A RESPECTABLE BOARDING HOUSE

For the last forty years, an old woman by the name of Madame Vauquer, née de Conflans, has run a boarding house in Paris, in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève,² between the Latin Quarter and the Faubourg Saint-Marceau.³ Although this respectable establishment, known as the Maison Vauquer, accepts both men and women, young and old, its habits have never once excited malicious gossip. But then, no young lady has been seen there for thirty years and a young man who lodges there must have a very small allowance from his family. However, in 1819, the year in which this drama begins, one poor young woman was to be found there. Now, the word drama has fallen into some disrepute, having been bandied about in such an excessive and perverse way, in this age of tear-strewn literature,⁴ but it does ask to be used here. Not that this story is dramatic in the true sense of the term, but by the end of it, perhaps a few tears will have been shed intra muros et extra.⁵ Will it be understood outside Paris? There is room for doubt. The peculiarities of this scene packed with commentary and local colour may only be appreciated between the hills of Montmartre and the heights of Montrouge, in that illustrious valley of endlessly crumbling stucco and black, mud-clogged gutters; a valley full of genuine suffering and frequently counterfeit joy, where life is so frantically hectic that only the most freakish anomaly will produce any lasting sensation. Nonetheless, here and there, in this dense web of vice and virtue, you come across sufferings that seem grand and solemn: the selfish, the self-interested stop and feel pity; although for them such things are no sooner seen than swallowed, as swiftly as succulent fruit. A stouter heart than most may put a temporary spoke in the wheel of the chariot of civilization, which resembles that of the idol of Jaggernaut,⁶ but will soon be crushed as it continues its glorious progress. You will react in much the same way, you who are holding this book in your white hand, you who are sinking into a soft-cushioned chair saying to yourself: ‘Perhaps this will entertain me.’ After reading about old man Goriot’s secret woes, you will dine heartily, blaming your insensitivity firmly on the author, accusing him of exaggeration, pointing the finger at his feverish imagination. Well! Let me tell you that this drama is neither fiction nor romance. All is true,⁷ so true that we may each recognize elements of it close to home, perhaps even in our hearts.

The premises used for the business of the boarding house are owned by Madame Vauquer. The building stands at the foot of the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, just where the ground shelves into the Rue de l’Arbalète so sharply and inconveniently that horses rarely go up or down it. This circumstance contributes to the silence which prevails in these streets wedged between the domes of the Val-de-Grâce and the Panthéon,⁸ two monuments which modify the atmospheric conditions, giving the light a jaundiced tinge, while the harsh shadows cast by their cupolas make everything gloomy. The pavements are dry, the gutters are empty of either water or mud, grass grows out of the walls. Every passer-by – even the most carefree man in the world – feels dejected here, where the sound of a carriage is a momentous event, the houses are drab and the walls make you feel boxed in. A Parisian who strayed this way would see nothing but boarding houses and institutions, tedium and wretchedness, old age dying, blithe youth forced to toil. No district of Paris is less attractive, nor, it must be said, so little known. The Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève itself is like a bronze frame, the only one that fits this tale, for it prepares the mind only too well with its murky colours and sobering thoughts; just as, step by step, the daylight fades and the guide’s patter rings hollow, when the traveller descends into the Catacombs. A fitting comparison! Who is to say which sight is the more horrible: shrivelled hearts, or empty skulls?

The front of the building overlooks a small patch of garden, while the boarding house as a whole stands at a right angle to the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, where you see its depth in cross-section. Between the house and the garden, a sunken gravel strip a fathom wide runs the length of the façade, fronted by a sandy path bordered with geraniums, oleanders and pomegranate trees planted in large blue and white porcelain vases. The entrance to this path is through a secondary door, above which is a sign declaring: MAISON VAUQUER, and underneath: Lodgings for persons of both sexes et cetera. During the day, at the end of the path, through an openwork gate with a strident bell, you might glimpse a green marble arcade painted by a local artist on the wall facing the street. A statue of Eros stands in the recess suggested by the painting. Those fond of symbols might see in its blistering coat of varnish a kind of love more Parisian than mythical, one which is cured a stone’s throw away.⁹ Beneath the pedestal, this half-eroded inscription, with its fashionable enthusiasm for Voltaire on his return to Paris in 1777,¹⁰ reveals the ornament’s age:

At nightfall, the openwork gate is covered with a solid one. The patch of garden, as wide as the façade is long, is boxed in by the street wall and the adjoining wall of the house next door, whose thick curtain of ivy is so unusually picturesque for Paris that passers-by find their eye drawn to it. The garden walls are covered in espaliers and vines, whose spindly and powdery attempts at fruit each year provide Madame Vauquer with a source of concern and conversation with her lodgers. Along each wall a narrow path leads to an area overshadowed by lime trees, which Madame Vauquer, albeit née de Conflans, obstinately calls ly-ums, despite her boarders’ remarks on her pronunciation. Two paths run either side of a bed of artichokes bordered with sorrel, lettuce and parsley, and flanked by tapering fruit trees.¹¹ A round table, painted green and surrounded by seats, stands beneath the spreading lime branches. On sweltering summer days, those boarders who can afford to take coffee come and sip it here, in heat strong enough to hatch eggs. The front of the building, three storeys high and topped with garrets, is built of rough stone daubed in that shade of yellow which gives a dingy air to almost every house in Paris. Each floor has five small-paned windows, whose slatted blinds all hang aslant so that no two line up as they should. The building has two windows to its depth; those on the ground floor are furnished only by iron bars, covered with mesh. At the back is a yard about twenty feet across, where pigs, chickens and rabbits live together companionably, with a shed stacked with wood at one end. Hanging between the shed and the kitchen window is the pantry; the slops from the sink flow out beneath it. The yard has a narrow door leading to the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, through which the cook sweeps away the household’s waste, sluicing the cesspool that forms there with water to keep the stench at bay.

The ground floor is naturally appointed to the activity of a boarding house. A French window opens into the front room, whose two street-facing windows let in some light. The drawing room communicates with the dining room, which is separated from the kitchen by a flight of wooden stairs laid with scrubbed and re-stained tiles. There is no more dispiriting sight than that drawing room furnished with easy and hard-backed chairs upholstered in haircloth¹² with matt and shiny stripes. In the middle is a round table with a grey-and-white marble top bearing the obligatory white porcelain coffee service with worn gilt trim found everywhere these days. This room, whose floor is rather crooked, is wainscoted to elbow height. The remaining wall space is covered with glazed wallpaper showing scenes from Telemachus,¹³ whose classical characters appear in colour. In the panel between the barred windows, the boarders may contemplate the scene of the banquet given by Calypso for Ulysses’ son. For forty years this picture has provided material for endless quips by the younger boarders, who make believe they’re superior to their circumstances by mocking the dinner to which poverty condemns them. The stone fireplace, whose permanently spotless hearth attests to the fact that no fire is ever kindled there except on special occasions, is adorned with two vases crammed with decrepit artificial flowers, set on either side of a bluish marble clock in the worst taste. Our language has no name for the odour given off by this first room, which ought to be called ‘essence of boarding house’. It smells of all that is stale, mildewy, rancid; it chills you, makes your nose run, clings to your clothes; it repeats like last night’s dinner; it reeks of the scullery, the pantry, the poorhouse. If a method were invented for measuring the foul and fundamental particles contributed by the catarrhal conditions specific to each boarder, young and old, perhaps it really could be described. And yet, despite these dreary horrors, if you compare it with the dining room next door, you will find the drawing room as elegant and fragrant as any self-respecting boudoir. This room, panelled throughout, was once painted a colour which can no longer be discerned, providing a backdrop for the grime which has printed over it in layers, forming intriguing patterns. It is crammed with an assortment of sticky sideboards upon which you see nicked, stained carafes, round moiré¹⁴ stands and stacks of thick china plates with blue edging, made in Tournai. In one corner is a rack of numbered pigeon holes housing each boarder’s food- or wine-stained serviette. In this room you find those indestructible pieces of furniture that nobody else will have, stranded here like the debris of civilization in a Hospital of Incurables. You might see a weather house with a Capuchin monk that comes out when it rains, tasteless prints that spoil your appetite, all framed in varnished black wood with gilt-piping; a tortoiseshell wall-clock with copper detail; a green stove, Argand lamps¹⁵ coated in a blend of dust and oil, a long table covered with oilcloth greasy enough for a facetious diner to write his name on using his finger as a pen, warped chairs, shabby rush placemats, forever uncoiling but just about holding together; and finally, pitiful plate-warmers with broken grates, slack hinges and charred wood. A full explanation of how old, cracked, rotten, shaky, worm-eaten, armless, seedy, creaking and generally on its last legs the furniture is would require a description so lengthy it would delay the main interest of this story, something that those of you in a hurry would find unforgivable. The floor, laid with red tiles, is pitted with craters caused by repeated scrubbing and staining. In all, an unpoetic wretchedness reigns throughout; a mean, reduced, threadbare wretchedness. Although there is not yet filth, there are stains; although there are neither holes nor rags, everything is sliding into decay.

The room may be seen in all its splendour at around seven in the morning, at which time Madame Vauquer’s cat, running ahead of its mistress, jumps up onto the sideboards, sniffs at the milk kept in various jugs covered with plates and makes its morning prrruing sound. Now the widow herself appears, shuffling along in her puckered slippers, a crooked hair-piece poking out beneath the tulle bonnet perched on her head. Her flabby, sagging face, her protruding parrot’s beak of a nose, her stubby, pudgy hands, her plump tick of a body, her overstuffed, wobbling bodice, are all entirely in keeping with this room, where the walls sweat misfortune, where enterprise kicks its heels and whose fetid fug Madame Vauquer breathes in without gagging. Her face is as cold as the first autumn frost, the expression in her crow-footed eyes shifts between the fixed smile of a dancer and the baleful glower of a discounter;¹⁶ in all, everything about her points to the boarding house, just as the boarding house leads to her. There can be no prison without a warder, the one is unimaginable without the other. The pallor and portliness of this small woman are the products of the life she leads, just as typhus emanates from the vapours of a hospital. Her knitted woollen petticoat, drooping below an overskirt made from an old dress and poking out through the slits where the cloth has worn away, epitomizes the drawing room, the dining room, the garden, anticipates the cooking and prefigures the boarders. Once she’s here, the scene is set, the show can begin. Madame Vauquer, who must be about fifty years of age, resembles all women who have seen better days. She has the unflinching stare, the self-righteous manner of a Madam who will lay down the law to raise her fee, but is otherwise prepared to stop at nothing to improve her lot, to inform on Georges or Pichegru¹⁷ (if Georges and Pichegru hadn’t already been shopped). Nonetheless, the boarders would say that she was a good woman at heart, believing her to be as down on her luck as they were, hearing her groan and cough as they did. What kind of a man was Monsieur Vauquer? She tended to be uncommunicative on the subject of the deceased. How did he lose his fortune? In the troubles, she would reply. He had treated her shabbily, leaving her with only her eyes to weep with, this house as her livelihood and the right not to sympathize with anyone else in a tight spot, because, as she would say, she had suffered all that a body can suffer. Recognizing her mistress’s shuffling step, big Sylvie, the cook, would hurry out to serve déjeuner to the lodgers.

