Father Goriot

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FATHER GORIOT

BY

HONORE DE BALZAC



Translated by
Ellen Marriage




To the great and illustrious Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, a token
of admiration for his works and genius.
DE BALZAC.




Mme. Vauquer (_nee_ de Conflans) is an elderly person, who for
the past forty years has kept a lodging-house in the Rue
Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve, in the district that lies between the
Latin Quarter and the Faubourg Saint-Marcel. Her house (known in
the neighborhood as the _Maison Vauquer_) receives men and women,
old and young, and no word has ever been breathed against her
respectable establishment; but, at the same time, it must be said
that as a matter of fact no young woman has been under her roof for
thirty years, and that if a young man stays there for any length of
time it is a sure sign that his allowance must be of the slenderest.
In 1819, however, the time when this drama opens, there was an almost
penniless young girl among Mme. Vauquer's boarders.

That word drama has been somewhat discredited of late; it has been
overworked and twisted to strange uses in these days of dolorous
literature; but it must do service again here, not because this story
is dramatic in the restricted sense of the word, but because some
tears may perhaps be shed _intra et extra muros_ before it is over.

Will any one without the walls of Paris understand it? It is open to
doubt. The only audience who could appreciate the results of close
observation, the careful reproduction of minute detail and local
color, are dwellers between the heights of Montrouge and Montmartre,
in a vale of crumbling stucco watered by streams of black mud, a vale
of sorrows which are real and joys too often hollow; but this audience
is so accustomed to terrible sensations, that only some unimaginable
and well-neigh impossible woe could produce any lasting impression
there. Now and again there are tragedies so awful and so grand by
reason of the complication of virtues and vices that bring them about,
that egotism and selfishness are forced to pause and are moved to
pity; but the impression that they receive is like a luscious fruit,
soon consumed. Civilization, like the car of Juggernaut, is scarcely
stayed perceptibly in its progress by a heart less easy to break than
the others that lie in its course; this also is broken, and
Civilization continues on her course triumphant. And you, too, will do
the like; you who with this book in your white hand will sink back
among the cushions of your armchair, and say to yourself, "Perhaps
this may amuse me." You will read the story of Father Goriot's secret
woes, and, dining thereafter with an unspoiled appetite, will lay the
blame of your insensibility upon the writer, and accuse him of
exaggeration, of writing romances. Ah! once for all, this drama is
neither a fiction nor a romance! _All is true_,--so true, that every
one can discern the elements of the tragedy in his own house, perhaps
in his own heart.

The lodging-house is Mme. Vauquer's own property. It is still standing
in the lower end of the Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve, just where the
road slopes so sharply down to the Rue de l'Arbalete, that wheeled
traffic seldom passes that way, because it is so stony and steep. This
position is sufficient to account for the silence prevalent in the
streets shut in between the dome of the Pantheon and the dome of the
Val-de-Grace, two conspicuous public buildings which give a yellowish
tone to the landscape and darken the whole district that lies beneath
the shadow of their leaden-hued cupolas.

In that district the pavements are clean and dry, there is neither mud
nor water in the gutters, grass grows in the chinks of the walls. The
most heedless passer-by feels the depressing influences of a place
where the sound of wheels creates a sensation; there is a grim look
about the houses, a suggestion of a jail about those high garden
walls. A Parisian straying into a suburb apparently composed of
lodging-houses and public institutions would see poverty and dullness,
old age lying down to die, and joyous youth condemned to drudgery. It
is the ugliest quarter of Paris, and, it may be added, the least
known. But, before all things, the Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve is like
a bronze frame for a picture for which the mind cannot be too well
prepared by the contemplation of sad hues and sober images. Even so,
step by step the daylight decreases, and the cicerone's droning voice
grows hollower as the traveler descends into the Catacombs. The
comparison holds good! Who shall say which is more ghastly, the sight
of the bleached skulls or of dried-up human hearts?



