public
opinion, and found in success the _ultima ratio mundi_.

“Vautrin is right, success is virtue!” he said to himself.



Arrived in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve, he rushed up to his room for
ten francs wherewith to satisfy the demands of the cabman, and went
in to dinner. He glanced round the squalid room, saw the eighteen
poverty-stricken creatures about to feed like cattle in their stalls,
and the sight filled him with loathing. The transition was too sudden,
and the contrast was so violent that it could not but act as a powerful
stimulant; his ambition developed and grew beyond all social bounds. On
the one hand, he beheld a vision of social life in its most charming
and refined forms, of quick-pulsed youth, of fair, impassioned faces
invested with all the charm of poetry, framed in a marvelous setting of
luxury or art; and, on the other hand, he saw a sombre picture, the miry
verge beyond these faces, in which passion was extinct and nothing was
left of the drama but the cords and pulleys and bare mechanism. Mme. de
Beauseant’s counsels, the words uttered in anger by the forsaken lady,
her petulant offer, came to his mind, and poverty was a ready expositor.
Rastignac determined to open two parallel trenches so as to insure
success; he would be a learned doctor of law and a man of fashion.
Clearly he was still a child! Those two lines are asymptotes, and will
never meet.

“You are very dull, my lord Marquis,” said Vautrin, with one of the
shrewd glances that seem to read the innermost secrets of another mind.

“I am not in the humor to stand jokes from people who call me ‘my lord
Marquis,’” answered Eugene. “A marquis here in Paris, if he is not the
veriest sham, ought to have a hundred thousand livres a year at least;
and a lodger in the Maison Vauquer is not exactly Fortune’s favorite.”

Vautrin’s glance at Rastignac was half-paternal, half-contemptuous.
“Puppy!” it seemed to say; “I should make one mouthful of him!” Then he
answered:

“You are in a bad humor; perhaps your visit to the beautiful Comtesse de
Restaud was not a success.”

“She has shut her door against me because I told her that her father
dined at our table,” cried Rastignac.

Glances were exchanged all round the room; Father Goriot looked down.

“You have sent some snuff into my eye,” he said to his neighbor, turning
a little aside to rub his hand over his face.

“Any one who molests Father Goriot will have henceforward to reckon with
me,” said Eugene, looking at the old man’s neighbor; “he is worth all
the rest of us put together.--I am not speaking of the ladies,” he
added, turning in the direction of Mlle. Taillefer.

Eugene’s remarks produced a sensation, and his tone silenced the
dinner-table. Vautrin alone spoke. “If you are going to champion Father
Goriot, and set up for his responsible editor into the bargain, you
had need be a crack shot and know how to handle the foils,” he said,
banteringly.

“So I intend,” said Eugene.

“Then you are taking the field to-day?”

“Perhaps,” Rastignac answered. “But I owe no account of myself to any
one, especially as I do not try to find out what other people do of a
night.”

Vautrin looked askance at Rastignac.

“If you do not mean to be deceived by the puppets, my boy, you must
go behind and see the whole show, and not peep through holes in the
curtain. That is enough,” he added, seeing that Eugene was about to fly
into a passion. “We can have a little talk whenever you like.”

There was a general feeling of gloom and constraint. Father Goriot was
so deeply dejected by the student’s remark that he did not notice the
change in the disposition of his fellow-lodgers, nor know that he had
met with a champion capable of putting an end to the persecution.

“Then, M. Goriot sitting there is the father of a countess,” said Mme.
Vauquer in a low voice.

“And of a baroness,” answered Rastignac.

“That is about all he is capable of,” said Bianchon to Rastignac; “I
have taken a look at his head; there is only one bump--the bump of
Paternity; he must be an _eternal father_.”

Eugene was too intent on his thoughts to laugh at Bianchon’s joke. He
determined to profit by Mme. de Beauseant’s counsels, and was asking
himself how he could obtain the necessary money. He grew grave. The wide
savannas of the world stretched before his eyes; all things lay before
him, nothing was his. Dinner came to an end, the others went, and he was
left in the dining-room.