The boarders, who lived out, usually only came for dinner, which cost thirty francs a month payable in advance. At the time when this story begins, there were seven lodgers. The best apartments in the house were on the first floor. Madame Vauquer lived in the smaller of the two and the other was occupied by Madame Couture, the widow of a Commissary-General¹⁸ of the French Republic. She had in her charge a young lady of a tender age, called Victorine Taillefer, whom she cared for as a mother. These two ladies paid eighteen hundred francs for their board and lodging. The first of the two apartments on the second floor was occupied by an elderly man called Poiret; the other by a man of around forty years of age, known as Monsieur Vautrin, who wore a black wig, dyed his side-whiskers, and was by his own account a former merchant. The third floor was divided into four rooms, two of which were rented, one by an elderly spinster called Mademoiselle Michonneau; the other by a retired dealer in vermicelli, Italian pasta and starch, who had come to be known as old man Goriot. The other two rooms were intended for birds of passage, for students down on their luck who, like Goriot and Mademoiselle Michonneau, could only afford forty-five francs a month for food and lodging, but Madame Vauquer had little desire for their custom and only took them in for want of anyone better: they ate too much bread. At the time, one of these two rooms was occupied by a young man who had come to Paris from the Angoulême area to study law and whose large family were tightening their belts and making endless sacrifices in order to send him twelve hundred francs a year. Eugène de Rastignac, as he was called, was one of those young men whose lack of fortune requires them to develop an aptitude for work, who, from an early age, fully understand what their parents expect of them and prepare for greatness by calculating how far their learning will take them and adapting it in advance of shifts in society, thus ensuring they will be the first to benefit. Without his inquisitiveness and the skill with which he engineered his entry into the most exclusive Parisian society, the present account would not have been painted in such true colours, and for this we must undoubtedly thank his shrewdness and his desire to fathom the mysteries of an appalling situation, as carefully concealed by those who had created it as by the man who endured it.

Up from the third floor was an attic where the laundry was hung out, and two garrets, where Christophe the errand boy and big Sylvie the cook slept. Besides the seven lodgers, year in, year out, Madame Vauquer took eight students of law or medicine and two or three regulars who lived nearby, all of whom paid for board alone. In the evening, eighteen people sat down to eat in the dining room, which could hold up to twenty, but in the morning, only the seven residents were to be found there, so that déjeuner almost felt like a family meal. They would come downstairs in slippers and venture to make confidential remarks about the dress or appearance of the non-residents, discussing the events of the previous evening, their privacy encouraging them to speak freely. These seven lodgers were Madame Vauquer’s spoilt children and she measured out the level of care and respect due to each, depending on how much they paid, with the precision of an astronomer. The residents may have ended up under the same roof by chance, but they were all motivated by the same consideration. The two second-floor lodgers paid only seventy-two francs per month. Rates as cheap as these are only to be found in the Faubourg Saint-Marcel between the hospitals of La Bourbe and La Salpêtrière.¹⁹ Indeed, with the exception of Madame Couture, who paid more, all of the lodgers were more or less obviously down at heel. And so the dingy-looking interior of this establishment was matched by the equally shabby clothing of those who occupied it. The men wore frock-coats whose colour you’d be hard pressed to define, shoes of the kind found discarded in the road in fashionable districts, linen hanging by a thread, clothes stripped of all but their soul. The women wore faded, re-dyed, washed-out dresses, old darned lace, gloves shiny with wear, collarettes that always looked soiled and frayed fichus.²⁰ Yet despite these clothes, almost without exception, they had solid physiques, constitutions which had survived life’s storms, and cold, hard faces, as worn as écu coins withdrawn from circulation. Their thin lips concealed greedy teeth. Each lodger’s appearance hinted at a tragedy, either fully played-out, or in progress; not a tragedy performed in the glare of the footlights against a backdrop of painted scenery, but a silent, real-life tragedy, so chilling it stirs and warms the heart, a tragedy with no final curtain.

The elderly, weary-eyed Mademoiselle Michonneau was never seen without a grubby green taffeta eye-shade edged with wire, which would have scared off the Angel of Mercy. Her shawl, with its balding, drooping fringe, appeared to be draped over a skeleton, so angular were the shapes it clung to. What acid had eaten away this woman’s feminine curves? She must have been pretty once, and shapely too: was it vice, grief, cupidity? Had she loved too much? Perhaps she had been a dealer in second-hand finery,²¹ or simply a whore? Was she atoning for a shameless youth spent in pursuit of profit and pleasure, with an old age which made passers-by turn away? Her blank expression chilled, her scraggy face threatened. Her voice was as shrill as a solitary cicada scraping in the undergrowth at the approach of winter. She said that she had cared for an old gentleman suffering from an inflammation of the bladder and abandoned by his children who believed him to be destitute. This old man had bequeathed to her a life annuity of one thousand francs, which was periodically disputed by his heirs, who called her every kind of name. Although her face had been ravaged by the passions that had distorted it, the texture of her skin was still delicate and white in places, perhaps indicating that her body also retained some vestigial beauty.

Monsieur Poiret was a kind of blundering automaton. To see him – looming like a grey shadow along a path in the Jardin des Plantes, a drooping old cap on his head, barely able to grip the yellowing ivory handle of his stick, the crumpled skirts of his frock-coat flapping, miserably failing to hide his empty, sagging breeches and blue-stockinged legs that gave way like a drunkard’s, and revealing his dirty white waistcoat and the concertinaed coarse muslin shirt frill which had worked loose from the tie twisted round his scrawny turkey’s neck – you wouldn’t be alone in asking yourself whether this pantomime figure could possibly belong to the audacious tribe of the sons of Japet²² who flit about on the Boulevard des Italiens. What kind of employment had knocked the stuffing out of him? What passion had left such a stamp of bewilderment on his bulbous face, which would have seemed overdone drawn as a caricature. What kind of a man had he been? Perhaps he’d been employed by the Ministry of Justice, in the office to which executioners addressed their memoranda of expenses, accounts of supplies of black veils for parricides, of sawdust for baskets, of rope for the guillotine. He might have once been a receiver at the entrance to an abattoir or an assistant health inspector. In all, he appeared to have been one of the mill-horses that keep the great wheel of society turning, one of those Parisian cats that never know for which monkeys they are pulling chestnuts out of the fire,²³ one of many pivots on which some public tragedy or controversy has revolved, one of those men that we look at and say: After all, someone has to do it. The fine folk of Paris are oblivious to faces such as his, drained by mental or physical suffering. But then Paris is an ocean. Heave in the lead as often as you like, you’ll never sound its depths. Explore it, describe it: however exhaustive your exploration or description, however numerous and inquisitive the explorers of that sea, there will always be virgin territory, an unknown cave, flowers, pearls, monsters, something unheard of, forgotten by literary divers. The Maison Vauquer is one of these curious monstrosities.

Two faces stood out in striking contrast to the majority of the boarders and lodgers. Although Mademoiselle Victorine Taillefer had the sickly complexion of a young lady suffering from chlorosis,²⁴ and her habitual melancholy, troubled countenance and air of weakness and fragility blended seamlessly into the background of general suffering, at least she wasn’t old and her tongue and her movements were agile. This young unfortunate resembled a shrub with yellowing leaves, recently planted in the wrong kind of soil. Her sallow features, her slick of tawny hair, her painfully thin waist, gave her the kind of grace which modern poets have found in medieval statues. Her grey eyes flecked with black expressed a Christian gentleness and resignation, while her simple, inexpensive clothes showed off her youthful curves. Compared with the other boarders, she was pretty. If she had been happy, she would have been ravishing: happiness is a woman’s poetry, as powders and pomades are her persona. If the exhilaration of a ball could have imparted a rosy bloom to her pale face; if the sweet delights of an elegant life could have filled out her cheeks – already somewhat hollow – and made them glow; if love could have rekindled some spark in her downcast eyes, Victorine would have been the equal of the most beautiful of young women. She lacked what creates a woman anew: fine clothes and love letters. Her story would have made a good novel. Believing he had good reason not to recognize her as his daughter, her father refused to have her under his roof, gave her only six hundred francs per year and had wound up his estate so that his son would be the sole inheritor. Victorine’s mother had died of despair in the house of a distant relative, Madame Couture, who had cared for the orphan ever since as if she were her own child. Unfortunately the widow of the Commissary-General to the Armies of the Republic had nothing to her name but her dower and her pension; one day she might have to leave this poor girl, entirely without experience and resources, to the mercy of the world. The worthy woman took Victorine to Mass every Sunday and to Confession once a fortnight, to make her pious, if nothing else. With good reason. Her religious fervour gave the disowned child some hope for the future. She loved her father and tried, every year, to deliver in person her mother’s letter of forgiveness to him; but every year without fail she found the door of her father’s house closed to her. Her brother, her only possible intermediary, hadn’t once come to visit her in four years and sent her no assistance. She implored God to open her father’s eyes, to soften her brother’s heart, and prayed for both without condemning either. As far as Madame Couture and Madame Vauquer were concerned, there weren’t enough words in the dictionary of insults to describe such barbaric conduct. Whenever they spoke ill of the infamous millionaire, Victorine murmured words as gentle as the call of a wounded dove whose cry of pain still expresses love.

Eugène de Rastignac’s looks were typically southern: pale complexion, black hair, blue eyes. His bearing, his manners, his unfailing poise, all indicated that he had been born into a noble family, where every effort had been made to educate him in traditions of good taste. Although he was careful with his coats, although on a normal day you would find him still wearing out last year’s clothes, nonetheless, from time to time he was able to go out dressed like any fashionable young gentleman. Most days he wore an old frock-coat, a shabby waistcoat, the limp, sorry-looking, badly knotted black tie favoured by students, trousers in keeping with the rest and resoled boots.

