Father Goriot
At seven o’clock that evening Therese came with a letter from Delphine.
“What are you doing, dear friend? I have been loved for a very
little while, and I am neglected already? In the confidences of
heart and heart, I have learned to know your soul--you are too
noble not to be faithful for ever, for you know that love with all
its infinite subtle changes of feeling is never the same. Once you
said, as we were listening to the Prayer in _Mose in Egitto_, ‘For
some it is the monotony of a single note; for others, it is the
infinite of sound.’ Remember that I am expecting you this evening
to take me to Mme. de Beauseant’s ball. Every one knows now that
the King signed M. d’Ajuda’s marriage-contract this morning, and
the poor Vicomtesse knew nothing of it until two o’clock this
afternoon. All Paris will flock to her house, of course, just as a
crowd fills the Place de Greve to see an execution. It is
horrible, is it not, to go out of curiosity to see if she will
hide her anguish, and whether she will die courageously? I
certainly should not go, my friend, if I had been at her house
before; but, of course, she will not receive society any more
after this, and all my efforts would be in vain. My position is a
very unusual one, and besides, I am going there partly on your
account. I am waiting for you. If you are not beside me in less
than two hours, I do not know whether I could forgive such
treason.”
Rastignac took up a pen and wrote:
“I am waiting till the doctor comes to know if there is any hope of
your father’s life. He is lying dangerously ill. I will come and
bring you the news, but I am afraid it may be a sentence of death.
When I come you can decide whether you can go to the ball.--Yours
a thousand times.”
At half-past eight the doctor arrived. He did not take a very hopeful
view of the case, but thought that there was no immediate danger.
Improvements and relapses might be expected, and the good man’s life and
reason hung in the balance.
“It would be better for him to die at once,” the doctor said as he took
leave.
Eugene left Goriot to Bianchon’s care, and went to carry the sad news to
Mme. de Nucingen. Family feeling lingered in her, and this must put an
end for the present to her plans of amusement.
“Tell her to enjoy her evening as if nothing had happened,” cried
Goriot. He had been lying in a sort of stupor, but he suddenly sat
upright as Eugene went out.
Eugene, half heartbroken, entered Delphine’s. Her hair had been dressed;
she wore her dancing slippers; she had only to put on her ball-dress;
but when the artist is giving the finishing stroke to his creation, the
last touches require more time than the whole groundwork of the picture.
“Why, you are not dressed!” she cried.
“Madame, your father----”
“My father again!” she exclaimed, breaking in upon him. “You need not
teach me what is due to my father, I have known my father this long
while. Not a word, Eugene. I will hear what you have to say when you
are dressed. My carriage is waiting, take it, go round to your rooms and
dress, Therese has put out everything in readiness for you. Come back
as soon as you can; we will talk about my father on the way to Mme. de
Beauseant’s. We must go early; if we have to wait our turn in a row of
carriages, we shall be lucky if we get there by eleven o’clock.”
“Madame----”
“Quick! not a word!” she cried, darting into her dressing-room for a
necklace.
“Do go, Monsieur Eugene, or you will vex madame,” said Therese, hurrying
him away; and Eugene was too horror-stricken by this elegant parricide
to resist.
He went to his rooms and dressed, sad, thoughtful, and dispirited. The
world of Paris was like an ocean of mud for him just then; and it seemed
that whoever set foot in that black mire must needs sink into it up to
the chin.
“Their crimes are paltry,” said Eugene to himself. “Vautrin was
greater.”
He had seen society in its three great phases--Obedience, Struggle,
and Revolt; the Family, the World, and Vautrin; and he hesitated in his
choice. Obedience was dull, Revolt impossible, Struggle hazardous.
His thoughts wandered back to the home circle. He thought of the quiet
uneventful life, the pure happiness of the days spent among those who
loved him there. Those loving and beloved beings passed their lives in
obedience to the natural laws of the hearth, and in that obedience found
a deep and constant serenity, unvexed by torments such as these. Yet,
for all his good impulses, he could not bring himself to make profession
of the religion of pure souls to Delphine, nor to prescribe the duties
of piety to her in the name of love. His education had begun to bear its
fruits; he loved selfishly already. Besides, his tact had discovered to
him the real nature of Delphine; he divined instinctively that she was
capable of stepping over her father’s corpse to go to the ball; and
within himself he felt that he had neither the strength of mind to play
the part of mentor, nor the strength of character to vex her, nor the
courage to leave her to go alone.
“She would never forgive me for putting her in the wrong over it,” he
said to himself. Then he turned the doctor’s dictum over in his mind;
he tried to believe that Goriot was not so dangerously ill as he had
imagined, and ended by collecting together a sufficient quantity of
traitorous excuses for Delphine’s conduct. She did not know how ill her
father was; the kind old man himself would have made her go to the ball
if she had gone to see him. So often it happens that this one or that
stands condemned by the social laws that govern family relations;
and yet there are peculiar circumstances in the case, differences of
temperament, divergent interests, innumerable complications of family
life that excuse the apparent offence.
