“Are you really going to stay with me, monsieur?” asked the Baroness.
“Then we shall make each other’s acquaintance. Mme. de Restaud told me
about you, and has made me anxious to meet you.”
“She must be very insincere, then, for she has shut her door on me.”
“What?”
“Madame, I will tell you honestly the reason why; but I must crave your
indulgence before confiding such a secret to you. I am your father’s
neighbor; I had no idea that Mme. de Restaud was his daughter. I was
rash enough to mention his name; I meant no harm, but I annoyed your
sister and her husband very much. You cannot think how severely the
Duchesse de Langeais and my cousin blamed this apostasy on a daughter’s
part, as a piece of bad taste. I told them all about it, and they both
burst out laughing. Then Mme. de Beauseant made some comparison between
you and your sister, speaking in high terms of you, and saying how very
fond you were of my neighbor, M. Goriot. And, indeed, how could you help
loving him? He adores you so passionately that I am jealous already. We
talked about you this morning for two hours. So this evening I was quite
full of all that your father had told me, and while I was dining with my
cousin I said that you could not be as beautiful as affectionate. Mme.
de Beauseant meant to gratify such warm admiration, I think, when she
brought me here, telling me, in her gracious way, that I should see
you.”
“Then, even now, I owe you a debt of gratitude, monsieur,” said the
banker’s wife. “We shall be quite old friends in a little while.”
“Although a friendship with you could not be like an ordinary
friendship,” said Rastignac; “I should never wish to be your friend.”
Such stereotyped phrases as these, in the mouths of beginners, possess
an unfailing charm for women, and are insipid only when read coldly; for
a young man’s tone, glance and attitude give a surpassing eloquence to
the banal phrases. Mme. de Nucingen thought that Rastignac was adorable.
Then, woman-like, being at a loss how to reply to the student’s
outspoken admiration, she answered a previous remark.
“Yes, it is very wrong of my sister to treat our poor father as she
does,” she said; “he has been a Providence to us. It was not until M. de
Nucingen positively ordered me only to receive him in the mornings that
I yielded the point. But I have been unhappy about it for a long while;
I have shed many tears over it. This violence to my feelings, with my
husband’s brutal treatment, have been two causes of my unhappy married
life. There is certainly no woman in Paris whose lot seems more enviable
than mine, and yet, in reality, there is not one so much to be pitied.
You will think I must be out of my senses to talk to you like this; but
you know my father, and I cannot regard you as a stranger.”
“You will find no one,” said Eugene, “who longs as eagerly as I do to be
yours. What do all women seek? Happiness.” (He answered his own question
in low, vibrating tones.) “And if happiness for a woman means that she
is to be loved and adored, to have a friend to whom she can pour out her
wishes, her fancies, her sorrows and joys; to whom she can lay bare
her heart and soul, and all her fair defects and her gracious virtues,
without fear of a betrayal; believe me, the devotion and the warmth that
never fails can only be found in the heart of a young man who, at a bare
sign from you, would go to his death, who neither knows nor cares to
know anything as yet of the world, because you will be all the world to
him. I myself, you see (you will laugh at my simplicity), have just come
from a remote country district; I am quite new to this world of Paris; I
have only known true and loving hearts; and I made up my mind that here
I should find no love. Then I chanced to meet my cousin, and to see
my cousin’s heart from very near; I have divined the inexhaustible
treasures of passion, and, like Cherubino, I am the lover of all women,
until the day comes when I find _the_ woman to whom I may devote myself.
As soon as I saw you, as soon as I came into the theatre this evening, I
felt myself borne towards you as if by the current of a stream. I had so
often thought of you already, but I had never dreamed that you would be
so beautiful! Mme. de Beauseant told me that I must not look so much at
you. She does not know the charm of your red lips, your fair face, nor
see how soft your eyes are.... I also am beginning to talk nonsense; but
let me talk.”
Nothing pleases a woman better than to listen to such whispered words as
these; the most puritanical among them listens even when she ought not
to reply to them; and Rastignac, having once begun, continued to pour
out his story, dropping his voice, that she might lean and listen; and
Mme. de Nucingen, smiling, glanced from time to time at de Marsay, who
still sat in the Princesse Galathionne’s box.