Vautrin, the forty-year-old man with dyed side-whiskers, slotted in somewhere between these two characters and the other boarders. He was one of those men people call ‘the life and soul!’. He had broad shoulders, a powerful chest, bulging muscles and thick, square hands marked with distinctive growths of tufty, flame-red hair between the finger joints. His face, lined with premature wrinkles, showed signs of an intransigence which belied his accommodating and sociable ways. His bass-baritone voice, as booming as his hearty laugh, was far from displeasing. He was obliging and cheerful. If a lock was playing up, he would dismantle it, get it working, oil it, file it and put it back together again in an instant, saying, ‘I know a thing or two about that.’ Indeed, he knew a thing or two about everything: ships, the sea, France, foreign parts, business, men, current affairs, laws, grand houses and prisons. If someone had a fit of the grumbles, he offered them his services on the spot. He had on several occasions lent money to Madame Vauquer and some of her boarders; but despite his good-natured manner, those in his debt would have died rather than fail to return what they owed him, due to a certain piercing and steely look²⁵ he had, which struck fear into the heart. His skill at aiming a stream of saliva hinted at unshakeable sang-froid, suggesting that he would stop at nothing, not even a crime, to get himself out of a tight situation. His eyes seemed to penetrate right to the heart of all matters, all consciences, all feelings, with the severity of a judge. He usually went out after déjeuner, coming back for dinner, then would disappear for the entire evening and return towards midnight, letting himself in with a master key which Madame Vauquer had let him have. He was the only one to enjoy this privilege. But then, he was on the best of terms with the widow, whom he would seize around the waist, calling her ‘Ma’, a baffling piece of flattery. The old bird still believed this feat to be within the reach of any man, but only Vautrin had long enough arms to squeeze her bulky circumference. One typically extravagant gesture of his was to pay fifteen francs a month for the gloria²⁶ he took at dessert. Had any of the boarders been less superficial – the young caught up in the whirlwind of Parisian life, the old indifferent to anything which did not affect them directly – they might have looked beyond the ambiguous impression that Vautrin made on them. He knew or guessed the business of all those around him, while not one of them was able to read either his thoughts or his actions. Although he might cast his apparent conviviality and jollity, his constant willingness to oblige, as a barrier between himself and the others, he frequently revealed glimpses of the fearsome depths of his personality. Often, a flash of wit worthy of Juvenal²⁷ – showing that he revelled in scoffing at the law, lashing out at high society, exposing its fecklessness – suggested that he had some score to settle with society and that there was some carefully buried mystery in his life.

Attracted, perhaps without realizing it, by the strength of the one and the beauty of the other, Mademoiselle Taillefer divided her furtive glances, her secret thoughts, between the forty-year-old man and the young student; but neither appeared to show any interest in her, even though, from one day to the next, chance might improve her lot and make her a wealthy match. None of these people, as it happened, ever bothered to question whether the alleged misfortunes of this or that person were genuine or false. They all felt a kind of mutual indifference mingled with distrust that arose from their respective situations. They knew they were powerless to do anything about their sufferings, and by dint of recounting them to each other had all drained the cup of sympathy dry. Like old couples, they had nothing left to say to each other. And so all that was left between them were the interrelated parts of the machinery of life, the cogs and wheels without the oil. They would all of them walk straight past a blind man in the road, listen unmoved to tales of woe and view a man’s death as a solution to the problem of the poverty which left them insensible to the most agonizing death throes. The happiest of these forlorn souls was Madame Vauquer, who reigned over this poorhouse with paying guests. She alone believed the little garden – silent and cold, parched and dank, and thus as monotonous as any steppe – to be a pleasant grove. For her alone this drab yellow building, smelling as strongly of verdigris²⁸ as a counting-house, was a source of delight. These cells belonged to her. She fed these convicts – lifers sentenced to endless punishment – and they respected the authority she exerted over them. Where else in Paris would these poor creatures have found, at the price she was asking, adequate, wholesome food, and lodgings which they were at liberty to make, if not elegant or comfortable, at least clean and salubrious? Had she ever allowed herself some blatant act of injustice, the victim would have suffered it in silence.

Such a gathering should and did present in microcosm the elements that make up society as a whole. Among the eighteen boarders was to be found, as in every school, or throughout the world, one poor rejected creature, a figure of fun and the butt of all humour. At the start of his second year, this man began to stand out for Eugène de Rastignac from the rest of those among whom he was condemned to live for a further two years. Their whipping boy was the retired vermicelli dealer, old man Goriot: a painter would have shone all the light in the scene upon his face, as this historian will. What twist of fate had caused such a confusion of scorn and hatred, persecution and pity, such a lack of concern for his suffering, to rain down on the head of the oldest boarder? Had he brought it upon himself through one of those acts of ridicule or eccentricity that we find less pardonable than actual vice? Such issues lie behind many a social injustice. Perhaps it’s in human nature to reserve all suffering for the person who quietly endures everything, whether out of genuine humility, weakness or indifference. Don’t we all love to prove our strength at the expense of someone or something else? Even that most pathetic of creatures, the street urchin, rings all the doorbells when it’s freezing cold outside or shins up a gleaming monument to write his name on it.

In 1813, at around sixty-nine years of age, old man Goriot had withdrawn from business and retired to Madame Vauquer’s establishment. He had initially rented the rooms now occupied by Madame Couture and had paid twelve hundred francs for board and lodging with the air of a man for whom five louis more or less was a trifle. Madame Vauquer had spruced up the three rooms of this apartment on receipt of an advance payment, which covered, he was told, the cost of the tawdry furnishings: yellow calico curtains, varnished wooden armchairs upholstered in Utrecht velvet, a couple of cheap distemper-paintings and wallpaper at which suburban taverns would turn up their noses. Perhaps it was the casual generosity with which old man Goriot – at that time respectfully referred to as Monsieur Goriot – allowed himself to be duped that made her decide he was a fool without an ounce of business sense. Goriot arrived fitted out with an opulent wardrobe, the magnificent trousseau of a merchant with the means to treat himself on retiring from trade. Madame Vauquer had admired eighteen cambric shirts, whose exquisite quality she found all the more remarkable for the two pins joined by a fine chain, each set with a huge diamond, that the vermicelli dealer wore on his shirt frill. It was his custom to wear a cornflower-blue morning coat, and every day he chose a fresh white piqué waistcoat, beneath which his pear-shaped, protuberant belly would wobble around, causing a heavy gold chain hung with watch-charms to bounce up and down. His snuffbox, also made of gold, contained a locket full of hair, appearing to suggest he had stolen a few hearts. When his hostess accused him of being a bit of a ladies’ man, his lips widened into the glad smile of the bourgeois whose soft spot has just been touched. His armoires (which he pronounced ‘ormoires’²⁹ as those of humble station do) were crammed with an abundance of his household silverware. The widow’s eyes lit up as she obligingly helped him to unpack and tidy away the ladles, serving spoons, cutlery, cruets, sauce boats, miscellaneous dishes, silver-gilt breakfast services, all more or less splendid pieces, worth a considerable weight in marks,³⁰ and from which he couldn’t bear to be separated. These presents reminded him of special occasions in his family life. ‘This’, he said to Madame Vauquer, clutching a platter and small dish with two kissing turtle-doves on its cover, ‘is the first present my wife ever gave me, on our anniversary. Poor darling! It cost her every penny of her maiden’s savings. Let me tell you, Madame, I would rather scrape a living from the earth with my bare nails than part with this. Thank the Lord! I’ll be able to drink my coffee from this bowl every morning for the rest of my life. I have nothing to complain about, my bread will be buttered on both sides for a good while yet.’ Indeed, Madame Vauquer, with her magpie’s eye, had taken a good look at certain entries in the Grand-Livre,³¹ which, roughly totted up, indicated that the excellent Goriot had an income of around eight to ten thousand francs a year. From that day on, Madame Vauquer, née de Conflans, who only admitted to thirty-nine of her forty-eight years, began to get ideas. Although the lower lids of Goriot’s eyes were turned out, swollen and drooping, so that he was forever wiping them, she found his manner agreeable and proper. Moreover, his fleshy, bulging calves, not to mention his long square nose, betokened certain fine qualities the widow seemed to find attractive, and which were borne out by the old man’s moon-like and naively foolish face. He appeared to be a solidly built beast, more likely to be led by his heart than his head. His hair dressed in pigeon-wings, which the barber from the Ecole Polytechnique came to powder for him each morning, formed five points on his low forehead and framed his face well. Although a little countrified, he was so well turned out and took such generous pinches of snuff, inhaling it with the air of a man whose snuffbox is always bound to be full of Macouba,³² that on Monsieur Goriot’s first night under her roof, Madame Vauquer rolled in her blankets like a partridge wrapped in bacon and roasted in the flames of an overwhelming desire to throw off the shroud of Vauquer and rise out of the ashes as Goriot. To be married, sell her boarding house, give her arm to this prime specimen of the bourgeoisie, become one of the local worthies, collecting money for the poor, driving out to Choisy, Soissy, Gentilly³³ on Sundays; going to the theatre whenever she felt like it and sitting in a box, without having to wait for some boarder to pass on a free ticket in July:³⁴ the Eldorado she dreamed of was that of any modest Parisian householder. She had told no one about the forty thousand francs she owned, scraped together penny by penny. In terms of wealth, she confidently believed herself to be a decent match. ‘As for the rest, I’m certainly good enough for that old chap!’ she said to herself in bed, turning onto her side as if to provide herself with evidence of the alluring contours which big Sylvie found moulded into the hollows of the mattress each morning. From that day on, for around three months, the widow Vauquer took advantage of Monsieur Goriot’s barber and spent a fair amount of money on her appearance, which she justified by the need to ensure that the standing of her establishment was in keeping with the dignitaries who patronized it. She plotted and schemed to bring in a different class of boarder, and made no secret of the fact that, from now on, she would only accept persons of the highest distinction in every respect. If a stranger showed up, she boasted to him of the preference that Monsieur Goriot, one of the most important and respected merchants in Paris, had shown for her establishment. She distributed brochures with the heading MAISON VAUQUER. ‘It was’, she wrote, ‘one of the most longstanding and highly esteemed boarding houses in the vicinity of the Latin Quarter. It had a charming view over the Gobelins valley (you could just about see it from the third floor) and a delightful garden, at one end of which was a LONG ARBOUR of lime trees.’ She also mentioned the clean air and seclusion. This brochure brought her Madame la Comtesse d’Ambermesnil, a thirty-six-year-old woman, who was awaiting completion of the settlement and payment of a pension due to her as the widow of a general who had died in the fields of battle. Madame Vauquer introduced certain refinements to her table, lit a fire in her drawing room for almost six months and kept the promises made in her brochure so well that she really invested herself. The comtesse even told Madame Vauquer, whom she called her dear friend, that she would bring her the Baronne de Vaumerland and the widow of Colonel Comte Picqoiseau, two friends of hers, who would, at the end of the quarter, be leaving a boarding house in the Marais that cost more than the Maison Vauquer. Of course, these ladies would be extremely well off once the War Office had sorted out their affairs. ‘But’, she said, ‘the paperwork is always interminable.’ The two widows would retire to Madame Vauquer’s rooms after dinner, where they had little chats, drinking cassis and nibbling delicacies reserved for the delectation of the mistress of the house. Madame de l’Ambermesnil greatly approved of her hostess’s views on Goriot, excellent views, which she had of course guessed from the start; she thought he was just perfect.