“So you have seen my daughter?” Goriot spoke tremulously, and the sound
of his voice broke in upon Eugene’s dreams. The young man took the
elder’s hand, and looked at him with something like kindness in his
eyes.

“You are a good and noble man,” he said. “We will have some talk about
your daughters by and by.”

He rose without waiting for Goriot’s answer, and went to his room. There
he wrote the following letter to his mother:--


 “My Dear Mother,--Can you nourish your child from your breast
  again? I am in a position to make a rapid fortune, but I want
  twelve hundred francs--I must have them at all costs. Say nothing
  about this to my father; perhaps he might make objections, and
  unless I have the money, I may be led to put an end to myself, and
  so escape the clutches of despair. I will tell you everything when
  I see you. I will not begin to try to describe my present
  situation; it would take volumes to put the whole story clearly
  and fully. I have not been gambling, my kind mother, I owe no one
  a penny; but if you would preserve the life that you gave me, you
  must send me the sum I mention. As a matter of fact, I go to see
  the Vicomtesse de Beauseant; she is using her influence for me; I
  am obliged to go into society, and I have not a penny to lay out
  on clean gloves. I can manage to exist on bread and water, or go
  without food, if need be, but I cannot do without the tools with
  which they cultivate the vineyards in this country. I must
  resolutely make up my mind at once to make my way, or stick in the
  mire for the rest of my days. I know that all your hopes are set
  on me, and I want to realize them quickly. Sell some of your old
  jewelry, my kind mother; I will give you other jewels very soon. I
  know enough of our affairs at home to know all that such a
  sacrifice means, and you must not think that I would lightly ask
  you to make it; I should be a monster if I could. You must think
  of my entreaty as a cry forced from me by imperative necessity.
  Our whole future lies in the subsidy with which I must begin my
  first campaign, for life in Paris is one continual battle. If you
  cannot otherwise procure the whole of the money, and are forced to
  sell our aunt’s lace, tell her that I will send her some still
  handsomer,” and so forth.

He wrote to ask each of his sisters for their savings--would they
despoil themselves for him, and keep the sacrifice a secret from the
family? To his request he knew that they would not fail to respond
gladly, and he added to it an appeal to their delicacy by touching the
chord of honor that vibrates so loudly in young and high-strung natures.

Yet when he had written the letters, he could not help feeling
misgivings in spite of his youthful ambition; his heart beat fast, and
he trembled. He knew the spotless nobleness of the lives buried away in
the lonely manor house; he knew what trouble and what joy his request
would cause his sisters, and how happy they would be as they talked
at the bottom of the orchard of that dear brother of theirs in Paris.
Visions rose before his eyes; a sudden strong light revealed his
sisters secretly counting over their little store, devising some girlish
stratagem by which the money could be sent to him _incognito_, essaying,
for the first time in their lives, a piece of deceit that reached the
sublime in its unselfishness.

“A sister’s heart is a diamond for purity, a deep sea of tenderness!” he
said to himself. He felt ashamed of those letters.

What power there must be in the petitions put up by such hearts;
how pure the fervor that bears their souls to Heaven in prayer! What
exquisite joy they would find in self-sacrifice! What a pang for his
mother’s heart if she could not send him all that he asked for! And this
noble affection, these sacrifices made at such terrible cost, were to
serve as the ladder by which he meant to climb to Delphine de Nucingen.
A few tears, like the last grains of incense flung upon the sacred
alter fire of the hearth, fell from his eyes. He walked up and down,
and despair mingled with his emotion. Father Goriot saw him through the
half-open door.

“What is the matter, sir?” he asked from the threshold.

“Ah! my good neighbor, I am as much a son and brother as you are a
father. You do well to fear for the Comtesse Anastasie; there is one M.
Maxime de Trailles, who will be her ruin.”

Father Goriot withdrew, stammering some words, but Eugene failed to
catch their meaning.