Rastignac did not leave Mme. de Nucingen till her husband came to take
her home.
“Madame,” Eugene said, “I shall have the pleasure of calling upon you
before the Duchesse de Carigliano’s ball.”
“If Matame infites you to come,” said the Baron, a thickset Alsatian,
with indications of a sinister cunning in his full-moon countenance,
“you are quide sure of being well receifed.”
“My affairs seem to be in a promising way,” said Eugene to himself.--
“‘Can you love me?’ I asked her, and she did not resent it. “The bit is in
the horse’s mouth, and I have only to mount and ride;” and with that
he went to pay his respects to Mme. de Beauseant, who was leaving the
theatre on d’Ajuda’s arm.
The student did not know that the Baroness’ thoughts had been wandering;
that she was even then expecting a letter from de Marsay, one of those
letters that bring about a rupture that rends the soul; so, happy in his
delusion, Eugene went with the Vicomtesse to the peristyle, where people
were waiting till their carriages were announced.
“That cousin of yours is hardly recognizable for the same man,” said the
Portuguese laughingly to the Vicomtesse, when Eugene had taken leave of
them. “He will break the bank. He is as supple as an eel; he will go a
long way, of that I am sure. Who else could have picked out a woman for
him, as you did, just when she needed consolation?”
“But it is not certain that she does not still love the faithless
lover,” said Mme. de Beauseant.
The student meanwhile walked back from the Theatre-Italien to the Rue
Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve, making the most delightful plans as he went. He
had noticed how closely Mme. de Restaud had scrutinized him when he sat
beside Mme. de Nucingen, and inferred that the Countess’ doors would not
be closed in the future. Four important houses were now open to him--for
he meant to stand well with the Marechale; he had four supporters in the
inmost circle of society in Paris. Even now it was clear to him that,
once involved in this intricate social machinery, he must attach himself
to a spoke of the wheel that was to turn and raise his fortunes; he
would not examine himself too curiously as to the methods, but he was
certain of the end, and conscious of the power to gain and keep his
hold.
“If Mme. de Nucingen takes an interest in me, I will teach her how to
manage her husband. That husband of hers is a great speculator; he might
put me in the way of making a fortune by a single stroke.”
He did not say this bluntly in so many words; as yet, indeed, he was
not sufficient of a diplomatist to sum up a situation, to see its
possibilities at a glance, and calculate the chances in his favor. These
were nothing but hazy ideas that floated over his mental horizon; they
were less cynical than Vautrin’s notions; but if they had been tried in
the crucible of conscience, no very pure result would have issued from
the test. It is by a succession of such like transactions that men sink
at last to the level of the relaxed morality of this epoch, when there
have never been so few of those who square their courses with their
theories, so few of those noble characters who do not yield to
temptation, for whom the slightest deviation from the line of rectitude
is a crime. To these magnificent types of uncompromising Right we owe
two masterpieces--the Alceste of Moliere, and, in our own day, the
characters of Jeanie Deans and her father in Sir Walter Scott’s novel.
Perhaps a work which should chronicle the opposite course, which should
trace out all the devious courses through which a man of the world, a
man of ambitions, drags his conscience, just steering clear of crime
that he may gain his end and yet save appearances, such a chronicle
would be no less edifying and no less dramatic.
Rastignac went home. He was fascinated by Mme. de Nucingen; he seemed to
see her before him, slender and graceful as a swallow. He recalled the
intoxicating sweetness of her eyes, her fair hair, the delicate silken
tissue of the skin, beneath which it almost seemed to him that he could
see the blood coursing; the tones of her voice still exerted a spell
over him; he had forgotten nothing; his walk perhaps heated his
imagination by sending a glow of warmth through his veins. He knocked
unceremoniously at Goriot’s door.
“I have seen Mme. Delphine, neighbor,” said he.
“Where?”
“At the Italiens.”
“Did she enjoy it?.... Just come inside,” and the old man left his bed,
unlocked the door, and promptly returned again.
It was the first time that Eugene had been in Father Goriot’s room, and
he could not control his feeling of amazement at the contrast between
the den in which the father lived and the costume of the daughter whom
he had just beheld. The window was curtainless, the walls were damp, in
places the varnished wall-paper had come away and gave glimpses of the
grimy yellow plaster beneath. The wretched bed on which the old man
lay boasted but one thin blanket, and a wadded quilt made out of large
pieces of Mme. Vauquer’s old dresses. The floor was damp and gritty.