‘Oh! My dear lady! A man as sound as a bell,’ the widow said to her, ‘a man in mint condition, with plenty left for a woman to enjoy.’

The comtesse generously gave Madame Vauquer the benefit of her opinion: her wardrobe needed to be brought in line with her aspirations. ‘We must set you on a war-footing,’ she said to her. After much calculation, the two widows set off together to the Galeries de Bois³⁵ at the Palais-Royal, where they bought a plumed hat and a bonnet. The comtesse then took her friend to La Petite Jeannette,³⁶ and at this shop they chose a dress and a shawl. When the ammunition had been loaded and the widow presented arms, she bore a striking resemblance to the signboard of the Boeuf à la mode.³⁷ Despite this, she found her appearance so much improved that she felt she owed the comtesse, and although not one for giving presents, begged her to accept a hat costing twenty francs. As it happened, she wanted to ask her a favour: to sound out Goriot and sing her praises to him. Madame de l’Ambermesnil went along with this little game most obligingly. She cornered the old vermicelli dealer and managed to confer with him; but finding that her efforts, inspired by her particular wish to seduce him on her own behalf, were met with prudishness, if not consternation, she came out disgusted by his rudeness.

‘My angel,’ she said to her dear friend, ‘you won’t get anything out of that man! He’s absurdly suspicious; he’s a skinflint, a brute, a fool, who will bring you nothing but trouble.’

Such things had passed between Monsieur Goriot and Madame de l’Ambermesnil that the comtesse could no longer bear to remain under the same roof as him. She left the next day, forgetting to pay six months’ rent and leaving personal effects worth all of five francs. Despite the grim determination with which Madame Vauquer carried out her enquiry, she was unable to track down the Comtesse de l’Ambermesnil’s whereabouts in Paris. She often talked about this deplorable affair, bewailing her trusting nature, although she was warier than a she-cat. However, she wouldn’t be the first person to mistrust her nearest and dearest yet confide in the first stranger who comes along: a strange but true quirk of behaviour, whose root is easily traced to the human heart. Some people perhaps have nothing left to gain from those they live with; having revealed the emptiness of their souls, they secretly feel themselves to be judged with deserved severity; however, as they have a powerful craving for the flattery they need but lack, or a burning desire to appear to possess qualities they do not have, they hope to take by surprise the heart and esteem of those who are strangers to them, at the risk of one day falling from grace. Meanwhile, there are some individuals who are born mercenary, who never do a kind deed for friends or family, because they owe it to them; but who will bend over backwards for people they don’t know in a bid to salvage some scrap of self-esteem: the narrower the circle of their intimates, the less they love them; the wider it is, the keener they are to offer their services. Madame Vauquer’s nature had something of both these types, at bottom loathsome, deceitful and mean.

‘If I’d been here,’ Vautrin would say to her, ‘that’s one mishap you’d have been spared! I’d have soon seen through that trickstress of yours. I’d recognize one of their boat-races anywhere.’

Like all narrow-minded people, Madame Vauquer tended not to look beyond her own version of events or to examine root causes. She preferred to blame others for her own failings. At the time when she incurred her loss, she decided that the honest vermicelli dealer was the source of her misfortune, and from then on, she said, began to come to her senses about him. Once she realized that her pointed coquetry and showy dress were getting her nowhere, it didn’t take her long to work out what the reason was. She noticed that her lodger already had his carryings-on, as she called them. This proved that the hope she had cherished so fondly was based on sheer fantasy and that she’d never get anything out of that man, as the comtesse had so forcefully put it, and after all, she had appeared to be something of an expert. Inevitably, she took her aversion further than she had her attraction. The intensity of her loathing was proportionate to her thwarted expectations, rather than to her love. Although the human heart may stop and rest as it climbs the peaks of an attachment, it rarely pauses on the slippery downward slope of hatred. But Monsieur Goriot was her boarder, and so the widow had to repress the outbursts of her wounded self-esteem, smother her sighs of disappointment and swallow her desire for vengeance, like a monk nettled by his prior. The small-minded satisfy their urges, good or bad, with endless pettiness. The widow channelled all her female cunning into inventing covert ways of persecuting her victim. She began by putting a stop to the extravagances which had found their way onto her table. ‘No more cornichons, no more anchovies: it’s all a perfect swindle!’ she said to Sylvie, on the morning when she resumed her original modus operandi. Monsieur Goriot had frugal tastes: the prerequisite parsimony of the self-made man had become a habit with him. Soup, boiled meat, a dish of vegetables were, and always would be, his favourite dinner. As Madame Vauquer was unable to deprive him of what he liked best, she found it hard to make her lodger’s life a misery. In desperation at her failure to make a dent in Goriot’s armour, she began to belittle him, infecting her boarders with her loathing, and as they made him their sport, they dished up her revenge. By the end of the first year, the widow had come to view him with such suspicion that she would wonder why this wealthy merchant, with a private income of seven to eight thousand livres, who owned such splendid silverware and jewels fine enough for any dancing girl, was staying at her boarding house and paying her such a paltry sum of money in proportion to his wealth. For most of this first year, Goriot had tended to dine out once or twice a week; until, little by little, it came to the point where he would dine in town only twice a month. Mister Goriot’s intimate little dinners out suited Madame Vauquer’s interests far too well for her not to be irritated by the increasing frequency with which her lodger took his meals in the boarding house. She attributed this change as much to a desire to annoy his hostess as to the gradual attrition of his wealth: one of the most unattractive habits of Lilliputian minds is to imagine that others share their pettiness. Unfortunately, at the end of the second year, Monsieur Goriot lent some substance to the gossip about him by asking Madame Vauquer if he could move up to the second floor, reducing his rent to nine hundred francs. His need to save money was so great that he went without a fire in his room all winter. Widow Vauquer wished to be paid in advance; Monsieur Goriot consented, and from then on she called him old man Goriot. The reasons behind his decline were anyone’s guess. No easy investigation! As the counterfeit comtesse had put it, old man Goriot was secretive, a dark horse. According to the logic of the empty-headed, who keep nothing secret because they hold nothing sacred, those who keep themselves to themselves must have something to hide. So it was that the highly respected merchant became a charlatan, the ladies’ man became an old rogue. Sometimes, according to Vautrin, who came to live at the Maison Vauquer around that time, old man Goriot was a lamb who, having been shorn of his fortune in the stock-market, would try and recoup his losses as a stag,³⁸ in the forceful phraseology of financial language. At other times, he was one of those lightweight gamblers who have a flutter with ten francs every night and never win more than the same amount back. Sometimes, they decided he must be a spy with high-level police connections; but Vautrin said he wasn’t cunning enough to be one of them. Old man Goriot was also a miserly, small-time lender or a man who would always bet on the same number in the Lottery. Every kind of shady behaviour that vice, shame and impotence could produce was laid at his door. Only, however foul his behaviour or his vices might be, the general loathing he inspired did not extend to kicking him out: he paid his rent. Besides, he was useful – each boarder’s good or bad mood found an outlet in the little digs and jokes they aimed at him. The most widely credited and accepted opinion was that held by Madame Vauquer. To her mind, that man, in mint condition, as sound as a bell and who still had plenty left for a woman to enjoy, was a rake with unnatural appetites. These were the facts on which Madame Vauquer based her smear-mongering. When she was still in bed one morning – a few months after the departure of the catastrophic comtesse who had managed to live at her expense for six months – she heard the rustle of a silk dress on her staircase and the light tread of a dainty young woman, who then slipped through Goriot’s door, which had been conveniently left ajar. Big Sylvie immediately came to inform her mistress that a young lady who was too pretty to be proper, dressed like a goddess, wearing laced prunella³⁹ boots without a spot of mud on them, had slipped like an eel from the street into her kitchen and asked for Monsieur Goriot’s room. Madame Vauquer and her cook duly pressed their ears against the door and detected a number of tenderly spoken words during the visit, which lasted some time. When Monsieur Goriot escorted out his lady friend, big Sylvie grabbed her basket and pretended she was off to market, so that she could shadow the loving couple.

‘Madame,’ she said to her mistress on her return, ‘Monsieur Goriot must be rolling in it, all the same, to be keeping them in that style. Just fancy! There was a splendid carriage waiting at the corner of the Rue de l’Estrapade,⁴⁰ which she got in to.’

At dinner, Madame Vauquer went to draw a curtain, to block out a ray of sun that was shining in Goriot’s eyes.

‘Beauty loves you, Monsieur Goriot, even the sun comes looking for you,’ she said, alluding to the visit he had received. ‘My! What good taste you have; she was a pretty one.’

‘That was my daughter,’ he said proudly. The boarders interpreted this as the foolishness of an old man keeping up appearances.

A month after this visit, Monsieur Goriot received another. His daughter, who had come in morning dress the first time, appeared after dinner decked out for an evening in society. The boarders, busy gossiping in the drawing room, caught a glimpse of her, a slim-waisted pretty blonde, graceful and far too distinguished to be the daughter of someone like old man Goriot.

‘That makes two of ’em!’ said big Sylvie, failing to recognize her.

A few days later, another daughter, a tall, shapely brunette with dark hair and sparkling eyes, asked for Monsieur Goriot.

‘That makes three of ’em!’ said Sylvie.

This second daughter, who also visited her father in the morning the first time round, arrived in a carriage a few evenings later, wearing a ball gown.

‘That makes four of ’em!’ said Madame Vauquer and big Sylvie, unable to see in this grand lady the slightest trace of the girl who had been dressed so simply on the morning of her first visit.

Goriot was still paying twelve hundred francs for his board and lodging. Madame Vauquer thought it quite natural for a rich man to have four or five mistresses and even thought it very clever of him to pass them off as his daughters. She saw nothing wrong in him receiving them at the Maison Vauquer. However, because these visits provided her with an explanation of her lodger’s indifference to her, from the second year onwards she allowed herself to call him an old goat. Finally, following her lodger’s descent to nine hundred francs, when she saw one of these ladies coming downstairs one day, she curtly asked him exactly what kind of establishment he thought this was. Old man Goriot replied that the lady was his eldest daughter.

‘Got thirty-six daughters, have you?’ said Madame Vauquer, sourly.

‘Just two,’ replied her lodger, with the meekness of a man who has come down in the world, his spirit broken by destitution.

