Father Goriot
did. I recollect the steward telling my grandmother that she might live
at Grandvilliers in complete security, because her corn was as good as
a certificate of civism. Well, then, this Loriot, who sold corn to
those butchers, has never had but one passion, they say--he idolizes his
daughters. He settled one of them under Restaud’s roof, and grafted the
other into the Nucingen family tree, the Baron de Nucingen being a rich
banker who had turned Royalist. You can quite understand that so long as
Bonaparte was Emperor, the two sons-in-law could manage to put up with
the old Ninety-three; but after the restoration of the Bourbons, M. de
Restaud felt bored by the old man’s society, and the banker was still
more tired of it. His daughters were still fond of him; they wanted
‘to keep the goat and the cabbage,’ so they used to see Joriot whenever
there was no one there, under pretence of affection. ‘Come to-day, papa,
we shall have you all to ourselves, and that will be much nicer!’
and all that sort of thing. As for me, dear, I believe that love has
second-sight: poor Ninety-three; his heart must have bled. He saw that
his daughters were ashamed of him, that if they loved their husbands
his visits must make mischief. So he immolated himself. He made the
sacrifice because he was a father; he went into voluntary exile. His
daughters were satisfied, so he thought that he had done the best thing
he could; but it was a family crime, and father and daughters were
accomplices. You see this sort of thing everywhere. What could this old
Doriot have been but a splash of mud in his daughters’ drawing-rooms? He
would only have been in the way, and bored other people, besides being
bored himself. And this that happened between father and daughters may
happen to the prettiest woman in Paris and the man she loves the best;
if her love grows tiresome, he will go; he will descend to the basest
trickery to leave her. It is the same with all love and friendship. Our
heart is a treasury; if you pour out all its wealth at once, you are
bankrupt. We show no more mercy to the affection that reveals its utmost
extent than we do to another kind of prodigal who has not a penny left.
Their father had given them all he had. For twenty years he had given
his whole heart to them; then, one day, he gave them all his fortune
too. The lemon was squeezed; the girls left the rest in the gutter.”
“The world is very base,” said the Vicomtesse, plucking at the threads
of her shawl. She did not raise her head as she spoke; the words that
Mme. de Langeais had meant for her in the course of her story had cut
her to the quick.
“Base? Oh, no,” answered the Duchess; “the world goes its own way, that
is all. If I speak in this way, it is only to show that I am not duped
by it. I think as you do,” she said, pressing the Vicomtesse’s hand.
“The world is a slough; let us try to live on the heights above it.”
She rose to her feet and kissed Mme. de Beauseant on the forehead as
she said: “You look very charming to-day, dear. I have never seen such a
lovely color in your cheeks before.”
Then she went out with a slight inclination of the head to the cousin.
“Father Goriot is sublime!” said Eugene to himself, as he remembered how
he had watched his neighbor work the silver vessel into a shapeless mass
that night.
Mme. de Beauseant did not hear him; she was absorbed in her own
thoughts. For several minutes the silence remained unbroken till the
law student became almost paralyzed with embarrassment, and was equally
afraid to go or stay or speak a word.
“The world is basely ungrateful and ill-natured,” said the Vicomtesse
at last. “No sooner does a trouble befall you than a friend is ready
to bring the tidings and to probe your heart with the point of a
dagger while calling on you to admire the handle. Epigrams and sarcasms
already! Ah! I will defend myself!”
She raised her head like the great lady that she was, and lightnings
flashed from her proud eyes.
“Ah!” she said, as she saw Eugene, “are you there?”
“Still,” he said piteously.
“Well, then, M. de Rastignac, deal with the world as it deserves. You
are determined to succeed? I will help you. You shall sound the depths
of corruption in woman; you shall measure the extent of man’s pitiful
vanity. Deeply as I am versed in such learning, there were pages in the
book of life that I had not read. Now I know all. The more cold-blooded
your calculations, the further you will go. Strike ruthlessly; you will
be feared. Men and women for you must be nothing more than post-horses;
take a fresh relay, and leave the last to drop by the roadside; in this
way you will reach the goal of your ambition. You will be nothing here,
you see, unless a woman interests herself in you; and she must be young
and wealthy, and a woman of the world. Yet, if you have a heart, lock
it carefully away like a treasure; do not let any one suspect it, or you
will be lost; you would cease to be the executioner, you would take
the victim’s place. And if ever you should love, never let your secret
escape you! Trust no one until you are very sure of the heart to which
you open your heart. Learn to mistrust every one; take every precaution
for the sake of the love which does not exist as yet. Listen,
Miguel”--the name slipped from her so naturally that she did not
notice her mistake--“there is something still more appalling than the
ingratitude of daughters who have cast off their old father and wish
that he were dead, and that is a rivalry between two sisters. Restaud
comes of a good family, his wife has been received into their circle;
she has been presented at court; and her sister, her wealthy sister,
Mme. Delphine de Nucingen, the wife of a great capitalist, is consumed
with envy, and ready to die of spleen. There is gulf set between the
sisters--indeed, they are sisters no longer--the two women who refuse
to acknowledge their father do not acknowledge each other. So Mme. de
Nucingen would lap up all the mud that lies between the Rue Saint-Lazare
and the Rue de Grenelle to gain admittance to my salon. She fancied
that she should gain her end through de Marsay; she has made herself
de Marsay’s slave, and she bores him. De Marsay cares very little about
her. If you will introduce her to me, you will be her darling, her
Benjamin; she will idolize you. If, after that, you can love her, do so;
if not, make her useful. I will ask her to come once or twice to one of
my great crushes, but I will never receive her here in the morning. I
will bow to her when I see her, and that will be quite sufficient.
