Father Goriot
executioner sends in his accounts,--so much for providing black veils
for parricides, so much for sawdust, so much for pulleys and cord for
the knife. Or he might have been a receiver at the door of a public
slaughter-house, or a sub-inspector of nuisances. Indeed, the man
appeared to have been one of the beasts of burden in our great social
mill; one of those Parisian Ratons whom their Bertrands do not even know
by sight; a pivot in the obscure machinery that disposes of misery and
things unclean; one of those men, in short, at sight of whom we are
prompted to remark that, “After all, we cannot do without them.”
Stately Paris ignores the existence of these faces bleached by moral or
physical suffering; but, then, Paris is in truth an ocean that no line
can plumb. You may survey its surface and describe it; but no matter how
numerous and painstaking the toilers in this sea, there will always be
lonely and unexplored regions in its depths, caverns unknown, flowers
and pearls and monsters of the deep overlooked or forgotten by the
divers of literature. The Maison Vauquer is one of these curious
monstrosities.
Two, however, of Mme. Vauquer’s boarders formed a striking contrast to
the rest. There was a sickly pallor, such as is often seen in anaemic
girls, in Mlle. Victorine Taillefer’s face; and her unvarying expression
of sadness, like her embarrassed manner and pinched look, was in
keeping with the general wretchedness of the establishment in the Rue
Nueve-Saint-Genevieve, which forms a background to this picture; but her
face was young, there was youthfulness in her voice and elasticity
in her movements. This young misfortune was not unlike a shrub, newly
planted in an uncongenial soil, where its leaves have already begun
to wither. The outlines of her figure, revealed by her dress of the
simplest and cheapest materials, were also youthful. There was the same
kind of charm about her too slender form, her faintly colored face and
light-brown hair, that modern poets find in mediaeval statuettes; and a
sweet expression, a look of Christian resignation in the dark gray eyes.
She was pretty by force of contrast; if she had been happy, she would
have been charming. Happiness is the poetry of woman, as the toilette
is her tinsel. If the delightful excitement of a ball had made the pale
face glow with color; if the delights of a luxurious life had brought
the color to the wan cheeks that were slightly hollowed already; if love
had put light into the sad eyes, then Victorine might have ranked among
the fairest; but she lacked the two things which create woman a second
time--pretty dresses and love-letters.
A book might have been made of her story. Her father was persuaded that
he had sufficient reason for declining to acknowledge her, and allowed
her a bare six hundred francs a year; he had further taken measures
to disinherit his daughter, and had converted all his real estate into
personalty, that he might leave it undivided to his son. Victorine’s
mother had died broken-hearted in Mme. Couture’s house; and the
latter, who was a near relation, had taken charge of the little orphan.
Unluckily, the widow of the commissary-general to the armies of the
Republic had nothing in the world but her jointure and her widow’s
pension, and some day she might be obliged to leave the helpless,
inexperienced girl to the mercy of the world. The good soul, therefore,
took Victorine to mass every Sunday, and to confession once a fortnight,
thinking that, in any case, she would bring up her ward to be devout.
She was right; religion offered a solution of the problem of the
young girl’s future. The poor child loved the father who refused to
acknowledge her. Once every year she tried to see him to deliver her
mother’s message of forgiveness, but every year hitherto she had knocked
at that door in vain; her father was inexorable. Her brother, her only
means of communication, had not come to see her for four years, and had
sent her no assistance; yet she prayed to God to unseal her father’s
eyes and to soften her brother’s heart, and no accusations mingled with
her prayers. Mme. Couture and Mme. Vauquer exhausted the vocabulary
of abuse, and failed to find words that did justice to the banker’s
iniquitous conduct; but while they heaped execrations on the
millionaire, Victorine’s words were as gentle as the moan of the wounded
dove, and affection found expression even in the cry drawn from her by
pain.
Eugene de Rastignac was a thoroughly southern type; he had a fair
complexion, blue eyes, black hair. In his figure, manner, and his whole
bearing it was easy to see that he had either come of a noble family,
or that, from his earliest childhood, he had been gently bred. If he
was careful of his wardrobe, only taking last year’s clothes into
daily wear, still upon occasion he could issue forth as a young man of
fashion. Ordinarily he wore a shabby coat and waistcoat, the limp black
cravat, untidily knotted, that students affect, trousers that matched
the rest of his costume, and boots that had been resoled.