Towards the end of the third year, Goriot reduced his costs still further, moving up to the third floor and dropping to forty-five francs a month. He went without snuff, dismissed his wigmaker and stopped powdering his hair. The first time old man Goriot appeared without powder, his landlady gasped with surprise when she saw the colour of his hair, a dirty, greenish grey. His face, upon which suppressed grief had, imperceptibly, day by day, left its stamp of sadness, now seemed the most woebegone of all those round the table. There could no longer be the slightest doubt. Goriot was an old rake and, without the skill of a doctor, the adverse effects of the treatments his diseases required would have cost him his eyesight. His vile hair colour was the consequence of his excesses and the drugs he had taken to allow him to prolong them. The old man’s physical and mental condition gave substance to these old wives’ tales. When he had worn out his trousseau, he bought calico at fourteen sous an ell⁴¹ to replace his fine linen. One by one, his diamonds, his gold snuff-box, his chain, his jewels all disappeared. Instead of his cornflower-blue coat, his opulent-looking outfits, he now wore, winter and summer, a frock-coat of coarse brown drab,⁴² a goat-hair waistcoat and grey woollen trousers. He became increasingly thin; his calves sagged; his face, once plump and satisfied with the pleasures of bourgeois life, became inordinately wrinkled; his forehead furrowed, his jaw sharpened. Four years after moving in to the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, he was no longer the same man. The worthy sixty-two-year-old vermicelli dealer who looked not a year over forty, the pot-bellied, prosperous bourgeois, with his frank and foolish face, whose jaunty bearing gladdened those he passed, whose smile still bore the trace of his youth, now had the appearance of a vacant, meandering, pasty-faced seventy year old. His blue eyes, once so full of life, took on a dull iron-grey tinge; they had faded, no longer watered, and their red rim seemed to weep blood. He inspired revulsion in some, pity in others. Some of the young medical students, having noted the droop of his lower lip and measured the extension of his facial angle,⁴³ diagnosed him as suffering from cretinism, after their prolonged efforts to provoke him came to nothing. One evening, after dinner, when Madame Vauquer mockingly enquired, ‘Don’t they come and see you any more, those daughters of yours?’ in a way that cast doubt on his paternity, old man Goriot twitched as if his hostess had run him through.

‘They come from time to time,’ he replied, his voice choked with emotion.

‘A-ha! So you still see them from time to time!’ the students shouted to each other. ‘Bravo, old Goriot!’

But the old man didn’t hear the mockery his reply had earned him; he had sunk back into a pensive mood, which those observing him superficially assumed to be a kind of senile torpor due to his lack of intelligence. Had they known him well, perhaps they would have taken a keen interest in the problem underlying his physical and mental state; but nothing could have been harder for them. Although it would have been easy enough to find out whether Goriot really had been a vermicelli dealer and how much money he had made, the older boarders whose curiosity he aroused never left the neighbourhood and clung to the boarding house like oysters to a rock. As for the others, as soon as they left the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, the relentless pace of Parisian life made them forget the poor old man they mocked. For the old and narrow-minded, as for the young and thoughtless, old man Goriot’s desiccated wretchedness and air of bemusement were incompatible with wealth or ability of any kind. As for the women he called his daughters, everyone agreed with Madame Vauquer, who said, with the unswerving logic of an old woman well practised in the art of conjecture, after so many evenings spent gossiping: ‘If old man Goriot’s daughters were as rich as all his lady visitors seem to be, he wouldn’t have taken lodgings on the third floor of my establishment, at forty-five francs a month, and he wouldn’t go round dressed like a pauper.’ There was nothing to give the lie to the facts as she presented them. And so, at the end of November 1819, when this drama began to unfold, everyone in the boarding house had already made up their mind about the poor old man. He had never had either a daughter or a wife; his overindulgence in the pleasures of life had made him a slug, an anthropomorphic mollusc to be classified among the Capiferae,⁴⁴ said the museum clerk, one of the regular diners, a real card. Poiret was an eagle, a gentleman next to Goriot. Poiret could speak, reason, reply; true, he said nothing when he spoke, reasoned or replied, because he usually repeated in other words what someone else had just said; but he contributed to the conversation, he was alive, he seemed capable of feeling; while old man Goriot, the museum clerk continued, was constantly at zero-point on the Réaumur scale.⁴⁵

Eugène de Rastignac had returned to Paris in a frame of mind well known to all young men of superior ability or those spurred on by difficult circumstances to achieve greatness. As law students are required to do very little work to pass their preliminary papers at the Faculty, during his first year, Eugène had been free to sample the obvious material delights of Paris. A student has no time to waste if he wishes to familiarize himself with the repertoire of each theatre, memorize each twist and turn of the Parisian labyrinth, know what is and isn’t done, learn the language and appreciate pleasures unique to the capital; exploring smart and seedy districts, attending the most entertaining lectures, ticking off lists of treasures in museums. This is a time when a student is excited by insignificant things which to him seem very grand. He has his great man, a professor of the Collège de France who is paid to stoop to the level of his listeners. He straightens his cravat and poses to attract the attention of a woman in the dress circle of the Opéra-Comique. As his initiation proceeds, he becomes more thick-skinned, broadens the scope of his expectations and finally works out how the human strata of society overlay each other. Although at first he merely admires the carriages that parade along the Champs-Elysées on fine days, he soon begins to covet them. Without knowing it, Eugène had already completed this apprenticeship when he left for the vacation, after receiving his bachelor of arts and of law. His childhood illusions, his provincial mentality, had disappeared. On his return to the paternal manor-house and the bosom of his family, his sharpened intelligence and heightened ambition made him see both in a clearer light. Living on the small estate of Rastignac were his father, his mother, his two brothers, his two sisters and an aunt whose wealth consisted solely of annuities. These lands, with a yearly income of around three thousand francs, were subject to the insecurity which governs the laborious industry of wine-growing, and yet each year twelve hundred francs had to be pressed out of this sum for him. The sight of the constant hardship so generously hidden from him, the comparison he was forced to make between his sisters, who had seemed so beautiful to him as a child, and the Parisiennes who now fulfilled his dream of ideal beauty, the uncertain future of this large family, one that rested on his shoulders, the parsimonious care with which he watched them eke out the meagrest yield, keeping for themselves only the dregs of the wine-press, in all, a whole range of circumstances, which there is no need to list here, fuelled his desire to succeed and tripled his yearning for distinction. Like other noble souls, he wanted to succeed on merit alone. But he had the temperament of a Southerner; when the time came to act, his resolve would be weakened by the hesitation that paralyses a young man who finds himself on the open sea knowing neither how to put his energy to best use, nor how to trim the sails so they swell with wind. Although, at first, he resolved to throw himself wholeheartedly into his studies, he was soon side-tracked by the need to make the right connections, and having remarked how much influence women have on life in society, immediately decided to venture into the world and win himself a few female protectors: surely there’d be no shortage of takers for a passionate, witty young man, whose wit and passion were further enhanced by elegant bearing and a kind of highly strung beauty which women readily fall for. These thoughts filled his head as he walked through the fields with his sisters, who found him much changed from the cheerful companion he had once been. His aunt, Madame de Marcillac, who had been presented at court in days gone by, had known the most prominent aristocrats of the time. Suddenly, the ambitious young man saw, in the memories with which his aunt had so often lulled him to sleep, the raw material for several social victories at least as significant as those he was working towards at the law school; he questioned her about family connections which might still be revived. After shaking the branches of the family tree, the old lady deemed that, of all the people who might be of service to her nephew among their self-serving tribe of rich relatives, Madame la Vicomtesse de Beauséant would be the least recalcitrant. She wrote a letter in the old style to this young lady and handed it to Eugène, saying that if he succeeded in his dealings with the vicomtesse she would put him in touch with his other relatives. A few days after he arrived, Rastignac sent his aunt’s letter to Madame de Beauséant. The vicomtesse replied the following day with an invitation to a ball.

This was how things stood in the boarding house at the end of November 1819. A few days later, Eugène attended Madame de Beauséant’s ball, returning at around two in the morning. As he danced, the indefatigable student had promised himself that he would study until morning, to make up for lost time. He was about to stay awake all night for the first time in this silent neighbourhood: entranced by his glimpse of the splendours of society, he was full of a deceptive energy. He hadn’t dined at Madame Vauquer’s and so the lodgers were unlikely to expect him back from the ball until the next morning at first light, as he had sometimes been known to return from those at the Prado or the Odéon,⁴⁶ his silk stockings splashed with mud and his pumps trodden out of shape. Before shooting the bolts across the door, Christophe had opened it to look out into the road. Rastignac turned up at the same time and was able to slip up to his rooms without making a sound, followed by Christophe, who made plenty. Eugène undressed, put on slippers and a worn old coat, lit his tan-turf⁴⁷ fire and made ready to start work so swiftly that Christophe, still clattering around in his clumpy books, drowned out the young man’s quiet preparations. Eugène remained pensive for a few moments before immersing himself in his law books. He had just discovered that Madame la Vicomtesse de Beauséant was one of the most fashionable women in Paris and that her house was deemed to be the finest in the Faubourg Saint-Germain.⁴⁸ Furthermore, her name and fortune made her one of the leading lights of the aristocratic set. Thanks to his aunt, Madame de Marcillac, the penniless student had been warmly received in her house, without realizing the extent of the favour. Being admitted to those glittering salons was tantamount to a certificate of the highest nobility. By appearing in such company, the most exclusive of all, he had gained the right to go anywhere. Dazzled by the brilliance of the assembled company, after exchanging only a few words with the vicomtesse, Eugène had contented himself with singling out from the crush of Parisian deities thronged together at this rout,⁴⁹ one of those women whom a young man will inevitably worship at first sight. Comtesse Anastasie de Restaud, tall and well formed, was thought to have one of the prettiest waists in Paris. Picture to yourself deep dark eyes, flawless hands, shapely ankles, movements full of fire, indeed, a woman the Marquis de Ronquerolles had termed a thoroughbred. Her energy and spirit in no way detracted from her charm; although she had full, rounded contours, no one would have accused her of excessive embonpoint. Pure-blooded horse, thoroughbred woman: expressions such as these were beginning to replace the heavenly angels, the Ossianic figures, the old mythology of love brushed aside by the dandies. But for Rastignac, Madame Anastasie de Restaud was everything he imagined a desirable woman to be. He had contrived to put his name down for two dances on the list of partners written on her fan and managed a few words with her during the first quadrille.⁵⁰ ‘Where might a man see you again, Madame?’ he asked bluntly, with that passionate candour women find so attractive. ‘Why,’ she replied, ‘in the Bois, at the Bouffons,⁵¹ at home, everywhere.’ And the intrepid Southerner did everything he could to become intimate with the charming comtesse, in so much as a young man can become intimate with a woman in the space of a quadrille and a waltz. When he mentioned that he was related to Madame de Beauséant, this woman, whom he took for a great lady, invited him to call, and he thereby gained his introduction to her house. The last smile she tossed his way gave Rastignac reason to believe that his call was indispensable. He had been fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of a man who didn’t laugh at his ignorance, an unforgivable failing in the eyes of the haughty, well-born rakes of the time, men of the ilk of Maulincour, Ronquerolles, Maxime de Trailles, de Marsay, Ajuda-Pinto, Vandenesse, who were there in all their conceited glory, mingling with the most fashionable women, Lady Brandon, the Duchesse de Langeais, the Comtesse de Kergarouët, Madame de Sérisy, the Duchesse de Carigliano, Comtesse Ferraud, Madame de Lanty, the Marquise d’Aiglemont, Madame Firmiani, the Marquise de Listomère and the Marquise d’Espard, the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse and the Grandlieus. Luckily for him then, the naive student happened upon the Marquis de Montriveau, the lover of the Duchesse de Langeais,⁵² a man as uncomplicated as a child, from whom he learned that the Comtesse de Restaud lived in the Rue du Helder. What it is to be young, to have a thirst for the world, to be hungry for a woman and to see two grand houses open up to you! To have a foot in the door of the Vicomtesse de Beauséant’s house in the Faubourg Saint-Germain and a knee in that of the Comtesse de Restaud in the Chaussée d’Antin!⁵³ To see one Paris salon lead to another like so many interconnecting rooms and think yourself handsome enough to find in a woman’s heart the help and protection you need there! To feel ambitious enough to kick out imperiously on the tight-rope along which you must walk with the confidence of a sure-footed acrobat who never falls, and to have found an attractive woman to be the best possible balancing pole! With these thoughts in his head and the vision of a magnificent woman rising out of the tan-turf fire before him, suspended between the Code⁵⁴ and poverty, who wouldn’t have mused on what the future held, as Eugène did, who wouldn’t have filled it with success? His roving imagination began cashing in future joys thick and fast, so that he was already picturing himself at Madame de Restaud’s side, when a sighing groan worthy of a Saint Joseph⁵⁵ disturbed the stillness of the night and resonated with such feeling in the young man’s heart that he took it for the last gasp of a dying man. He quietly opened his door and as he stepped out into the corridor saw a trickle of light spilling out beneath old man Goriot’s door. Fearing that his neighbour might be unwell, Eugène put his eye to the keyhole, looked into the room and saw the old man engaged in an activity which seemed so obviously criminal that he felt obliged to do society a service by taking a careful look at what the so-called vermicelli dealer was getting up to by night. Old Goriot, who appeared to have tied a silver-gilt platter and what looked like a tureen to the cross-bar of the upturned table, was winding a kind of rope around the intricately embossed pieces, winching it in so tightly and powerfully as to shape them, most likely, into ingots. ‘Gracious! What a man!’ Rastignac said to himself, watching the old man’s sinewy arms, as, with the help of the rope, they noiselessly kneaded the silver-gilt like dough. ‘Does this mean he’s a thief, or a fence, who pretends to be foolish and helpless and lives like a pauper, as a cover for his operations?’ Eugène asked himself, straightening up for a moment, before returning to his post at the keyhole. Old man Goriot unfastened the rope, spread his blanket on the table, put the lump of silver on it and rolled it into the shape of a bar, completing the task with incredible ease. ‘He must be as strong as King Augustus of Poland,’⁵⁶ Eugène said to himself, as the round bar took shape. Old Goriot contemplated his handiwork sadly, tears trickled from his eyes, then he blew out the wax taper by the light of which he had shaped the silver, and Eugène heard him lie down on his bed and heave a deep sigh.