The next morning Rastignac went out to post his letters. Up to the last
moment he wavered and doubted, but he ended by flinging them into the
box. “I shall succeed!” he said to himself. So says the gambler; so says
the great captain; but the three words that have been the salvation of
some few, have been the ruin of many more.

A few days after this Eugene called at Mme. de Restaud’s house; she was
not at home. Three times he tried the experiment, and three times he
found her doors closed against him, though he was careful to choose an
hour when M. de Trailles was not there. The Vicomtesse was right.

The student studied no longer. He put in an appearance at lectures
simply to answer to his name, and after thus attesting his presence,
departed forthwith. He had been through a reasoning process familiar to
most students. He had seen the advisability of deferring his studies
to the last moment before going up for his examinations; he made up his
mind to cram his second and third years’ work into the third year, when
he meant to begin to work in earnest, and to complete his studies in law
with one great effort. In the meantime he had fifteen months in which to
navigate the ocean of Paris, to spread the nets and set the lines that
would bring him a protectress and a fortune. Twice during that week he
saw Mme. de Beauseant; he did not go to her house until he had seen the
Marquis d’Ajuda drive away.

Victory for yet a few more days was with the great lady, the most poetic
figure in the Faubourg Saint-Germain; and the marriage of the Marquis
d’Ajuda-Pinto with Mlle. de Rochefide was postponed. The dread of losing
her happiness filled those days with a fever of joy unknown before,
but the end was only so much the nearer. The Marquis d’Ajuda and the
Rochefides agreed that this quarrel and reconciliation was a very
fortunate thing; Mme. de Beauseant (so they hoped) would gradually
become reconciled to the idea of the marriage, and in the end would be
brought to sacrifice d’Ajuda’s morning visits to the exigencies of a
man’s career, exigencies which she must have foreseen. In spite of the
most solemn promises, daily renewed, M. d’Ajuda was playing a part,
and the Vicomtesse was eager to be deceived. “Instead of taking a leap
heroically from the window, she is falling headlong down the staircase,”
 said her most intimate friend, the Duchesse de Langeais. Yet this
after-glow of happiness lasted long enough for the Vicomtesse to be of
service to her young cousin. She had a half-superstitious affection for
him. Eugene had shown her sympathy and devotion at a crisis when a woman
sees no pity, no real comfort in any eyes; when if a man is ready with
soothing flatteries, it is because he has an interested motive.

Rastignac made up his mind that he must learn the whole of Goriot’s
previous history; he would come to his bearings before attempting to
board the Maison de Nucingen. The results of his inquiries may be given
briefly as follows:--

In the days before the Revolution, Jean-Joachim Goriot was simply a
workman in the employ of a vermicelli maker. He was a skilful, thrifty
workman, sufficiently enterprising to buy his master’s business when
the latter fell a chance victim to the disturbances of 1789. Goriot
established himself in the Rue de la Jussienne, close to the Corn
Exchange. His plain good sense led him to accept the position of
President of the Section, so as to secure for his business the
protection of those in power at that dangerous epoch. This prudent step
had led to success; the foundations of his fortune were laid in the time
of the Scarcity (real or artificial), when the price of grain of all
kinds rose enormously in Paris. People used to fight for bread at the
bakers’ doors; while other persons went to the grocers’ shops and bought
Italian paste foods without brawling over it. It was during this year
that Goriot made the money, which, at a later time, was to give him
all the advantage of the great capitalist over the small buyer; he had,
moreover, the usual luck of average ability; his mediocrity was the
salvation of him. He excited no one’s envy, it was not even suspected
that he was rich till the peril of being rich was over, and all his
intelligence was concentrated, not on political, but on commercial
speculations. Goriot was an authority second to none on all questions
relating to corn, flour, and “middlings”; and the production, storage,
and quality of grain. He could estimate the yield of the harvest, and
foresee market prices; he bought his cereals in Sicily, and imported
Ukrainian wheat. Any one who had heard him hold forth on the regulations
that control the importation and exportation of grain, who had seen his
grasp of the subject, his clear insight into the principles involved,
his appreciation of weak points in the way that the system worked,
would have thought that here was the stuff of which a minister is made.
Patient, active, and persevering, energetic and prompt in action, he
surveyed his business horizon with an eagle eye. Nothing there took him
by surprise; he foresaw all things, knew all that was happening, and
kept his own counsel; he was a diplomatist in his quick comprehension
of a situation; and in the routine of business he was as patient and
plodding as a soldier on the march. But beyond this business horizon he
could not see. He used to spend his hours of leisure on the threshold of
his shop, leaning against the framework of the door. Take him from
his dark little counting-house, and he became once more the rough,
slow-witted workman, a man who cannot understand a piece of reasoning,
who is indifferent to all intellectual pleasures, and falls asleep at
the play, a Parisian Dolibom in short, against whose stupidity other
minds are powerless.