Vautrin (the man of forty with the dyed whiskers) marked a transition
stage between these two young people and the others. He was the kind of
man that calls forth the remark: “He looks a jovial sort!” He had
broad shoulders, a well-developed chest, muscular arms, and strong
square-fisted hands; the joints of his fingers were covered with tufts
of fiery red hair. His face was furrowed by premature wrinkles; there
was a certain hardness about it in spite of his bland and insinuating
manner. His bass voice was by no means unpleasant, and was in keeping
with his boisterous laughter. He was always obliging, always in good
spirits; if anything went wrong with one of the locks, he would soon
unscrew it, take it to pieces, file it, oil and clean and set it in
order, and put it back in its place again; “I am an old hand at it,”
he used to say. Not only so, he knew all about ships, the sea, France,
foreign countries, men, business, law, great houses and prisons,--there
was nothing that he did not know. If any one complained rather more than
usual, he would offer his services at once. He had several times lent
money to Mme. Vauquer, or to the boarders; but, somehow, those whom he
obliged felt that they would sooner face death than fail to repay him; a
certain resolute look, sometimes seen on his face, inspired fear of him,
for all his appearance of easy good-nature. In the way he spat there was
an imperturbable coolness which seemed to indicate that this was a
man who would not stick at a crime to extricate himself from a false
position. His eyes, like those of a pitiless judge, seemed to go to
the very bottom of all questions, to read all natures, all feelings and
thoughts. His habit of life was very regular; he usually went out after
breakfast, returning in time for dinner, and disappeared for the rest
of the evening, letting himself in about midnight with a latch key, a
privilege that Mme. Vauquer accorded to no other boarder. But then he
was on very good terms with the widow; he used to call her “mamma,” and
put his arm round her waist, a piece of flattery perhaps not appreciated
to the full! The worthy woman might imagine this to be an easy feat;
but, as a matter of fact, no arm but Vautrin’s was long enough to
encircle her.
It was a characteristic trait of his generously to pay fifteen francs a
month for the cup of coffee with a dash of brandy in it, which he took
after dinner. Less superficial observers than young men engulfed by the
whirlpool of Parisian life, or old men, who took no interest in anything
that did not directly concern them, would not have stopped short at the
vaguely unsatisfactory impression that Vautrin made upon them. He knew
or guessed the concerns of every one about him; but none of them had
been able to penetrate his thoughts, or to discover his occupation. He
had deliberately made his apparent good-nature, his unfailing readiness
to oblige, and his high spirits into a barrier between himself and the
rest of them, but not seldom he gave glimpses of appalling depths
of character. He seemed to delight in scourging the upper classes of
society with the lash of his tongue, to take pleasure in convicting it
of inconsistency, in mocking at law and order with some grim jest worthy
of Juvenal, as if some grudge against the social system rankled in him,
as if there were some mystery carefully hidden away in his life.
Mlle. Taillefer felt attracted, perhaps unconsciously, by the strength
of the one man, and the good looks of the other; her stolen glances and
secret thoughts were divided between them; but neither of them seemed
to take any notice of her, although some day a chance might alter her
position, and she would be a wealthy heiress. For that matter, there was
not a soul in the house who took any trouble to investigate the various
chronicles of misfortunes, real or imaginary, related by the rest. Each
one regarded the others with indifference, tempered by suspicion; it was
a natural result of their relative positions. Practical assistance not
one could give, this they all knew, and they had long since exhausted
their stock of condolence over previous discussions of their grievances.
They were in something the same position as an elderly couple who have
nothing left to say to each other. The routine of existence kept them in
contact, but they were parts of a mechanism which wanted oil. There was
not one of them but would have passed a blind man begging in the street,
not one that felt moved to pity by a tale of misfortune, not one who
did not see in death the solution of the all-absorbing problem of misery
which left them cold to the most terrible anguish in others.
The happiest of these hapless beings was certainly Mme. Vauquer, who
reigned supreme over this hospital supported by voluntary contributions.
For her, the little garden, which silence, and cold, and rain, and
drought combined to make as dreary as an Asian _steppe_, was a pleasant
shaded nook; the gaunt yellow house, the musty odors of a back shop had
charms for her, and for her alone. Those cells belonged to her. She fed
those convicts condemned to penal servitude for life, and her authority
was recognized among them. Where else in Paris would they have found
wholesome food in sufficient quantity at the prices she charged them,
and rooms which they were at liberty to make, if not exactly elegant or
comfortable, at any rate clean and healthy? If she had committed some
flagrant act of injustice, the victim would have borne it in silence.
Such a gathering contained, as might have been expected, the elements
out of which a complete society might be constructed. And, as in a
school, as in the world itself, there was among the eighteen men and
women who met round the dinner table a poor creature, despised by
all the others, condemned to be the butt of all their jokes. At the
beginning of Eugene de Rastignac’s second twelvemonth, this figure
suddenly started out into bold relief against the background of human
forms and faces among which the law student was yet to live for
another two years to come. This laughing-stock was the retired
vermicelli-merchant, Father Goriot, upon whose face a painter, like the
historian, would have concentrated all the light in his picture.
How had it come about that the boarders regarded him with a
half-malignant contempt? Why did they subject the oldest among their
number to a kind of persecution, in which there was mingled some pity,
but no respect for his misfortunes? Had he brought it on himself by some
eccentricity or absurdity, which is less easily forgiven or forgotten
than more serious defects? The question strikes at the root of many a