‘He’s mad,’ thought the student.

‘Poor child!’ said old Goriot, aloud. On hearing these words, Rastignac decided he would be wise to keep quiet about this incident and not condemn his neighbour too hastily. He was about to return to his room when he suddenly heard an indescribable sound, like the muffled tread of men in list slippers⁵⁷ coming up the stairs. Eugène listened carefully and managed to pick out the rasp of two men breathing in turn. Although he had heard neither the creak of the door nor the men’s footsteps, he suddenly saw a faint light on the second floor, coming from Monsieur Vautrin’s room. ‘So many mysteries in one boarding house!’ he said to himself. He went down a few stairs, listened, and the clink of gold reached his ears. Before long the light went out and he heard the breathing again, without the door having creaked. The sound faded away gradually as the two men went downstairs.

‘Who’s there?’ shouted Madame Vauquer, opening her bedroom window.

‘Just me coming in, Ma Vauquer,’ replied Vautrin, in his booming voice.

‘That’s odd! Christophe had bolted the door,’ said Eugène to himself as he went back to his room. ‘In Paris you have to stay up all night if you want to know what’s really going on around you.’ His ambitiously amorous train of thought having been diverted by these little events, he now set to work. Distracted by his misgivings about old man Goriot, distracted still more by visions of Madame de Restaud, who kept appearing before him like an augury of future greatness, he ended up lying down on his bed and falling fast asleep. A young man will sleep soundly through seven out of ten of the nights he means to spend working. A man must be over twenty to stay awake all night.

The next morning, Paris was smothered by one of those thick fogs which envelop and befuddle it so completely that even the most punctual people get the time wrong. Business appointments are missed. Everyone thinks it’s eight o’clock when the clock strikes twelve. At half past nine, Madame Vauquer still hadn’t stirred from her bed. Christophe and big Sylvie, who had also risen late, were calmly drinking their coffee, made with the cream off the top of the milk meant for the lodgers, which Sylvie then boiled for a long time, to ensure that this illegally levied tithe did not come to Madame Vauquer’s notice.

‘Sylvie,’ said Christophe, dipping his first piece of toast in his coffee; ‘Monsieur Vautrin, who’s a decent sort, all things considered, had two more chaps round again last night. Best say nothing to Madame, if she starts her inquisition.’

‘Did he give you anything?’

‘He gave me a hundred sous just for this month, his way of saying: “keep your mouth shut”.’

‘There’s only him and Madame Couture who put their hands in their pockets; the others take away with the left hand what they give us with the right at New Year.’

‘It’s not like they give us much, either!’ said Christophe. ‘One measly coin, I ask you! A hundred sous, if you’re lucky. Old man Goriot’s been cleaning his own boots for two years now. That cheapskate Poiret does without polish; he’d drink it before he put any on his filthy old shoes. As for that runt of a student, he gives me forty sous. Forty sous don’t even pay for my brushes, and to cap it all, he sells his old clothes. What a dump!’

‘Well!’ said Sylvie, sipping at her coffee, ‘I still say we’ve got the best positions of any round here: we’re doing all right for ourselves. But Christophe, speaking of old uncle Vautrin, has anyone been asking you about him?’

‘Yes, they have. I met a gent in the street a few days ago who said: “Haven’t you got a large chap who dyes his side-whiskers staying at your place?” So I said, “No, sir, he don’t dye ’em. A gay dog like him don’t have the time.” So I told Monsieur Vautrin, and he said: “You did the right thing, my boy! Always give them a smart answer. There’s nothing worse than having other people know your weaknesses. That sort of thing can ruin your marriage prospects.” ’

‘One of ’em tried to catch me out too, at market, asking whether I’d ever seen him putting his shirt on. The cheek of it! Listen!’ she said, breaking off, ‘there’s the Val-de-Grâce striking a quarter to ten and not a soul stirring.’

‘Why, they’ve all gone out! Madame Couture and the young lady went off at eight to partake of the Almighty at Saint-Etienne.⁵⁸ Old man Goriot went out with a parcel. The student won’t be back until after his lecture, at ten. I saw them leave when I was doing my stairs; old man Goriot bashed me with his bundle, hard as iron, it was. What’s his game I wonder, the old gaffer? The others are always on his back, but if you ask me, he’s a harmless old soul and worth more than the rest of them put together. He don’t give me much himself; but the ladies he sends me to sometimes stretch to a handsome tip; nicely turned out they are too.’

‘The ones he calls his daughters, eh? There’s a dozen of them.’

‘I’ve only ever seen two ladies, the same two as have been here.’

‘I can hear Madame stirring; she’ll be kicking up a rumpus soon: better go up. Keep an eye on the milk, Christophe, on account of the cat.’

Sylvie went upstairs to her mistress’s room.

‘Gracious, Sylvie, it’s a quarter to ten; you’ve let me sleep in like a sluggard! I’ve never known such a thing.’

‘It’s the fog; you can cut it with a knife.’

‘What about déjeuner?’

‘If you ask me, the devil’s got into your lodgers; they all cleared out at cock-croak.’

‘Speak proper please, Sylvie,’ said Madame Vauquer reprovingly; ‘one should say at the cock o’ dawn.’

‘Ah! Madame, anything you say. Either way, you can have your déjeuner at ten. No sign of Michonnette and Poireau⁵⁹ yet. There’s only the two of ’em left in the house and they’re sleeping like logs.’

‘But Sylvie, you’re pairing them together, as if …’

‘As if what?’ repeated Sylvie, with a foolish snort of laughter. ‘They are a right pair, after all.’

‘It’s very strange, Sylvie: how did Monsieur Vautrin get in last night after Christophe had bolted the door?’

‘Not at all, Madame. Christophe heard Monsieur Vautrin and went down to open the door for him. And there you were thinking …’

‘Pass me my shift, hurry, and see to déjeuner. Fix up that leftover mutton with some potatoes and give them some stewed pears, the ones that cost two liards⁶⁰ each.’

Madame Vauquer came downstairs a few moments later, just as her cat, with a paw, had flipped off the plate covering the bowl of milk and was lapping it up as fast as it could.

‘Mistigris!’ she shouted. The cat sprang away, then came back and rubbed up against her legs. ‘Don’t try and butter me up, you old coward!’ she scolded. ‘Sylvie! Sylvie!’

‘Yes, Madame. What is it?’

‘Look what the cat’s been drinking.’

‘It’s that dimwit Christophe’s fault. Where’s he got to? I told him to lay the table. Don’t worry, Madame, it’ll do for old man Goriot’s coffee. I’ll put some water in it, he won’t notice a thing. He’s oblivious to everything, even what he eats.’

‘So where’s he gone, the old nincompoop?’ said Madame Vauquer, laying out the plates.

‘Who knows? He’s up to all sorts.’

‘I’ve had too much sleep.’

‘Why, Madame is as fresh as a daisy …’

At that point the doorbell was heard, and Vautrin came into the drawing room singing in his booming voice:

‘I’ve been a-roving all over the world

And I’ve been seen in every land …

‘Ho-ho! Good day, Ma Vauquer,’ he said, catching sight of the landlady and gallantly taking her in his arms.

‘Now, now, that’ll do.’

‘Call me a saucebox!’ he replied. ‘Go on, say it. Pretty please? Very well, I’ll help you lay the table. Now! Isn’t that kind of me?

Courting the brunette and the blonde,

Loving, sighing …

I’ve just seen a peculiar thing.

… for either one.’

‘What’s that?’ said the widow.

‘At half past eight old man Goriot was at the goldsmith’s, the one in the Rue Dauphine that buys old plate and gold braid. He got a tidy sum of money for a silver-gilt piece he sold them, nicely twisted it was, for an amateur.’

‘Well I never!’