Natures of this kind are nearly all alike; in almost all of them you
will find some hidden depth of sublime affection. Two all-absorbing
affections filled the vermicelli maker’s heart to the exclusion of every
other feeling; into them he seemed to put all the forces of his nature,
as he put the whole power of his brain into the corn trade. He had
regarded his wife, the only daughter of a rich farmer of La Brie, with a
devout admiration; his love for her had been boundless. Goriot had
felt the charm of a lovely and sensitive nature, which, in its delicate
strength, was the very opposite of his own. Is there any instinct more
deeply implanted in the heart of man than the pride of protection, a
protection which is constantly exerted for a fragile and defenceless
creature? Join love thereto, the warmth of gratitude that all generous
souls feel for the source of their pleasures, and you have the
explanation of many strange incongruities in human nature.

After seven years of unclouded happiness, Goriot lost his wife. It was
very unfortunate for him. She was beginning to gain an ascendency over
him in other ways; possibly she might have brought that barren soil
under cultivation, she might have widened his ideas and given other
directions to his thoughts. But when she was dead, the instinct of
fatherhood developed in him till it almost became a mania. All the
affection balked by death seemed to turn to his daughters, and he found
full satisfaction for his heart in loving them. More or less brilliant
proposals were made to him from time to time; wealthy merchants or
farmers with daughters vied with each other in offering inducements
to him to marry again; but he determined to remain a widower. His
father-in-law, the only man for whom he felt a decided friendship, gave
out that Goriot had made a vow to be faithful to his wife’s memory. The
frequenters of the Corn Exchange, who could not comprehend this sublime
piece of folly, joked about it among themselves, and found a ridiculous
nickname for him. One of them ventured (after a glass over a bargain)
to call him by it, and a blow from the vermicelli maker’s fist sent him
headlong into a gutter in the Rue Oblin. He could think of nothing else
when his children were concerned; his love for them made him fidgety
and anxious; and this was so well known, that one day a competitor, who
wished to get rid of him to secure the field to himself, told Goriot
that Delphine had just been knocked down by a cab. The vermicelli maker
turned ghastly pale, left the Exchange at once, and did not return for
several days afterwards; he was ill in consequence of the shock and the
subsequent relief on discovering that it was a false alarm. This time,
however, the offender did not escape with a bruised shoulder; at a
critical moment in the man’s affairs, Goriot drove him into bankruptcy,
and forced him to disappear from the Corn Exchange.

As might have been expected, the two girls were spoiled. With an income
of sixty thousand francs, Goriot scarcely spent twelve hundred on
himself, and found all his happiness in satisfying the whims of the two
girls. The best masters were engaged, that Anastasie and Delphine
might be endowed with all the accomplishments which distinguish a good
education. They had a chaperon--luckily for them, she was a woman
who had good sense and good taste;--they learned to ride; they had a
carriage for their use; they lived as the mistress of a rich old lord
might live; they had only to express a wish, their father would hasten
to give them their most extravagant desires, and asked nothing of them
in return but a kiss. Goriot had raised the two girls to the level of
the angels; and, quite naturally, he himself was left beneath them. Poor
man! he loved them even for the pain that they gave him.