Opposite the window stood a chest of drawers made of rosewood, one of
the old-fashioned kind with a curving front and brass handles, shaped
like rings of twisted vine stems covered with flowers and leaves. On a
venerable piece of furniture with a wooden shelf stood a ewer and
basin and shaving apparatus. A pair of shoes stood in one corner; a
night-table by the bed had neither a door nor marble slab. There was not
a trace of a fire in the empty grate; the square walnut table with
the crossbar against which Father Goriot had crushed and twisted his
posset-dish stood near the hearth. The old man’s hat was lying on a
broken-down bureau. An armchair stuffed with straw and a couple of
chairs completed the list of ramshackle furniture. From the tester of
the bed, tied to the ceiling by a piece of rag, hung a strip of some
cheap material in large red and black checks. No poor drudge in a
garret could be worse lodged than Father Goriot in Mme. Vauquer’s
lodging-house. The mere sight of the room sent a chill through you and
a sense of oppression; it was like the worst cell in a prison. Luckily,
Goriot could not see the effect that his surroundings produced on Eugene
as the latter deposited his candle on the night-table. The old man
turned round, keeping the bedclothes huddled up to his chin.
“Well,” he said, “and which do you like the best, Mme. de Restaud or
Mme. de Nucingen?”
“I like Mme. Delphine the best,” said the law student, “because she
loves you the best.”
At the words so heartily spoken the old man’s hand slipped out from
under the bedclothes and grasped Eugene’s.
“Thank you, thank you,” he said, gratefully. “Then what did she say
about me?”
The student repeated the Baroness’ remarks with some embellishments of
his own, the old man listening the while as though he heard a voice from
Heaven.
“Dear child!” he said. “Yes, yes, she is very fond of me. But you must
not believe all that she tells you about Anastasie. The two sisters are
jealous of each other, you see, another proof of their affection. Mme.
de Restaud is very fond of me too. I know she is. A father sees his
children as God sees all of us; he looks into the very depths of their
hearts; he knows their intentions; and both of them are so loving. Oh!
if I only had good sons-in-law, I should be too happy, and I dare
say there is no perfect happiness here below. If I might live with
them--simply hear their voices, know that they are there, see them go
and come as I used to do at home when they were still with me; why, my
heart bounds at the thought.... Were they nicely dressed?”
“Yes,” said Eugene. “But, M. Goriot, how is it that your daughters have
such fine houses, while you live in such a den as this?”
“Dear me, why should I want anything better?” he replied, with seeming
carelessness. “I can’t quite explain to you how it is; I am not used to
stringing words together properly, but it all lies there----” he said,
tapping his heart. “My real life is in my two girls, you see; and so
long as they are happy, and smartly dressed, and have soft carpets under
their feet, what does it matter what clothes I wear or where I lie down
of a night? I shall never feel cold so long as they are warm; I shall
never feel dull if they are laughing. I have no troubles but theirs.
When you, too, are a father, and you hear your children’s little voices,
you will say to yourself, ‘That has all come from me.’ You will feel
that those little ones are akin to every drop in your veins, that they
are the very flower of your life (and what else are they?); you will
cleave so closely to them that you seem to feel every movement that they
make. Everywhere I hear their voices sounding in my ears. If they are
sad, the look in their eyes freezes my blood. Some day you will find
out that there is far more happiness in another’s happiness than in your
own. It is something that I cannot explain, something within that sends
a glow of warmth all through you. In short, I live my life three times
over. Shall I tell you something funny? Well, then, since I have been
a father, I have come to understand God. He is everywhere in the world,
because the whole world comes from Him. And it is just the same with my
children, monsieur. Only, I love my daughters better than God loves
the world, for the world is not so beautiful as God Himself is, but my
children are more beautiful than I am. Their lives are so bound up with
mine that I felt somehow that you would see them this evening. Great
Heaven! If any man would make my little Delphine as happy as a wife is
when she is loved, I would black his boots and run on his errands. That
miserable M. de Marsay is a cur; I know all about him from her maid. A
longing to wring his neck comes over me now and then. He does not love
her! does not love a pearl of a woman, with a voice like a nightingale
and shaped like a model. Where can her eyes have been when she married
that great lump of an Alsatian? They ought both of them to have married
young men, good-looking and good-tempered--but, after all, they had
their own way.”
