Father Goriot
we have the Code to browse upon; it is not amusing, and we are none the
wiser for it, but that cannot be helped. So far so good. We mean to make
an advocate of ourselves with a prospect of one day being made President
of a Court of Assize, when we shall send poor devils, our betters, to
the galleys with a T.F.[*] on their shoulders, so that the rich may be
convinced that they can sleep in peace. There is no fun in that; and you
are a long while coming to it; for, to begin with, there are two years
of nauseous drudgery in Paris, we see all the lollipops that we long for
out of our reach. It is tiresome to want things and never to have them.
If you were a pallid creature of the mollusk order, you would have
nothing to fear, but it is different when you have the hot blood of
a lion and are ready to get into a score of scrapes every day of your
life. This is the ghastliest form of torture known in this inferno of
God’s making, and you will give in to it. Or suppose that you are a good
boy, drink nothing stronger than milk, and bemoan your hard lot; you,
with your generous nature, will endure hardships that would drive a dog
mad, and make a start, after long waiting, as deputy to some rascal
or other in a hole of a place where the Government will fling you a
thousand francs a year like the scraps that are thrown to the butcher’s
dog. Bark at thieves, plead the cause of the rich, send men of heart
to the guillotine, that is your work! Many thanks! If you have no
influence, you may rot in your provincial tribunal. At thirty you will
be a Justice with twelve hundred francs a year (if you have not flung
off the gown for good before then). By the time you are forty you may
look to marry a miller’s daughter, an heiress with some six thousand
livres a year. Much obliged! If you have influence, you may possibly
be a Public Prosecutor by the time you are thirty; with a salary of
a thousand crowns, you could look to marry the mayor’s daughter. Some
petty piece of political trickery, such as mistaking Villele for Manuel
in a bulletin (the names rhyme, and that quiets your conscience), and
you will probably be a Procureur General by the time you are forty, with
a chance of becoming a deputy. Please to observe, my dear boy, that our
conscience will have been a little damaged in the process, and that we
shall endure twenty years of drudgery and hidden poverty, and that
our sisters are wearing Dian’s livery. I have the honor to call your
attention to another fact: to wit, that there are but twenty Procureurs
Generaux at a time in all France, while there are some twenty thousand
of you young men who aspire to that elevated position; that there are
some mountebanks among you who would sell their family to screw their
fortunes a peg higher. If this sort of thing sickens you, try another
course. The Baron de Rastignac thinks of becoming an advocate, does he?
There’s a nice prospect for you! Ten years of drudgery straight away.
You are obliged to live at the rate of a thousand francs a month; you
must have a library of law books, live in chambers, go into society, go
down on your knees to ask a solicitor for briefs, lick the dust off
the floor of the Palais de Justice. If this kind of business led to
anything, I should not say no; but just give me the names of five
advocates here in Paris who by the time that they are fifty are making
fifty thousand francs a year! Bah! I would sooner turn pirate on the
high seas than have my soul shrivel up inside me like that. How will
you find the capital? There is but one way, marry a woman who has money.
There is no fun in it. Have you a mind to marry? You hang a stone around
your neck; for if you marry for money, what becomes of our exalted
notions of honor and so forth? You might as well fly in the face of
social conventions at once. Is it nothing to crawl like a serpent before
your wife, to lick her mother’s feet, to descend to dirty actions
that would sicken swine--faugh!--never mind if you at least make your
fortune. But you will be as doleful as a dripstone if you marry for
money. It is better to wrestle with men than to wrangle at home with
your wife. You are at the crossway of the roads of life, my boy; choose
your way.
[*] Travaux forces, forced labour.
“But you have chosen already. You have gone to see your cousin of
Beauseant, and you have had an inkling of luxury; you have been to Mme.
de Restaud’s house, and in Father Goriot’s daughter you have seen a
glimpse of the Parisienne for the first time. That day you came
back with a word written on your forehead. I knew it, I could read
it--‘_Success_!’ Yes, success at any price. ‘Bravo,’ said I to myself,
‘here is the sort of fellow for me.’ You wanted money. Where was it all
to come from? You have drained your sisters’ little hoard (all brothers
sponge more or less on their sisters). Those fifteen hundred francs of
yours (got together, God knows how! in a country where there are more
chestnuts than five-franc pieces) will slip away like soldiers after
pillage. And, then, what will you do? Shall you begin to work? Work, or
what you understand by work at this moment, means, for a man of Poiret’s
calibre, an old age in Mamma Vauquer’s lodging-house. There are fifty
thousand young men in your position at this moment, all bent as you are
on solving one and the same problem--how to acquire a fortune rapidly.
You are but a unit in that aggregate. You can guess, therefore, what
efforts you must make, how desperate the struggle is. There are not
fifty thousand good positions for you; you must fight and devour one
another like spiders in a pot. Do you know how a man makes his way here?