When the girls were old enough to be married, they were left free to
choose for themselves. Each had half her father’s fortune as her dowry;
and when the Comte de Restaud came to woo Anastasie for her beauty,
her social aspirations led her to leave her father’s house for a more
exalted sphere. Delphine wished for money; she married Nucingen, a
banker of German extraction, who became a Baron of the Holy Roman
Empire. Goriot remained a vermicelli maker as before. His daughters
and his sons-in-law began to demur; they did not like to see him still
engaged in trade, though his whole life was bound up with his business.
For five years he stood out against their entreaties, then he yielded,
and consented to retire on the amount realized by the sale of his
business and the savings of the last few years. It was this capital
that Mme. Vauquer, in the early days of his residence with her, had
calculated would bring in eight or ten thousand livres in a year. He had
taken refuge in her lodging-house, driven there by despair when he knew
that his daughters were compelled by their husbands not only to refuse
to receive him as an inmate in their houses, but even to see him no more
except in private.

This was all the information which Rastignac gained from a M. Muret
who had purchased Goriot’s business, information which confirmed
the Duchesse de Langeais’ suppositions, and herewith the preliminary
explanation of this obscure but terrible Parisian tragedy comes to an
end.

Towards the end of the first week in December Rastignac received two
letters--one from his mother, and one from his eldest sister. His heart
beat fast, half with happiness, half with fear, at the sight of the
familiar handwriting. Those two little scraps of paper contained life
or death for his hopes. But while he felt a shiver of dread as he
remembered their dire poverty at home, he knew their love for him so
well that he could not help fearing that he was draining their very
life-blood. His mother’s letter ran as follows:--


 “MY DEAR CHILD,--I am sending you the money that you asked for.
  Make a good use of it. Even to save your life I could not raise so
  large a sum a second time without your father’s knowledge, and
  there would be trouble about it. We should be obliged to mortgage
  the land. It is impossible to judge of the merits of schemes of
  which I am ignorant; but what sort of schemes can they be, that
  you should fear to tell me about them? Volumes of explanation
  would not have been needed; we mothers can understand at a word,
  and that word would have spared me the anguish of uncertainty. I
  do not know how to hide the painful impression that your letter
  has made upon me, my dear son. What can you have felt when you
  were moved to send this chill of dread through my heart? It must
  have been very painful to you to write the letter that gave me so
  much pain as I read it. To what courses are you committed? You are
  going to appear to be something that you are not, and your whole
  life and success depends upon this? You are about to see a society
  into which you cannot enter without rushing into expense that you
  cannot afford, without losing precious time that is needed for
  your studies. Ah! my dear Eugene, believe your mother, crooked
  ways cannot lead to great ends. Patience and endurance are the two
  qualities most needed in your position. I am not scolding you; I
  do not want any tinge of bitterness to spoil our offering. I am
  only talking like a mother whose trust in you is as great as her
  foresight for you. You know the steps that you must take, and I,
  for my part, know the purity of heart, and how good your
  intentions are; so I can say to you without a doubt, ‘Go forward,
  beloved!’ If I tremble, it is because I am a mother, but my
  prayers and blessings will be with you at every step. Be very
  careful, dear boy. You must have a man’s prudence, for it lies
  with you to shape the destinies of five others who are dear to
  you, and must look to you. Yes, our fortunes depend upon you, and
  your success is ours. We all pray to God to be with you in all
  that you do. Your aunt Marcillac has been most generous beyond
  words in this matter; she saw at once how it was, even down to
  your gloves. ‘But I have a weakness for the eldest!’ she said
  gaily. You must love your aunt very much, dear Eugene. I shall
  wait till you have succeeded before telling you all that she has
  done for you, or her money would burn your fingers. You, who are
  young, do not know what it is to part with something that is a
  piece of your past! But what would we not sacrifice for your
  sakes? Your aunt says that I am to send you a kiss on the forehead
  from her, and that kiss is to bring you luck again and again, she
  says. She would have written you herself, the dear kind-hearted
  woman, but she is troubled with the gout in her fingers just now.
  Your father is very well. The vintage of 1819 has turned out
  better than we expected. Good-bye, dear boy; I will say nothing
  about your sisters, because Laure is writing to you, and I must
  let her have the pleasure of giving you all the home news. Heaven
  send that you may succeed! Oh! yes, dear Eugene, you must succeed.
  I have come, through you, to a knowledge of a pain so sharp that I
  do not think I could endure it a second time. I have come to know
  what it is to be poor, and to long for money for my children’s
  sake. There, good-bye! Do not leave us for long without news of
  you; and here, at the last, take a kiss from your mother.”