Eugene did not wish to see too clearly; he was ready to sacrifice his
conscience to his mistress. Within the last few days his whole life had
undergone a change. Woman had entered into his world and thrown it into
chaos, family claims dwindled away before her; she had appropriated
all his being to her uses. Rastignac and Delphine found each other at
a crisis in their lives when their union gave them the most poignant
bliss. Their passion, so long proved, had only gained in strength by the
gratified desire that often extinguishes passion. This woman was his,
and Eugene recognized that not until then had he loved her; perhaps love
is only gratitude for pleasure. This woman, vile or sublime, he adored
for the pleasure she had brought as her dower; and Delphine loved
Rastignac as Tantalus would have loved some angel who had satisfied his
hunger and quenched the burning thirst in his parched throat.
“Well,” said Mme. de Nucingen when he came back in evening dress, “how
is my father?”
“Very dangerously ill,” he answered; “if you will grant me a proof of
your affections, we will just go in to see him on the way.”
“Very well,” she said. “Yes, but afterwards. Dear Eugene, do be nice,
and don’t preach to me. Come.”
They set out. Eugene said nothing for a while.
“What is it now?” she asked.
“I can hear the death-rattle in your father’s throat,” he said almost
angrily. And with the hot indignation of youth, he told the story of
Mme. de Restaud’s vanity and cruelty, of her father’s final act of
self-sacrifice, that had brought about this struggle between life
and death, of the price that had been paid for Anastasie’s golden
embroideries. Delphine cried.
“I shall look frightful,” she thought. She dried her tears.
“I will nurse my father; I will not leave his bedside,” she said aloud.
“Ah! now you are as I would have you,” exclaimed Rastignac.
The lamps of five hundred carriages lit up the darkness about the Hotel
de Beauseant. A gendarme in all the glory of his uniform stood on either
side of the brightly lighted gateway. The great world was flocking
thither that night in its eager curiosity to see the great lady at the
moment of her fall, and the rooms on the ground floor were already full
to overflowing, when Mme. de Nucingen and Rastignac appeared. Never
since Louis XIV. tore her lover away from La grand Mademoiselle, and
the whole court hastened to visit that unfortunate princess, had a
disastrous love affair made such a sensation in Paris. But the youngest
daughter of the almost royal house of Burgundy had risen proudly above
her pain, and moved till the last moment like a queen in this world--its
vanities had always been valueless for her, save in so far as they
contributed to the triumph of her passion. The salons were filled with
the most beautiful women in Paris, resplendent in their toilettes, and
radiant with smiles. Ministers and ambassadors, the most distinguished
men at court, men bedizened with decorations, stars, and ribbons, men
who bore the most illustrious names in France, had gathered about the
Vicomtesse.
The music of the orchestra vibrated in wave after wave of sound from the
golden ceiling of the palace, now made desolate for its queen.
Madame de Beauseant stood at the door of the first salon to receive the
guests who were styled her friends. She was dressed in white, and wore
no ornament in the plaits of hair braided about her head; her face was
calm; there was no sign there of pride, nor of pain, nor of joy that
she did not feel. No one could read her soul; she stood there like some
Niobe carved in marble. For a few intimate friends there was a tinge of
satire in her smile; but no scrutiny saw any change in her, nor had she
looked otherwise in the days of the glory of her happiness. The most
callous of her guests admired her as young Rome applauded some gladiator
who could die smiling. It seemed as if society had adorned itself for a
last audience of one of its sovereigns.
“I was afraid that you would not come,” she said to Rastignac.
“Madame,” he said, in an unsteady voice, taking her speech as a
reproach, “I shall be the last to go, that is why I am here.”
“Good,” she said, and she took his hand. “You are perhaps the only one
I can trust here among all these. Oh, my friend, when you love, love
a woman whom you are sure that you can love always. Never forsake a
woman.”
She took Rastignac’s arm, and went towards a sofa in the card-room.
“I want you to go to the Marquis,” she said. “Jacques, my footman, will
go with you; he has a letter that you will take. I am asking the Marquis
to give my letters back to me. He will give them all up, I like to think
that. When you have my letters, go up to my room with them. Some one
shall bring me word.”
She rose to go to meet the Duchesse de Langeais, her most intimate
friend, who had come like the rest of the world.
Rastignac went. He asked for the Marquis d’Ajuda at the Hotel Rochefide,
feeling certain that the latter would be spending his evening there, and
so it proved. The Marquis went to his own house with Rastignac, and gave
a casket to the student, saying as he did so, “They are all there.”
He seemed as if he was about to say something to Eugene, to ask
about the ball, or the Vicomtesse; perhaps he was on the brink of
the confession that, even then, he was in despair, and knew that his
marriage had been a fatal mistake; but a proud gleam shone in his eyes,
and with deplorable courage he kept his noblest feelings a secret.
“Do not even mention my name to her, my dear Eugene.” He grasped
Rastignac’s hand sadly and affectionately, and turned away from him.
Eugene went back to the Hotel Beauseant, the servant took him to the
Vicomtesse’s room. There were signs there of preparations for a journey.
He sat down by the fire, fixed his eyes on the cedar wood casket, and
fell into deep mournful musings. Mme. de Beauseant loomed large in these