Father Goriot
“Clk! clk! clk!” cried Bianchon, making the sound with his tongue
against the roof of his mouth, like a driver urging on a horse.
“He holds himself like a duke and a peer of France,” said Mme. Vauquer.
“Are you going a-courting?” inquired Mlle. Michonneau.
“Cock-a-doodle-doo!” cried the artist.
“My compliments to my lady your wife,” from the _employe_ at the Museum.
“Your wife; have you a wife?” asked Poiret.
“Yes, in compartments, water-tight and floats, guaranteed fast color,
all prices from twenty-five to forty sous, neat check patterns in the
latest fashion and best taste, will wash, half-linen, half-cotton,
half-wool; a certain cure for toothache and other complaints under the
patronage of the Royal College of Physicians! children like it! a remedy
for headache, indigestion, and all other diseases affecting the
throat, eyes, and ears!” cried Vautrin, with a comical imitation of the
volubility of a quack at a fair. “And how much shall we say for this
marvel, gentlemen? Twopence? No. Nothing of the sort. All that is left
in stock after supplying the Great Mogul. All the crowned heads of
Europe, including the Gr-r-rand Duke of Baden, have been anxious to get
a sight of it. Walk up! walk up! gentlemen! Pay at the desk as you go
in! Strike up the music there! Brooum, la, la, trinn! la, la, boum!
boum! Mister Clarinette, there you are out of tune!” he added gruffly;
“I will rap your knuckles for you!”
“Goodness! what an amusing man!” said Mme. Vauquer to Mme. Couture; “I
should never feel dull with him in the house.”
This burlesque of Vautrin’s was the signal for an outburst of merriment,
and under cover of jokes and laughter Eugene caught a glance from Mlle.
Taillefer; she had leaned over to say a few words in Mme. Couture’s ear.
“The cab is at the door,” announced Sylvie.
“But where is he going to dine?” asked Bianchon.
“With Madame la Baronne de Nucingen.”
“M. Goriot’s daughter,” said the law student.
At this, all eyes turned to the old vermicelli maker; he was gazing at
Eugene with something like envy in his eyes.
Rastignac reached the house in the Rue Saint-Lazare, one of those
many-windowed houses with a mean-looking portico and slender columns,
which are considered the thing in Paris, a typical banker’s house,
decorated in the most ostentatious fashion; the walls lined with stucco,
the landings of marble mosaic. Mme. de Nucingen was sitting in a little
drawing-room; the room was painted in the Italian fashion, and decorated
like a restaurant. The Baroness seemed depressed. The effort that she
made to hide her feelings aroused Eugene’s interest; it was plain
that she was not playing a part. He had expected a little flutter of
excitement at his coming, and he found her dispirited and sad. The
disappointment piqued his vanity.
“My claim to your confidence is very small, madame,” he said, after
rallying her on her abstracted mood; “but if I am in the way, please
tell me so frankly; I count on your good faith.”
“No, stay with me,” she said; “I shall be all alone if you go. Nucingen
is dining in town, and I do not want to be alone; I want to be taken out
of myself.”
“But what is the matter?”
“You are the very last person whom I should tell,” she exclaimed.
“Then I am connected in some way in this secret. I wonder what it is?”
“Perhaps. Yet, no,” she went on; “it is a domestic quarrel, which ought
to be buried in the depths of the heart. I am very unhappy; did I not
tell you so the day before yesterday? Golden chains are the heaviest of
all fetters.”
When a woman tells a young man that she is very unhappy, and when the
young man is clever, and well dressed, and has fifteen hundred francs
lying idle in his pocket, he is sure to think as Eugene said, and he
becomes a coxcomb.
“What can you have left to wish for?” he answered. “You are young,
beautiful, beloved, and rich.”
“Do not let us talk of my affairs,” she said shaking her head
mournfully. “We will dine together _tete-a-tete_, and afterwards we will
go to hear the most exquisite music. Am I to your taste?” she went on,
rising and displaying her gown of white cashmere, covered with Persian
designs in the most superb taste.
“I wish that you were altogether mine,” said Eugene; “you are charming.”
“You would have a forlorn piece of property,” she said, smiling
bitterly. “There is nothing about me that betrays my wretchedness;
and yet, in spite of appearances, I am in despair. I cannot sleep; my
troubles have broken my night’s rest; I shall grow ugly.”
“Oh! that is impossible,” cried the law student; “but I am curious to
know what these troubles can be that a devoted love cannot efface.”
“Ah! if I were to tell you about them, you would shun me,” she said.
“Your love for me is as yet only the conventional gallantry that men use
to masquerade in; and, if you really loved me, you would be driven to
despair. I must keep silence, you see. Let us talk of something else,
for pity’s sake,” she added. “Let me show you my rooms.”
“No; let us stay here,” answered Eugene; he sat down on the sofa
before the fire, and boldly took Mme. de Nucingen’s hand in his. She
surrendered it to him; he even felt the pressure of her fingers in one
of the spasmodic clutches that betray terrible agitation.
“Listen,” said Rastignac; “if you are in trouble, you ought to tell me
about it. I want to prove to you that I love you for yourself alone. You
must speak to me frankly about your troubles, so that I can put an end
to them, even if I have to kill half-a-dozen men; or I shall go, never
to return.”