By the time Eugene had finished the letter he was in tears. He thought
of Father Goriot crushing his silver keepsake into a shapeless mass
before he sold it to meet his daughter’s bill of exchange.

“Your mother has broken up her jewels for you,” he said to himself;
“your aunt shed tears over those relics of hers before she sold them
for your sake. What right have you to heap execrations on Anastasie? You
have followed her example; you have selfishly sacrificed others to your
own future, and she sacrifices her father to her lover; and of you two,
which is the worse?”

He was ready to renounce his attempts; he could not bear to take
that money. The fires of remorse burned in his heart, and gave him
intolerable pain, the generous secret remorse which men seldom take into
account when they sit in judgment upon their fellow-men; but perhaps
the angels in heaven, beholding it, pardon the criminal whom our justice
condemns. Rastignac opened his sister’s letter; its simplicity and
kindness revived his heart.


 “Your letter came just at the right time, dear brother. Agathe and
  I had thought of so many different ways of spending our money,
  that we did not know what to buy with it; and now you have come
  in, and, like the servant who upset all the watches that belonged
  to the King of Spain, you have restored harmony; for, really and
  truly, we did not know which of all the things we wanted we wanted
  most, and we were always quarreling about it, never thinking, dear
  Eugene, of a way of spending our money which would satisfy us
  completely. Agathe jumped for you. Indeed, we have been like two
  mad things all day, ‘to such a prodigious degree’ (as aunt would
  say), that mother said, with her severe expression, ‘Whatever can
  be the matter with you, mesdemoiselles?’ I think if we had been
  scolded a little, we should have been still better pleased. A
  woman ought to be very glad to suffer for one she loves! I,
  however, in my inmost soul, was doleful and cross in the midst of
  all my joy. I shall make a bad wife, I am afraid, I am too fond of
  spending. I had bought two sashes and a nice little stiletto for
  piercing eyelet-holes in my stays, trifles that I really did not
  want, so that I have less than that slow-coach Agathe, who is so
  economical, and hoards her money like a magpie. She had two
  hundred francs! And I have only one hundred and fifty! I am nicely
  punished; I could throw my sash down the well; it will be painful
  to me to wear it now. Poor dear, I have robbed you. And Agathe was
  so nice about it. She said, ‘Let us send the three hundred and
  fifty francs in our two names!’ But I could not help telling you
  everything just as it happened.