‘Yes, I was on my way back after escorting a friend of mine, who’s leaving the country, to the packet-boat;⁶¹ I waited for old man Goriot to see where he’d go next, for a lark. He headed back this way, to the Rue des Grès,⁶² where he went into the house of a notorious usurer, name of Gobseck, an out-and-out villain, who’d make dominoes out of his own father’s bones; a Jew, an Arab, a Greek, a Bohemian,⁶³ a man you’d be hard put to burgle; he keeps his stash in the Bank.’

‘What’s he done then, this Goriot of ours?’

‘It’s not so much what he’s done, as undone,’ said Vautrin. ‘He’s a rattle-brain soft enough to bankrupt himself for the kind of girls who …’

‘Here he comes now!’ said Sylvie.

‘Christophe,’ cried old man Goriot, ‘come upstairs with me!’

Christophe followed old Goriot and came back down shortly afterwards.

‘Where are you off to?’ said Madame Vauquer to her servant.

‘To run an errand for Monsieur Goriot.’

‘What do we have here?’ said Vautrin, snatching a letter out of Christophe’s hands and reading aloud:

‘To Madame la Comtesse Anastasie de Restaud.’

Handing the letter back to Christophe, he continued, ‘And you’re going to … ?’

‘Rue du Helder. I’m under orders to give this to no one but Madame la Comtesse.’

‘What’s inside?’ said Vautrin, holding the letter up to the light. ‘A banknote? No.’ He opened the envelope slightly. ‘A quietus,’⁶⁴ he exclaimed. ‘Well, I’ll be hanged! How very gallant of the old beau. Go on, be off, you rascal,’ he said, knocking Christophe’s hair flat with his huge hand and spinning him round; ‘you’ll get a good tip.’

The table was laid. Sylvie had put the milk on to boil. Madame Vauquer was lighting the stove, helped by Vautrin, who was still humming:

‘I’ve been a-roving all over the world

And I’ve been seen in every land …’

Everything was ready by the time Madame Couture and Mademoiselle Taillefer came back.

‘Where have you been so early, fair lady?’ said Madame Vauquer to Madame Couture.

‘We’ve been at our devotions at Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, as we shall be calling on Monsieur Taillefer today. Poor little mite, she’s shaking like a leaf,’ continued Madame Couture, sitting herself down by the stove and warming her steaming shoes at its opening.

‘Come and warm yourself, Victorine,’ said Madame Vauquer.

‘It’s all very well, Mademoiselle, to pray to the Almighty to melt your father’s heart,’ said Vautrin, pulling up a chair for the orphan. ‘But that’s not enough. You need a friend who’ll make it his business to give that villain a piece of his mind; he’s worth three million, so it’s said, and the brute won’t give you a dowry. A beautiful young woman needs a dowry these days.’

‘Poor child,’ said Madame Vauquer. ‘You’ll see, poppet, your monster of a father will get his come-uppance before too long.’

Victorine’s eyes welled up with tears at these words and the widow was brought up short at a sign from Madame Couture.

‘If only we could see him, if I could just talk to him and give him his wife’s last letter,’ the widow of the Commissary General went on. ‘I’ve never dared try sending it by post; he’d recognize my handwriting …’

‘O innocent, unfortunate and persecuted women,’⁶⁵ declaimed Vautrin, interrupting. ‘You have come to a pretty pass! I’ll apply myself to your affairs in the next day or so and put things to rights.’

‘Oh, Monsieur!’ said Victorine, casting a fervent, moist-eyed glance at Vautrin, whom it left unmoved; ‘should you manage to gain an audience with my father, be sure to tell him that his affection and my mother’s honour are more precious to me than all the wealth in the world. If you convinced him to relax his rigour even a little, I would remember you in my prayers. Let me assure you of my gratitude …’

‘I’ve been a-roving all over the world,’ sang Vautrin, ironically.

At that point, Goriot, Poiret and Mademoiselle Michonneau came downstairs, perhaps drawn by the smell of the roux⁶⁶ that Sylvie was making to thicken the mutton leftovers. Just as the seven guests sat down to their déjeuner,⁶⁷ greeting each other, the clock struck ten and the student’s footsteps were heard in the road.

‘Ah, Monsieur Eugène,’ said Sylvie; ‘so you’ll be joining the others for déjeuner today.’

The student greeted the lodgers and sat down next to old man Goriot.

‘I’ve just had the strangest adventure,’ he said, helping himself to a generous serving of mutton and cutting himself a piece of bread, whose size Madame Vauquer, as usual, measured with a beady eye.

‘An adventure!’ said Poiret.

‘Well, I don’t see why you should be so surprised, old boy,’ said Vautrin to Poiret. ‘The young gentleman is certainly cut out for one.’

Mademoiselle Taillefer glanced shyly at the young student.

‘Tell us your adventure,’ demanded Madame Vauquer.

‘Yesterday, I went to a ball held by Madame la Vicomtesse de Beauséant, a cousin of mine, who has a magnificent house, apartments hung with silk draperies; to cut a long story short, she gave a wonderful party, where I was as happy as a king …’

‘… fisher,’ said Vautrin, cutting him off.

‘Monsieur,’ replied Eugène sharply, ‘what are you trying to say?’

‘I said fisher, because kingfishers are much happier than kings.’

‘That’s very true: I’d much rather be a little bird without a care than a king, because …’ said Poiret, the human echo.

‘So anyway,’ continued the student, cutting him off mid-flow, ‘I danced with one of the most beautiful women at the ball, a ravishing comtesse, the loveliest creature I’ve ever seen. She wore peach blossom in her hair, with the finest spray of flowers on the side, real flowers that filled the air with their delicate scent; but it’s no use, you would need to have seen her, it’s impossible to describe how dancing lights up a woman’s face. Well, this morning at around nine, I came across the divine comtesse on foot, in the Rue des Grès. Oh! My heart was racing, I imagined …’

‘That she was on her way here,’ said Vautrin, giving the student a piercing stare. ‘She was probably on her way to see uncle Gobseck,⁶⁸ the usurer. Search the heart of a Parisian woman and you’ll find the usurer before the lover. Your comtesse is called Anastasie de Restaud and she lives in the Rue du Helder.’

When he heard this name, the student returned Vautrin’s stare. Old man Goriot suddenly raised his head and gave the two speakers a lucid, concerned look that surprised the other lodgers.

‘Christophe will arrive too late, she’ll have already left,’ Goriot groaned to himself, stricken.

‘Just as I thought,’ murmured Vautrin in Madame Vauquer’s ear.

Goriot ate without thinking, oblivious to what he was eating. He had never seemed more confused or vacant than he did now.

‘Who the devil told you her name, Monsieur Vautrin?’ Eugène asked.

‘Hah! There I have you,’ replied Vautrin. ‘Old man Goriot knew it, didn’t he? So why wouldn’t I?’

‘Monsieur Goriot!’ exclaimed the student.

‘Hmm?’ said the poor old man. ‘Was she very beautiful last night?’

‘Who?’

‘Madame de Restaud.’

‘Just look at the old skinflint,’ said Madame Vauquer to Vautrin; ‘see how his eyes light up.’

‘So he’d be keeping her then?’ said Mademoiselle Michonneau to the student, in a low voice.

‘Oh yes! She was dazzlingly beautiful,’ Eugène continued, watched eagerly by old Goriot. ‘If Madame de Beauséant hadn’t been there, my divine comtesse would have been the queen of the ball; the young men had eyes only for her. I was the twelfth on her list; she danced every quadrille. The other women were furious. If anyone was happy yesterday, she was. Now I understand why they say that there’s nothing more beautiful than a frigate in full sail, a horse at full gallop and a woman full of the dance.’

‘Yesterday, at the top of the wheel, received by a duchesse,’ said Vautrin; ‘this morning, at the bottom of the ladder, calling on a pawnbroker: that’s Parisian women for you. If their husbands can’t fund their unbridled pursuit of luxury, they sell themselves. Those who can’t sell themselves would disembowel their mothers if they thought they’d find anything in there that glittered. In a word, they’re up to a billion tricks. Everyone knows that …’

Old Goriot’s countenance, which had beamed like the sun on a fine day as he listened to the student, now clouded over at Vautrin’s harsh remarks.

‘Is that it?’ said Madame Vauquer. ‘Where’s the adventure in that? Did you speak to her? Did you ask her if she was coming to study law?’

‘She didn’t see me,’ said Eugène. ‘But don’t you think it’s strange to meet one of the prettiest women in Paris at nine in the morning in the Rue des Grès, a woman who must have left the ball at two in the morning? That’s the kind of adventure you can only have in Paris.’

‘Hah! That’s just the tip of the iceberg!’ retorted Vautrin.

Mademoiselle Taillefer had barely listened to a word, preoccupied by the attempt she was about to make. Madame Couture gestured to her to leave the table to go and dress. When the two women went out, old Goriot followed suit.

‘Well, did you see that?’ Madame Vauquer said to Vautrin and the other lodgers. ‘It’s obvious that he’s bled himself white for those women.’

‘You will never convince me’, cried the student, ‘that the beautiful Comtesse de Restaud belongs to old man Goriot.’

‘Why,’ said Vautrin, interrupting him, ‘we’re not trying to convince you. You’re still too young to really know Paris; later, you’ll discover that it is full of what, for now, we shall call men who have their passions …’ (At these words, Mademoiselle Michonneau gave Vautrin a knowing look, like that of a soldier’s horse when it hears the bugle call.) ‘A-ha!’ said Vautrin, breaking off to give her a hard stare; ‘so we’ve had our little passions too, have we?’ (The old spinster lowered her eyes hastily like a nun catching sight of a statue.) ‘So,’ he continued, ‘our man finds one idea that fits and wears it out. He is only thirsty for a certain kind of water drawn from a certain well, often stagnant; he’s prepared to sell his wife, his children, to sell his soul to the devil, so that he can drink from it. For one man the well is gambling, the stock-markets, a collection of paintings or insects, music; for another, it’s a woman who knows how to titillate his fancy. If you were to offer such a man every woman on earth, he wouldn’t care, he only wants the one who can satisfy his passion. Often, the woman in question cares little for our man, treats him harshly, makes him pay a high price for the tiny scraps of satisfaction she sells him; well! he can’t get enough and would pledge his last blanket at the Mont-de-Piété⁶⁹ if it meant he could give that woman his last écu. Old Goriot is one of those fellows. The comtesse exploits him because he keeps his head down, and that’s the smart set all over! The poor old fool thinks only of her. His passion aside, he’s a dull stick, as you’ve seen for yourself. Get him started on his pet subject and his face sparkles like a diamond. It’s not hard to guess the nature of his secret. This morning he sold some silver-gilt for melting down and I saw him go and call on uncle Gobseck in the Rue des Grès. Now, listen to this. As soon as he got back, he sent Christophe to the Comtesse de Restaud’s house; that blockhead showed us the address on the envelope, which contained a quietus. If the comtesse also intended to pay the old bill-discounter a visit, it’s obvious that the situation was urgent. Old Goriot has gallantly settled up for her. You don’t need to put this and that together to see what’s going on there. Which proves, my young friend, that while your comtesse was laughing, dancing, frolicking, flaunting her peach blossom and swinging her skirts, she was on tenterhooks, as they say, at the thought of the bills of exchange⁷⁰ that she or her lover had failed to honour.’