Father Goriot was sublime. Eugene had never yet seen his face light
up as it did now with the passionate fervor of a father’s love. It is
worthy of remark that strong feeling has a very subtle and pervasive
power; the roughest nature, in the endeavor to express a deep and
sincere affection, communicates to others the influence that has put
resonance into the voice, and eloquence into every gesture, wrought a
change in the very features of the speaker; for under the inspiration
of passion the stupidest human being attains to the highest eloquence of
ideas, if not of language, and seems to move in some sphere of light.
In the old man’s tones and gesture there was something just then of the
same spell that a great actor exerts over his audience. But does not the
poet in us find expression in our affections?
“Well,” said Eugene, “perhaps you will not be sorry to hear that she is
pretty sure to break with de Marsay before long. That sprig of fashion
has left her for the Princesse Galathionne. For my part, I fell in love
with Mme. Delphine this evening.”
“Stuff!” said Father Goriot.
“I did indeed, and she did not regard me with aversion. For a whole hour
we talked of love, and I am to go to call on her on Saturday, the day
after to-morrow.”
“Oh! how I should love you, if she should like you. You are
kind-hearted; you would never make her miserable. If you were to forsake
her, I would cut your throat at once. A woman does not love twice, you
see! Good heavens! what nonsense I am talking, M. Eugene! It is cold;
you ought not to stay here. _Mon Dieu!_ so you have heard her speak?
What message did she give you for me?”
“None at all,” said Eugene to himself; aloud he answered, “She told me
to tell you that your daughter sends you a good kiss.”
“Good-night, neighbor! Sleep well, and pleasant dreams to you! I have
mine already made for me by that message from her. May God grant you
all your desires! You have come in like a good angel on me to-night, and
brought with you the air that my daughter breathes.”
“Poor old fellow!” said Eugene as he lay down. “It is enough to melt a
heart of stone. His daughter no more thought of him than of the Grand
Turk.”
Ever after this conference Goriot looked upon his neighbor as a
friend, a confidant such as he had never hoped to find; and there was
established between the two the only relationship that could attach this
old man to another man. The passions never miscalculate. Father Goriot
felt that this friendship brought him closer to his daughter Delphine;
he thought that he should find a warmer welcome for himself if the
Baroness should care for Eugene. Moreover, he had confided one of his
troubles to the younger man. Mme. de Nucingen, for whose happiness he
prayed a thousand times daily, had never known the joys of love. Eugene
was certainly (to make use of his own expression) one of the nicest
young men that he had ever seen, and some prophetic instinct seemed to
tell him that Eugene was to give her the happiness which had not been
hers. These were the beginnings of a friendship that grew up between the
old man and his neighbor; but for this friendship the catastrophe of the
drama must have remained a mystery.
The affection with which Father Goriot regarded Eugene, by whom he
seated himself at breakfast, the change in Goriot’s face, which as a
rule, looked as expressionless as a plaster cast, and a few words that
passed between the two, surprised the other lodgers. Vautrin, who saw
Eugene for the first time since their interview, seemed as if he would
fain read the student’s very soul. During the night Eugene had had some
time in which to scan the vast field which lay before him; and now, as
he remembered yesterday’s proposal, the thought of Mlle. Taillefer’s
dowry came, of course, to his mind, and he could not help thinking
of Victorine as the most exemplary youth may think of an heiress. It
chanced that their eyes met. The poor girl did not fail to see that
Eugene looked very handsome in his new clothes. So much was said in
the glance, thus exchanged, that Eugene could not doubt but that he was
associated in her mind with the vague hopes that lie dormant in a girl’s
heart and gather round the first attractive newcomer. “Eight hundred
thousand francs!” a voice cried in his ears, but suddenly he took refuge
in the memories of yesterday evening, thinking that his extemporized
passion for Mme. de Nucingen was a talisman that would preserve him from
this temptation.