 “Do you know how we managed to keep your commandments? We took our
  glittering hoard, we went out for a walk, and when once fairly on
  the highway we ran all the way to Ruffec, where we handed over the
  coin, without more ado, to M. Grimbert of the Messageries Royales.
  We came back again like swallows on the wing. ‘Don’t you think
  that happiness has made us lighter?’ Agathe said. We said all
  sorts of things, which I shall not tell you, Monsieur le Parisien,
  because they were all about you. Oh, we love you dearly, dear
  brother; it was all summed up in those few words. As for keeping
  the secret, little masqueraders like us are capable of anything
  (according to our aunt), even of holding our tongues. Our mother
  has been on a mysterious journey to Angouleme, and the aunt went
  with her, not without solemn councils, from which we were shut
  out, and M. le Baron likewise. They are silent as to the weighty
  political considerations that prompted their mission, and
  conjectures are rife in the State of Rastignac. The Infantas are
  embroidering a muslin robe with open-work sprigs for her Majesty
  the Queen; the work progresses in the most profound secrecy. There
  be but two more breadths to finish. A decree has gone forth that
  no wall shall be built on the side of Verteuil, but that a hedge
  shall be planted instead thereof. Our subjects may sustain some
  disappointment of fruit and espaliers, but strangers will enjoy
  a fair prospect. Should the heir-presumptive lack
  pocket-handkerchiefs, be it known unto him that the dowager Lady
  of Marcillac, exploring the recesses of her drawers and boxes
  (known respectively as Pompeii and Herculaneum), having brought to
  light a fair piece of cambric whereof she wotted not, the Princesses
  Agathe and Laure place at their brother’s disposal their thread,
  their needles, and hands somewhat of the reddest. The two young
  Princes, Don Henri and Don Gabriel, retain their fatal habits of
  stuffing themselves with grape-jelly, of teasing their sisters, of
  taking their pleasure by going a-bird-nesting, and of cutting
  switches for themselves from the osier-beds, maugre the laws of
  the realm. Moreover, they list not to learn naught, wherefore the
  Papal Nuncio (called of the commonalty, M. le Cure) threateneth
  them with excommunication, since that they neglect the sacred
  canons of grammatical construction for the construction of other
  canon, deadly engines made of the stems of elder.

 “Farewell, dear brother, never did letter carry so many wishes for
  your success, so much love fully satisfied. You will have a great
  deal to tell us when you come home! You will tell me everything,
  won’t you? I am the oldest. From something the aunt let fall, we
  think you must have had some success.

 “Something was said of a lady, but nothing more was said...

 “Of course not, in our family! Oh, by-the-by, Eugene, would you
  rather that we made that piece of cambric into shirts for you
  instead of pocket-handkerchiefs? If you want some really nice
  shirts at once, we ought to lose no time in beginning upon them;
  and if the fashion is different now in Paris, send us one for a
  pattern; we want more particularly to know about the cuffs. Good-
  bye! Good-bye! Take my kiss on the left side of your forehead, on
  the temple that belongs to me, and to no one else in the world. I
  am leaving the other side of the sheet for Agathe, who has
  solemnly promised not to read a word that I have written; but, all
  the same, I mean to sit by her side while she writes, so as to be
  quite sure that she keeps her word.--Your loving sister,

                                           “LAURE DE RASTIGNAC.”


“Yes!” said Eugene to himself. “Yes! Success at all costs now! Riches
could not repay such devotion as this. I wish I could give them every
sort of happiness! Fifteen hundred and fifty francs,” he went on after a
pause. “Every shot must go to the mark! Laure is right. Trust a woman!
I have only calico shirts. Where some one else’s welfare is concerned, a
young girl becomes as ingenious as a thief. Guileless where she herself
is in question, and full of foresight for me,--she is like a heavenly
angel forgiving the strange incomprehensible sins of earth.”

The world lay before him. His tailor had been summoned and sounded, and
had finally surrendered. When Rastignac met M. de Trailles, he had seen
at once how great a part the tailor plays in a young man’s career; a
tailor is either a deadly enemy or a staunch friend, with an invoice
for a bond of friendship; between these two extremes there is, alack! no
middle term. In this representative of his craft Eugene discovered a man
who understood that his was a sort of paternal function for young men
at their entrance into life, who regarded himself as a stepping-stone
between a young man’s present and future. And Rastignac in gratitude
made the man’s fortune by an epigram of a kind in which he excelled at a
later period of his life.

“I have twice known a pair of trousers turned out by him make a match of
twenty thousand livres a year!”