“Very well,” she cried, putting her hand to her forehead in an agony of
despair, “I will put you to the proof, and this very moment. Yes,” she
said to herself, “I have no other resource left.”
She rang the bell.
“Are the horses put in for the master?” she asked of the servant.
“Yes, madame.”
“I shall take his carriage myself. He can have mine and my horses. Serve
dinner at seven o’clock.”
“Now, come with me,” she said to Eugene, who thought as he sat in
the banker’s carriage beside Mme. de Nucingen that he must surely be
dreaming.
“To the Palais-Royal,” she said to the coachman; “stop near the
Theatre-Francais.”
She seemed to be too troubled and excited to answer the innumerable
questions that Eugene put to her. He was at a loss what to think of her
mute resistance, her obstinate silence.
“Another moment and she will escape me,” he said to himself.
When the carriage stopped at last, the Baroness gave the law student a
glance that silenced his wild words, for he was almost beside himself.
“Is it true that you love me?” she asked.
“Yes,” he answered, and in his manner and tone there was no trace of the
uneasiness that he felt.
“You will not think ill of me, will you, whatever I may ask of you?”
“No.”
“Are you ready to do my bidding?”
“Blindly.”
“Have you ever been to a gaming-house?” she asked in a tremulous voice.
“Never.”
“Ah! now I can breathe. You will have luck. Here is my purse,” she said.
“Take it! there are a hundred francs in it, all that such a fortunate
woman as I can call her own. Go up into one of the gaming-houses--I do
not know where they are, but there are some near the Palais-Royal. Try
your luck with the hundred francs at a game they call roulette; lose
it all or bring me back six thousand francs. I will tell you about my
troubles when you come back.”
“Devil take me, I’m sure, if I have a glimmer of a notion of what I am
about, but I will obey you,” he added, with inward exultation, as he
thought, “She has gone too far to draw back--she can refuse me nothing
now!”
Eugene took the dainty little purse, inquired the way of a second-hand
clothes-dealer, and hurried to number 9, which happened to be the
nearest gaming-house. He mounted the staircase, surrendered his hat, and
asked the way to the roulette-table, whither the attendant took him, not
a little to the astonishment of the regular comers. All eyes were fixed
on Eugene as he asked, without bashfulness, where he was to deposit his
stakes.
“If you put a louis on one only of those thirty-six numbers, and it
turns up, you will win thirty-six louis,” said a respectable-looking,
white-haired old man in answer to his inquiry.
Eugene staked the whole of his money on the number 21 (his own age).
There was a cry of surprise; before he knew what he had done, he had
won.
“Take your money off, sir,” said the old gentleman; “you don’t often win
twice running by that system.”
Eugene took the rake that the old man handed to him, and drew in his
three thousand six hundred francs, and, still perfectly ignorant of
what he was about, staked again on the red. The bystanders watched him
enviously as they saw him continue to play. The disc turned, and again
he won; the banker threw him three thousand six hundred francs once
more.
“You have seven thousand, two hundred francs of your own,” the old
gentleman said in his ear. “Take my advice and go away with your
winnings; red has turned up eight times already. If you are charitable,
you will show your gratitude for sound counsel by giving a trifle to an
old prefect of Napoleon who is down on his luck.”
Rastignac’s head was swimming; he saw ten of his louis pass into the
white-haired man’s possession, and went down-stairs with his seven
thousand francs; he was still ignorant of the game, and stupefied by his
luck.
“So, that is over; and now where will you take me?” he asked, as soon as
the door was closed, and he showed the seven thousand francs to Mme. de
Nucingen.
Delphine flung her arms about him, but there was no passion in that wild
embrace.
“You have saved me!” she cried, and tears of joy flowed fast.
“I will tell you everything, my friend. For you will be my friend, will
you not? I am rich, you think, very rich; I have everything I want, or
I seem as if I had everything. Very well, you must know that M. de
Nucingen does not allow me the control of a single penny; he pays all
the bills for the house expenses; he pays for my carriages and opera
box; he does not give me enough to pay for my dress, and he reduces
me to poverty in secret on purpose. I am too proud to beg from him. I
should be the vilest of women if I could take his money at the price at
which he offers it. Do you ask how I, with seven hundred thousand francs
of my own, could let myself be robbed? It is because I was proud, and
scorned to speak. We are so young, so artless when our married life
begins! I never could bring myself to ask my husband for money; the
words would have made my lips bleed, I did not dare to ask; I spent my
savings first, and then the money that my poor father gave me, then I
ran into debt. Marriage for me is a hideous farce; I cannot talk about
it, let it suffice to say that Nucingen and I have separate rooms, and
that I would fling myself out of the window sooner than consent to any
other manner of life. I suffered agonies when I had to confess to my
girlish extravagance, my debts for jewelry and trifles (for our poor
father had never refused us anything, and spoiled us), but at last I
found courage to tell him about them. After all, I had a fortune of my
own. Nucingen flew into a rage; he said that I should be the ruin of
him, and used frightful language! I wished myself a hundred feet down
in the earth. He had my dowry, so he paid my debts, but he stipulated at
the same time that my expenses in future must not exceed a certain fixed
sum, and I gave way for the sake of peace. And then,” she went on, “I
wanted to gratify the self-love of some one whom you know. He may have
deceived me, but I should do him the justice to say that there was
nothing petty in his character. But, after all, he threw me over