“They gave Rossini’s _Barber of Seville_ at the Italiens yesterday
evening,” he remarked. “I never heard such delicious music. Good
gracious! how lucky people are to have a box at the Italiens!”
Father Goriot drank in every word that Eugene let fall, and watched him
as a dog watches his master’s slightest movement.
“You men are like fighting cocks,” said Mme. Vauquer; “you do what you
like.”
“How did you get back?” inquired Vautrin.
“I walked,” answered Eugene.
“For my own part,” remarked the tempter, “I do not care about doing
things by halves. If I want to enjoy myself that way, I should prefer
to go in my carriage, sit in my own box, and do the thing comfortably.
Everything or nothing; that is my motto.”
“And a good one, too,” commented Mme. Vauquer.
“Perhaps you will see Mme. de Nucingen to-day,” said Eugene, addressing
Goriot in an undertone. “She will welcome you with open arms, I am sure;
she would want to ask you for all sorts of little details about me. I
have found out that she will do anything in the world to be known by my
cousin Mme. de Beauseant; don’t forget to tell her that I love her too
well not to think of trying to arrange this.”
Rastignac went at once to the Ecole de Droit. He had no mind to stay
a moment longer than was necessary in that odious house. He wasted his
time that day; he had fallen a victim to that fever of the brain that
accompanies the too vivid hopes of youth. Vautrin’s arguments had set
him meditating on social life, and he was deep in these reflections when
he happened on his friend Bianchon in the Jardin du Luxembourg.
“What makes you look so solemn?” said the medical student, putting an
arm through Eugene’s as they went towards the Palais.
“I am tormented by temptations.”
“What kind? There is a cure for temptation.”
“What?”
“Yielding to it.”
“You laugh, but you don’t know what it is all about. Have you read
Rousseau?”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember that he asks the reader somewhere what he would do if
he could make a fortune by killing an old mandarin somewhere in China by
mere force of wishing it, and without stirring from Paris?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then?”
“Pshaw! I am at my thirty-third mandarin.”
“Seriously, though. Look here, suppose you were sure that you could do
it, and had only to give a nod. Would you do it?”
“Is he well stricken in years, this mandarin of yours? Pshaw! after all,
young or old, paralytic, or well and sound, my word for it. ... Well,
then. Hang it, no!”
“You are a good fellow, Bianchon. But suppose you loved a woman well
enough to lose your soul in hell for her, and that she wanted money for
dresses and a carriage, and all her whims, in fact?”
“Why, here you are taking away my reason, and want me to reason!”
“Well, then, Bianchon, I am mad; bring me to my senses. I have two
sisters as beautiful and innocent as angels, and I want them to be
happy. How am I to find two hundred thousand francs apiece for them in
the next five years? Now and then in life, you see, you must play for
heavy stakes, and it is no use wasting your luck on low play.”
“But you are only stating the problem that lies before every one at the
outset of his life, and you want to cut the Gordian knot with a sword.
If that is the way of it, dear boy, you must be an Alexander, or to the
hulks you go. For my own part, I am quite contented with the little lot
I mean to make for myself somewhere in the country, when I mean to step
into my father’s shoes and plod along. A man’s affections are just
as fully satisfied by the smallest circle as they can be by a vast
circumference. Napoleon himself could only dine once, and he could not
have more mistresses than a house student at the Capuchins. Happiness,
old man, depends on what lies between the sole of your foot and the
crown of your head; and whether it costs a million or a hundred louis,
the actual amount of pleasure that you receive rests entirely with you,
and is just exactly the same in any case. I am for letting that Chinaman
live.”
“Thank you, Bianchon; you have done me good. We will always be friends.”
“I say,” remarked the medical student, as they came to the end of a
broad walk in the Jardin des Plantes, “I saw the Michonneau and Poiret a
few minutes ago on a bench chatting with a gentleman whom I used to see
in last year’s troubles hanging about the Chamber of Deputies; he seems
to me, in fact, to be a detective dressed up like a decent retired
tradesman. Let us keep an eye on that couple; I will tell you why some
time. Good-bye; it is nearly four o’clock, and I must be in to answer to
my name.”
When Eugene reached the lodging-house, he found Father Goriot waiting
for him.
“Here,” cried the old man, “here is a letter from her. Pretty
handwriting, eh?”