Fifteen hundred francs, and as many suits of clothes as he chose to
order! At that moment the poor child of the South felt no more doubts of
any kind. The young man went down to breakfast with the indefinable air
which the consciousness of the possession of money gives to youth. No
sooner are the coins slipped into a student’s pocket than his wealth,
in imagination at least, is piled into a fantastic column, which affords
him a moral support. He begins to hold up his head as he walks; he is
conscious that he has a means of bringing his powers to bear on a given
point; he looks you straight in the face; his gestures are quick and
decided; only yesterday he was diffident and shy, any one might have
pushed him aside; to-morrow, he will take the wall of a prime minister.
A miracle has been wrought in him. Nothing is beyond the reach of
his ambition, and his ambition soars at random; he is light-hearted,
generous, and enthusiastic; in short, the fledgling bird has discovered
that he has wings. A poor student snatches at every chance pleasure
much as a dog runs all sorts of risks to steal a bone, cracking it and
sucking the marrow as he flies from pursuit; but a young man who can
rattle a few runaway gold coins in his pocket can take his pleasure
deliberately, can taste the whole of the sweets of secure possession; he
soars far above earth; he has forgotten what the word _poverty_ means;
all Paris is his. Those are days when the whole world shines radiant
with light, when everything glows and sparkles before the eyes of youth,
days that bring joyous energy that is never brought into harness, days
of debts and of painful fears that go hand in hand with every delight.
Those who do not know the left bank of the Seine between the Rue
Saint-Jacques and the Rue des Saints-Peres know nothing of life.

“Ah! if the women of Paris but knew,” said Rastignac, as he devoured
Mme. Vauquer’s stewed pears (at five for a penny), “they would come here
in search of a lover.”

Just then a porter from the Messageries Royales appeared at the door of
the room; they had previously heard the bell ring as the wicket opened
to admit him. The man asked for M. Eugene de Rastignac, holding out two
bags for him to take, and a form of receipt for his signature. Vautrin’s
keen glance cut Eugene like a lash.

“Now you will be able to pay for those fencing lessons and go to the
shooting gallery,” he said.

“Your ship has come in,” said Mme. Vauquer, eyeing the bags.

Mlle. Michonneau did not dare to look at the money, for fear her eyes
should betray her cupidity.

“You have a kind mother,” said Mme. Couture.

“You have a kind mother, sir,” echoed Poiret.

“Yes, mamma has been drained dry,” said Vautrin, “and now you can have
your fling, go into society, and fish for heiresses, and dance with
countesses who have peach blossom in their hair. But take my advice,
young man, and don’t neglect your pistol practice.”

Vautrin struck an attitude, as if he were facing an antagonist.
Rastignac, meaning to give the porter a tip, felt in his pockets and
found nothing. Vautrin flung down a franc piece on the table.

“Your credit is good,” he remarked, eyeing the student, and Rastignac
was forced to thank him, though, since the sharp encounter of wits at
dinner that day, after Eugene came in from calling on Mme. de Beauseant,
he had made up his mind that Vautrin was insufferable. For a week, in
fact, they had both kept silence in each other’s presence, and watched
each other. The student tried in vain to account to himself for this
attitude.

An idea, of course, gains in force by the energy with which it
is expressed; it strikes where the brain sends it, by a law as
mathematically exact as the law that determines the course of a shell
from a mortar. The amount of impression it makes is not to be determined
so exactly. Sometimes, in an impressible nature, the idea works havoc,
but there are, no less, natures so robustly protected, that this sort
of projectile falls flat and harmless on skulls of triple brass,
as cannon-shot against solid masonry; then there are flaccid and
spongy-fibred natures into which ideas from without sink like spent
bullets into the earthworks of a redoubt. Rastignac’s head was something
of the powder-magazine order; the least shock sufficed to bring about an
explosion. He was too quick, too young, not to be readily accessible
to ideas; and open to that subtle influence of thought and feeling in
others which causes so many strange phenomena that make an impression
upon us of which we are all unconscious at the time. Nothing escaped his
mental vision; he was lynx-eyed; in him the mental powers of perception,
which seem like duplicates of

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