By brilliant genius or by skilful corruption. You must either cut your
way through these masses of men like a cannon ball, or steal among them
like a plague. Honesty is nothing to the purpose. Men bow before the
power of genius; they hate it, and try to slander it, because genius
does not divide the spoil; but if genius persists, they bow before it.
To sum it all up in a phrase, if they fail to smother genius in the mud,
they fall on their knees and worship it. Corruption is a great power
in the world, and talent is scarce. So corruption is the weapon of
superfluous mediocrity; you will be made to feel the point of it
everywhere. You will see women who spend more than ten thousand francs
a year on dress, while their husband’s salary (his whole income) is
six thousand francs. You will see officials buying estates on twelve
thousand francs a year. You will see women who sell themselves body and
soul to drive in a carriage belonging to the son of a peer of France,
who has a right to drive in the middle rank at Longchamp. You have
seen that poor simpleton of a Goriot obliged to meet a bill with his
daughter’s name at the back of it, though her husband has fifty thousand
francs a year. I defy you to walk a couple of yards anywhere in Paris
without stumbling on some infernal complication. I’ll bet my head to
a head of that salad that you will stir up a hornet’s nest by taking a
fancy to the first young, rich, and pretty woman you meet. They are all
dodging the law, all at loggerheads with their husbands. If I were to
begin to tell you all that vanity or necessity (virtue is not often
mixed up in it, you may be sure), all that vanity and necessity drive
them to do for lovers, finery, housekeeping, or children, I should never
come to an end. So an honest man is the common enemy.
“But do you know what an honest man is? Here, in Paris, an honest man is
the man who keeps his own counsel, and will not divide the plunder. I am
not speaking now of those poor bond-slaves who do the work of the world
without a reward for their toil--God Almighty’s outcasts, I call them.
Among them, I grant you, is virtue in all the flower of its stupidity,
but poverty is no less their portion. At this moment, I think I see the
long faces those good folk would pull if God played a practical joke on
them and stayed away at the Last Judgment.
“Well, then, if you mean to make a fortune quickly, you must either be
rich to begin with, or make people believe that you are rich. It is no
use playing here except for high stakes; once take to low play, it is
all up with you. If in the scores of professions that are open to you,
there are ten men who rise very rapidly, people are sure to call them
thieves. You can draw your own conclusions. Such is life. It is no
cleaner than a kitchen; it reeks like a kitchen; and if you mean to
cook your dinner, you must expect to soil your hands; the real art is
in getting them clean again, and therein lies the whole morality of our
epoch. If I take this tone in speaking of the world to you, I have the
right to do so; I know it well. Do you think that I am blaming it? Far
from it; the world has always been as it is now. Moralists’ strictures
will never change it. Mankind are not perfect, but one age is more
or less hypocritical than another, and then simpletons say that its
morality is high or low. I do not think that the rich are any worse than
the poor; man is much the same, high or low, or wherever he is. In a
million of these human cattle there may be half a score of bold spirits
who rise above the rest, above the laws; I am one of them. And you, if
you are cleverer than your fellows, make straight to your end, and hold
your head high. But you must lay your account with envy and slander and
mediocrity, and every man’s hand will be against you. Napoleon met with
a Minister of War, Aubry by name, who all but sent him to the colonies.
“Feel your pulse. Think whether you can get up morning after morning,
strengthened in yesterday’s purpose. In that case I will make you an
offer that no one would decline. Listen attentively. You see, I have an
idea of my own. My idea is to live a patriarchal life on a vast estate,
say a hundred thousand acres, somewhere in the Southern States of
America. I mean to be a planter, to have slaves, to make a few snug
millions by selling my cattle, timber, and tobacco; I want to live an
absolute monarch, and to do just as I please; to lead such a life as no
one here in these squalid dens of lath and plaster ever imagines. I am a
great poet; I do not write my poems, I feel them, and act them. At this
moment I have fifty thousand francs, which might possibly buy forty
negroes. I want two hundred thousand francs, because I want to have
two hundred negroes to carry out my notions of the patriarachal life
properly. Negroes, you see, are like a sort of family ready grown, and
there are no inquisitive public prosecutors out there to interfere with
you. That investment in ebony ought to mean three or four million francs
in ten years’ time. If I am successful, no one will ask me who I am. I
shall be Mr. Four Millions, an American citizen. I shall be fifty years
old by then, and sound and hearty still; I shall enjoy life after my own
fashion. In two words, if I find you an heiress with a million, will you
give me two hundred thousand francs? Twenty per cent commission, eh? Is
that too much? Your little wife will be very much in love with you. Once
married, you will show signs of uneasiness and remorse; for a couple of
weeks you will be depressed. Then, some night after sundry grimacings,
comes the confession, between two kisses, ‘Two hundred thousand francs
of debts, my darling!’ This sort of farce is played every day in Paris,
and by young men of the highest fashion. When a young wife has given her
heart, she will not refuse her purse. Perhaps you are thinking that
you will lose the money for good? Not you. You will make two hundred
thousand francs again by some stroke of business. With your capital and
your brains you should be able to accumulate as large a fortune as you