You have shut the Comtesse de Restaud’s door against you by mentioning
Father Goriot’s name. Yes, my good friend, you may call at her house
twenty times, and every time out of the twenty you will find that she
is not at home. The servants have their orders, and will not admit you.
Very well, then, now let Father Goriot gain the right of entry into her
sister’s house for you. The beautiful Mme. de Nucingen will give the
signal for a battle. As soon as she singles you out, other women will
begin to lose their heads about you, and her enemies and rivals and
intimate friends will all try to take you from her. There are women who
will fall in love with a man because another woman has chosen him; like
the city madams, poor things, who copy our millinery, and hope thereby
to acquire our manners. You will have a success, and in Paris success is
everything; it is the key of power. If the women credit you with wit and
talent, the men will follow suit so long as you do not undeceive them
yourself. There will be nothing you may not aspire to; you will go
everywhere, and you will find out what the world is--an assemblage of
fools and knaves. But you must be neither the one nor the other. I am
giving you my name like Ariadne’s clue of thread to take with you into
the labyrinth; make no unworthy use of it,” she said, with a queenly
glance and curve of her throat; “give it back to me unsullied. And now,
go; leave me. We women also have our battles to fight.”
“And if you should ever need some one who would gladly set a match to a
train for you----”
“Well?” she asked.
He tapped his heart, smiled in answer to his cousin’s smile, and went.
It was five o’clock, and Eugene was hungry; he was afraid lest he should
not be in time for dinner, a misgiving which made him feel that it was
pleasant to be borne so quickly across Paris. This sensation of physical
comfort left his mind free to grapple with the thoughts that assailed
him. A mortification usually sends a young man of his age into a furious
rage; he shakes his fist at society, and vows vengeance when his belief
in himself is shaken. Just then Rastignac was overwhelmed by the words,
“You have shut the Countess’ door against you.”
“I shall call!” he said to himself, “and if Mme. de Beauseant is right,
if I never find her at home--I... well, Mme. de Restaud shall meet me
in every salon in Paris. I will learn to fence and have some pistol
practice, and kill that Maxime of hers!”
“And money?” cried an inward monitor. “How about money, where is that
to come from?” And all at once the wealth displayed in the Countess de
Restaud’s drawing-room rose before his eyes. That was the luxury which
Goriot’s daughter had loved too well, the gilding, the ostentatious
splendor, the unintelligent luxury of the parvenu, the riotous
extravagance of a courtesan. Then the attractive vision suddenly went
under an eclipse as he remembered the stately grandeur of the Hotel de
Beauseant. As his fancy wandered among these lofty regions in the great
world of Paris, innumerable dark thoughts gathered in his heart; his
ideas widened, and his conscience grew more elastic. He saw the world as
it is; saw how the rich lived beyond the jurisdiction of law and public
opinion, and found in success the _ultima ratio mundi_.
“Vautrin is right, success is virtue!” he said to himself.
Arrived in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve, he rushed up to his room for
ten francs wherewith to satisfy the demands of the cabman, and went
in to dinner. He glanced round the squalid room, saw the eighteen
poverty-stricken creatures about to feed like cattle in their stalls,
and the sight filled him with loathing. The transition was too sudden,
and the contrast was so violent that it could not but act as a powerful
stimulant; his ambition developed and grew beyond all social bounds. On
the one hand, he beheld a vision of social life in its most charming
and refined forms, of quick-pulsed youth, of fair, impassioned faces
invested with all the charm of poetry, framed in a marvelous setting of
luxury or art; and, on the other hand, he saw a sombre picture, the miry
verge beyond these faces, in which passion was extinct and nothing was
left of the drama but the cords and pulleys and bare mechanism. Mme. de
Beauseant’s counsels, the words uttered in anger by the forsaken lady,
her petulant offer, came to his mind, and poverty was a ready expositor.
Rastignac determined to open two parallel trenches so as to insure
success; he would be a learned doctor of law and a man of fashion.
Clearly he was still a child! Those two lines are asymptotes, and will
never meet.
“You are very dull, my lord Marquis,” said Vautrin, with one of the
shrewd glances that seem to read the innermost secrets of another mind.
“I am not in the humor to stand jokes from people who call me ‘my lord
Marquis,’” answered Eugene. “A marquis here in Paris, if he is not the
veriest sham, ought to have a hundred thousand livres a year at least;
and a lodger in the Maison Vauquer is not exactly Fortune’s favorite.”
Vautrin’s glance at Rastignac was half-paternal, half-contemptuous.
“Puppy!” it seemed to say; “I should make one mouthful of him!” Then he
answered: