Father Goriot
tears, no doubt, had misled Goriot; for he gathered up all his remaining
strength in a last effort, stretched out his hands, groped for the
students’ heads, and as his fingers caught convulsively at their hair,
they heard a faint whisper:
“Ah! my angels!”
Two words, two inarticulate murmurs, shaped into words by the soul which
fled forth with them as they left his lips.
“Poor dear!” cried Sylvie, melted by that exclamation; the expression of
the great love raised for the last time to a sublime height by that most
ghastly and involuntary of lies.
The father’s last breath must have been a sigh of joy, and in that sigh
his whole life was summed up; he was cheated even at the last. They laid
Father Goriot upon his wretched bed with reverent hands. Thenceforward
there was no expression on his face, only the painful traces of the
struggle between life and death that was going on in the machine; for
that kind of cerebral consciousness that distinguishes between pleasure
and pain in a human being was extinguished; it was only a question of
time--and the mechanism itself would be destroyed.
“He will lie like this for several hours, and die so quietly at last,
that we shall not know when he goes; there will be no rattle in the
throat. The brain must be completely suffused.”
As he spoke there was a footstep on the staircase, and a young woman
hastened up, panting for breath.
“She has come too late,” said Rastignac.
But it was not Delphine; it was Therese, her waiting-woman, who stood in
the doorway.
“Monsieur Eugene,” she said, “monsieur and madame have had a terrible
scene about some money that Madame (poor thing!) wanted for her father.
She fainted, and the doctor came, and she had to be bled, calling
out all the while, ‘My father is dying; I want to see papa!’ It was
heartbreaking to hear her----”
“That will do, Therese. If she came now, it would be trouble thrown
away. M. Goriot cannot recognize any one now.”
“Poor, dear gentleman, is he as bad at that?” said Therese.
“You don’t want me now, I must go and look after my dinner; it is
half-past four,” remarked Sylvie. The next instant she all but collided
with Mme. de Restaud on the landing outside.
There was something awful and appalling in the sudden apparition of
the Countess. She saw the bed of death by the dim light of the single
candle, and her tears flowed at the sight of her father’s passive
features, from which the life had almost ebbed. Bianchon with thoughtful
tact left the room.
“I could not escape soon enough,” she said to Rastignac.
The student bowed sadly in reply. Mme. de Restaud took her father’s hand
and kissed it.
“Forgive me, father! You used to say that my voice would call you back
from the grave; ah! come back for one moment to bless your penitent
daughter. Do you hear me? Oh! this is fearful! No one on earth will ever
bless me henceforth; every one hates me; no one loves me but you in all
the world. My own children will hate me. Take me with you, father; I
will love you, I will take care of you. He does not hear me ... I am
mad...”
She fell on her knees, and gazed wildly at the human wreck before her.
“My cup of misery is full,” she said, turning her eyes upon Eugene.
“M. de Trailles has fled, leaving enormous debts behind him, and I have
found out that he was deceiving me. My husband will never forgive me,
and I have left my fortune in his hands. I have lost all my illusions.
Alas! I have forsaken the one heart that loved me (she pointed to her
father as she spoke), and for whom? I have held his kindness cheap,
and slighted his affection; many and many a time I have given him pain,
ungrateful wretch that I am!”
“He knew it,” said Rastignac.
Just then Goriot’s eyelids unclosed; it was only a muscular contraction,
but the Countess’ sudden start of reviving hope was no less dreadful
than the dying eyes.
“Is it possible that he can hear me?” cried the Countess. “No,” she
answered herself, and sat down beside the bed. As Mme. de Restaud seemed
to wish to sit by her father, Eugene went down to take a little food.
The boarders were already assembled.
“Well,” remarked the painter, as he joined them, “it seems that there is
to be a death-orama upstairs.”
“Charles, I think you might find something less painful to joke about,”
said Eugene.
“So we may not laugh here?” returned the painter. “What harm does it do?
Bianchon said that the old man was quite insensible.”
“Well, then,” said the _employe_ from the Museum, “he will die as he has
lived.”
“My father is dead!” shrieked the Countess.
The terrible cry brought Sylvie, Rastignac, and Bianchon; Mme.
de Restaud had fainted away. When she recovered they carried her
downstairs, and put her into the cab that stood waiting at the door.
Eugene sent Therese with her, and bade the maid take the Countess to
Mme. de Nucingen.
Bianchon came down to them.
“Yes, he is dead,” he said.
“Come, sit down to dinner, gentlemen,” said Mme. Vauquer, “or the soup
will be cold.”
The two students sat down together.
“What is the next thing to be done?” Eugene asked of Bianchon.
“I have closed his eyes and composed his limbs,” said Bianchon. “When
the certificate has been officially registered at the Mayor’s office,
we will sew him in his winding sheet and bury him somewhere. What do you
think we ought to do?”
“He will not smell at his bread like this any more,” said the painter,
mimicking the old man’s little trick.
“Oh, hang it all!” cried the tutor, “let Father Goriot drop, and let us
have something else for a change. He is a standing dish, and we have had
him with every sauce this hour or more. It is one of the privileges of
the good city of Paris that anybody may be born, or live, or die there
without attracting any attention whatsoever. Let us profit by the
advantages of civilization. There are fifty or sixty deaths every day;
if you have a mind to do it, you can sit down at any time and wail over
whole hecatombs of dead in Paris. Father Goriot has gone off the hooks,
has he? So much the better for him. If you venerate his memory, keep it
to yourselves, and let the rest of us feed in peace.”
“Oh, to be sure,” said the widow, “it is all the better for him that he
is dead. It looks as though he had had trouble enough, poor soul, while
he was alive.”
And this was all the funeral oration delivered over him who had been for
Eugene the type and embodiment of Fatherhood.
The fifteen lodgers began to talk as usual. When Bianchon and Eugene had
satisfied their hunger, the rattle of spoons and forks, the boisterous
conversation, the expressions on the faces that bespoke various degrees
of want of feeling, gluttony, or indifference, everything about them
made them shiver with loathing. They went out to find a priest to watch
that night with the dead. It was necessary to measure their last pious
cares by the scanty sum of money that remained. Before nine o’clock that
evening the body was laid out on the bare sacking of the bedstead in
the desolate room; a lighted candle stood on either side, and the priest
watched at the foot. Rastignac made inquiries of this latter as to the
expenses of the funeral, and wrote to the Baron de Nucingen and the
Comte de Restaud, entreating both gentlemen to authorize their man of
business to defray the charges of laying their father-in-law in the
grave. He sent Christophe with the letters; then he went to bed, tired
out, and slept.
Next day Bianchon and Rastignac were obliged to take the certificate
to the registrar themselves, and by twelve o’clock the formalities were
completed. Two hours went by, no word came from the Count nor from the
Baron; nobody appeared to act for them, and Rastignac had already been
obliged to pay the priest. Sylvie asked ten francs for sewing the old
man in his winding-sheet and making him ready for the grave, and Eugene
and Bianchon calculated that they had scarcely sufficient to pay for the
funeral, if nothing was forthcoming from the dead man’s family. So it
was the medical student who laid him in a pauper’s coffin, despatched
from Bianchon’s hospital, whence he obtained it at a cheaper rate.
“Let us play those wretches a trick,” said he. “Go to the cemetery, buy
a grave for five years at Pere-Lachaise, and arrange with the Church and
the undertaker to have a third-class funeral. If the daughters and
their husbands decline to repay you, you can carve this on the
headstone--‘_Here lies M. Goriot, father of the Comtesse de Restaud and
the Baronne de Nucingen, interred at the expense of two students_.’”
Eugene took part of his friend’s advice, but only after he had gone
in person first to M. and Mme. de Nucingen, and then to M. and Mme. de
Restaud--a fruitless errand. He went no further than the doorstep in
either house. The servants had received strict orders to admit no one.
“Monsieur and Madame can see no visitors. They have just lost their
father, and are in deep grief over their loss.”
Eugene’s Parisian experience told him that it was idle to press the
point. Something clutched strangely at his heart when he saw that it was
impossible to reach Delphine.
“Sell some of your ornaments,” he wrote hastily in the porter’s room,
“so that your father may be decently laid in his last resting-place.”
He sealed the note, and begged the porter to give it to Therese for her
mistress; but the man took it to the Baron de Nucingen, who flung the
note into the fire. Eugene, having finished his errands, returned to the
lodging-house about three o’clock. In spite of himself, the tears came
into his eyes. The coffin, in its scanty covering of black cloth,
was standing there on the pavement before the gate, on two chairs.
A withered sprig of hyssop was soaking in the holy water bowl of
silver-plated copper; there was not a soul in the street, not a
passer-by had stopped to sprinkle the coffin; there was not even an
attempt at a black drapery over the wicket. It was a pauper who lay
there; no one made a pretence of mourning for him; he had neither
friends nor kindred--there was no one to follow him to the grave.
Bianchon’s duties compelled him to be at the hospital, but he had left
a few lines for Eugene, telling his friend about the arrangements he
had made for the burial service. The house student’s note told Rastignac
that a mass was beyond their means, that the ordinary office for the
dead was cheaper, and must suffice, and that he had sent word to
the undertaker by Christophe. Eugene had scarcely finished reading
Bianchon’s scrawl, when he looked up and saw the little circular
gold locket that contained the hair of Goriot’s two daughters in Mme.
Vauquer’s hands.
“How dared you take it?” he asked.
“Good Lord! is that to be buried along with him?” retorted Sylvie. “It
is gold.”
“Of course it shall!” Eugene answered indignantly; “he shall at any
rate take one thing that may represent his daughters into the grave with
him.”
When the hearse came, Eugene had the coffin carried into the house
again, unscrewed the lid, and reverently laid on the old man’s breast
the token that recalled the days when Delphine and Anastasie were
innocent little maidens, before they began “to think for themselves,” as
he had moaned out in his agony.
Rastignac and Christophe and the two undertaker’s men were the only
followers of the funeral. The Church of Saint-Etienne du Mont was only a
little distance from the Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve. When the coffin
had been deposited in a low, dark, little chapel, the law student looked
round in vain for Goriot’s two daughters or their husbands. Christophe
was his only fellow-mourner; Christophe, who appeared to think it was
his duty to attend the funeral of the man who had put him in the way