‘You’ve given me a burning desire to find out the truth. I’ll go and call on Madame de Restaud tomorrow,’ cried Eugène.

‘Yes,’ said Poiret, ‘you should call on Madame de Restaud tomorrow.’

‘Perhaps you’ll find our dear friend Goriot there, come to cash in on his gallantry.’

‘Why,’ said Eugène, with an air of disgust, ‘this Paris of yours is a dunghill.’

‘And a funny old dunghill it is too,’ Vautrin continued. ‘A man in a carriage who gets his hands dirty is honest, a man who walks and gets his feet dirty is a rogue. If you’re unfortunate enough to lift some trifle or other, you’re paraded on the square⁷¹ in front of the law courts like a freak. If you steal a million, you’re pointed out in the salons as one of the Virtues. You pay thirty million to the Police and to the Law to maintain those moral standards there. A fine mess!’

‘Well I never!’ exclaimed Madame Vauquer; ‘so old man Goriot has melted down his silver-gilt breakfast service?’

‘The one with two turtle-doves on the cover?’ said Eugène.

‘That’s the one.’

‘It must have been very dear to him; he wept when he’d finished twisting the dish and platter. I happened to see him do it,’ said Eugène.

‘It was as dear to him as his life,’ replied the widow.

‘So you see how the old man’s passion rules him,’ cried Vautrin. ‘That woman knows how to titillate his soul.’

The student went up to his room. Vautrin went out. Shortly afterwards, Madame Couture and Victorine set off in a fiacre⁷² that Sylvie had found for them. Poiret offered Mademoiselle Michonneau his arm and they left to make the most of the best two hours of the day with a stroll in the Jardin des Plantes.

‘Well I never! They’ll be getting married next,’ said big Sylvie. ‘Today’s the first time they’ve gone out together. They’re both so dry that if they bump into each other, they’ll go up like touchwood.’

‘Mademoiselle Michonneau should watch out for her shawl,’ said Madame Vauquer, laughing; ‘it’ll catch like tinder.’

When Goriot came back that afternoon at four, the first thing he saw, by the light of two smoky lamps, was Victorine, red-eyed. Madame Vauquer was listening to the account of that morning’s unfruitful visit to Monsieur Taillefer. Irritated by the presence of his daughter and the old woman, Taillefer had had them brought before him so that he could make matters plain.

‘My dear lady,’ said Madame Couture to Madame Vauquer, ‘can you believe that he didn’t even offer Victorine a seat; she remained standing the whole time. Without raising his voice, quite coldly, he said that we should spare ourselves the trouble of calling on him; that to his mind, the young lady, without calling her his daughter, wasn’t doing herself any favours by importuning him (once a year, the monster); that, as Victorine’s mother married without a fortune, she had nothing to hope for; indeed, he said the hardest things, which made the poor girl burst into tears. So she threw herself at her father’s feet and bravely told him that she only kept trying for her mother’s sake, that she would obey him without a murmur; but she begged him to read the poor dead woman’s last testament. She took out the letter and gave it to him, saying the most heartfelt and beautiful things in the world; I don’t know where she got them from, God must have been dictating to her; the poor child was so inspired that I wept like a baby to hear her. And do you know what that abominable man did? He trimmed his nails, then took the letter that poor Madame Taillefer had drenched in her tears and threw it on the fire, saying, “Enough!” He tried to pull his daughter to her feet and when she took hold of his hands to kiss them, he snatched them away. What a scoundrel! His great lump of a son came in without even greeting his sister.’

‘Why, the monsters!’ said old Goriot.

‘And then’, said Madame Couture, ignoring the old man’s exclamation, ‘father and son left, bidding me farewell and begging me to excuse them, as they had urgent business to attend to. That was our visit. At least he saw his daughter. I really don’t know how he can deny her; they’re as like as peas in a pod.’

The boarders arrived in dribs and drabs, residents and non-residents wishing each other good day and exchanging the kind of banter which, among a particular class of Parisian, passes for wit, involving a strong element of chaff and heavily dependent on pronunciation and delivery for its success. This kind of argot is in constant mutation. The shibboleth on which it turns never lasts longer than a month. A political event, a trial at the assizes, a street ballad, an actor’s spiel, everything feeds into this game of wit, which mainly consists of throwing words and ideas into the air like shuttlecocks and batting them to and fro around the room. The recent invention of the Diorama, taking optical illusion to even giddier heights than the Panoramas,⁷³ had, in some studios, inspired the conceit of ending words in rama, a contagious skit that the Maison Vauquer had caught from a young painter, one of the regulars.

‘So, meesteurr Poiret,’ said the museum clerk; ‘still aliverama?’ Then, before he could reply: ‘Ladies, you look down at heart,’ he said to Madame Couture and Victorine.

‘How about some deeneurr?’ cried Horace Bianchon, Rastignac’s medical student friend. ‘My poor tum has sunk usque ad talones.’⁷⁴

‘The weather’s mighty coltorama!’ said Vautrin. ‘Move along there, old man Goriot. Damn it! Your great foot is filling the whole grate.’

‘Revered Monsieur Vautrin,’ said Bianchon, ‘surely you can’t mean coltorama? There must be some mistake, it should be coldorama.’

‘No,’ said the museum clerk, ‘it’s coltorama, my feet are colt, as in coltsfoot.’

‘Har har!’

‘Here comes H.E. the Marquis de Rastignac, Bachelor of Lawlessness,’ cried Bianchon, grabbing Eugène round the neck and pretending to strangle him. ‘Hey, everyone, look out!’

Mademoiselle Michonneau came in quietly, nodded to the boarders without saying a word and went and sat down with the other three women.

‘She always gives me the creeps, that old bat,’ said Bianchon to Vautrin in a low voice, nodding towards Mademoiselle Michonneau. ‘As a student of Doctor Gall’s system, I can see that her head has the bumps of Judas.’⁷⁵

‘Monsieur has met him?’ said Vautrin.

‘Who hasn’t bumped into him!’ replied Bianchon. ‘I swear to you, that pasty-faced old maid reminds me of a long worm steadily eating its way through a beam.’

‘That’s how it is, young man,’ said the forty year old, stroking his side-whiskers.

‘A rose, she lived as roses do,

Through a single dawn.’⁷⁶

‘A-ha! Here comes a glorious soupeaurama,’ said Poiret, as Christophe appeared, reverentially bearing a tureen.

‘Pardon me, Monsieur,’ said Madame Vauquer; ‘it’s not a soupe au rama, but a soupe au cabbage.’

All the young men burst out laughing.

‘You’re thrashed, Poiret!’

‘Poirrrrreette is thrashed.’

‘Two points to Ma Vauquer,’ said Vautrin.

‘Did anyone notice the fog this morning?’ said the museum clerk.

‘It was’, said Bianchon, ‘a freakish, feverish fog, a cheerless, melancholic, glaucous, broken-winded fog, a Goriot fog.’

‘A Goriorama’, said the painter, ‘because you couldn’t see what was staring you in the face.’

‘Ay seh, Milord Gorriotte, one is tawking abowt yew.’

Sitting at the lower end of the table, near the service door, old man Goriot lifted his head, sniffing a piece of bread he had tucked under his napkin, an old business tic of his which resurfaced now and then.

‘What’s the matter?’ Madame Vauquer bawled at him sourly, her voice cutting through the din of clattering spoons, plates and voices; ‘is the bread not good enough for you?’

‘On the contrary, Madame,’ he replied, ‘it’s made with the finest quality Etampes flour.’

‘How can you tell?’ asked Eugène.

‘By its whiteness, its taste.’

‘Your nose can taste, then, seeing as all you ever do is sniff the bread?’ said Madame Vauquer. ‘You’re getting to be so thrifty that one of these days you’ll end up inventing a way to feed yourself simply by breathing in cooking smells.’

‘Take out a patent,’ cried the museum clerk; ‘you’ll make a fortune.’

‘Ignore him, he’s just trying to convince us he used to be a vermicelli dealer,’ said the painter.

‘So that would make your nose a cornute?’⁷⁷ asked the clerk, continuing regardless.

‘Cor what?’ said Bianchon.

‘Cor-net.’

‘Cor-nemuse.’

‘Cor-nelian.’

‘Cor-nice.’

‘Cor-nichon.’

‘Cor-bie.’

‘Cor-bel.’

‘Cor-norama.’

These eight retorts shot from each side of the room with the rapidity of a firing squad and caused such uproarious laughter that poor old Goriot looked at his companions with a bemused expression, like a man trying to understand a foreign language.

‘Cor … ?’ he asked Vautrin, who was next to him.

‘Corns, old chap!’ said Vautrin, banging on the crown of Goriot’s hat and ramming it down over his eyes.

The poor old man, stunned by this swift attack, was paralysed for a moment. Meanwhile, Christophe came and cleared away the old fellow’s dish, thinking he’d finished, so that when Goriot pushed his hat back up and went to pick up his spoon, he knocked his hand against the table. All the boarders roared with laughter.

‘Monsieur,’ said the old man, ‘you are a cad, and should you attempt any further rammings of the kind …’

‘What then, Pa?’ said Vautrin, interrupting him.

‘Well! You’ll pay dearly for it one day …’

‘In hell, is it?’ said the painter; ‘in the nasty dark corner where they put the naughty children?’

‘Why, Mademoiselle,’ said Vautrin to Victorine, ‘you’re not eating. Papa turned out to be intractable?’

‘Abominable,’ said Madame Couture.

‘He needs to be brought to his senses,’ said Vautrin.

‘Although,’ said Rastignac, who was sitting next to Bianchon, ‘seeing as she’s not eating, Mademoiselle could always start alimentary proceedings against the food. Hey! Look at how old man Goriot is staring at Mademoiselle Victorine.’

The old man left off eating, intent on studying the poor girl, whose face bore the stamp of genuine pain, the pain of a wronged daughter who loves her father.

‘Dear chap,’ said Eugène in a low voice, ‘we’ve been mistaken about old man Goriot. He’s neither a fool nor a zombie. Apply your Gall system to him and tell me what you think. Last night I saw him twist a silver-gilt dish as if it were wax, and as he did, the expression on his face betrayed extraordinary emotion. His life seems too mysterious not to reward further study. Yes, Bianchon, laugh as much as you like; I’m not joking.’

‘The man is a medical phenomenon,’ said Bianchon. ‘Very well; if he wants, I’ll dissect him.’

‘No, examine his skull.’

‘Ah well! His stupidity appears to be contagious.’