The front of the lodging-house is at right angles to the road, and
looks out upon a little garden, so that you see the side of the house
in section, as it were, from the Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve. Beneath
the wall of the house front there lies a channel, a fathom wide, paved
with cobble-stones, and beside it runs a graveled walk bordered by
geraniums and oleanders and pomegranates set in great blue and white
glazed earthenware pots. Access into the graveled walk is afforded by
a door, above which the words MAISON VAUQUER may be read, and beneath,
in rather smaller letters, "_Lodgings for both sexes, etc._"

During the day a glimpse into the garden is easily obtained through a
wicket to which a bell is attached. On the opposite wall, at the
further end of the graveled walk, a green marble arch was painted once
upon a time by a local artist, and in this semblance of a shrine a
statue representing Cupid is installed; a Parisian Cupid, so blistered
and disfigured that he looks like a candidate for one of the adjacent
hospitals, and might suggest an allegory to lovers of symbolism. The
half-obliterated inscription on the pedestal beneath determines the
date of this work of art, for it bears witness to the widespread
enthusiasm felt for Voltaire on his return to Paris in 1777:


"Whoe'er thou art, thy master see;
He is, or was, or ought to be."


At night the wicket gate is replaced by a solid door. The little
garden is no wider than the front of the house; it is shut in between
the wall of the street and the partition wall of the neighboring
house. A mantle of ivy conceals the bricks and attracts the eyes of
passers-by to an effect which is picturesque in Paris, for each of the
walls is covered with trellised vines that yield a scanty dusty crop
of fruit, and furnish besides a subject of conversation for Mme.
Vauquer and her lodgers; every year the widow trembles for her
vintage.

A straight path beneath the walls on either side of the garden leads
to a clump of lime-trees at the further end of it; _line_-trees, as
Mme. Vauquer persists in calling them, in spite of the fact that she
was a de Conflans, and regardless of repeated corrections from her
lodgers.

The central space between the walls is filled with artichokes and rows
of pyramid fruit-trees, and surrounded by a border of lettuce,
pot-herbs, and parsley. Under the lime-trees there are a few
green-painted garden seats and a wooden table, and hither, during the
dog-days, such of the lodgers as are rich enough to indulge in a cup of
coffee come to take their pleasure, though it is hot enough to roast
eggs even in the shade.

The house itself is three stories high, without counting the attics
under the roof. It is built of rough stone, and covered with the
yellowish stucco that gives a mean appearance to almost every house in
Paris. There are five windows in each story in the front of the house;
all the blinds visible through the small square panes are drawn up
awry, so that the lines are all at cross purposes. At the side of the
house there are but two windows on each floor, and the lowest of all
are adorned with a heavy iron grating.

Behind the house a yard extends for some twenty feet, a space
inhabited by a happy family of pigs, poultry, and rabbits; the
wood-shed is situated on the further side, and on the wall between
the wood-shed and the kitchen window hangs the meat-safe, just above
the place where the sink discharges its greasy streams. The cook
sweeps all the refuse out through a little door into the Rue
Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve, and frequently cleanses the yard with
copious supplies of water, under pain of pestilence.

The house might have been built on purpose for its present uses.
Access is given by a French window to the first room on the ground
floor, a sitting-room which looks out upon the street through the two
barred windows already mentioned. Another door opens out of it into
the dining-room, which is separated from the kitchen by the well of
the staircase, the steps being constructed partly of wood, partly of
tiles, which are colored and beeswaxed. Nothing can be more depressing
than the sight of that sitting-room. The furniture is covered with
horse hair woven in alternate dull and glossy stripes. There is a
round table in the middle, with a purplish-red marble top, on which
there stands, by way of ornament, the inevitable white china
tea-service, covered with a half-effaced gilt network. The floor is
sufficiently uneven, the wainscot rises to elbow height, and the rest
of the wall space is decorated with a varnished paper, on which the
principal scenes from _Telemaque_ are depicted, the various classical
personages being colored. The subject between the two windows is the
banquet given by Calypso to the son of Ulysses, displayed thereon for
the admiration of the boarders, and has furnished jokes these forty
years to the young men who show themselves superior to their position
by making fun of the dinners to which poverty condemns them. The
hearth is always so clean and neat that it is evident that a fire is
only kindled there on great occasions; the stone chimney-piece is
adorned by a couple of vases filled with faded artificial flowers
imprisoned under glass shades, on either side of a bluish marble clock
in the very worst taste.

The first room exhales an odor for which there is no name in the
language, and which should be called the _odeur de pension_. The damp
atmosphere sends a chill through you as you breathe it; it has a
stuffy, musty, and rancid quality; it permeates your clothing;
after-dinner scents seem to be mingled in it with smells from the
kitchen and scullery and the reek of a hospital. It might be possible
to describe it if some one should discover a process by which to
distil from the atmosphere all the nauseating elements with which it
is charged by the catarrhal exhalations of every individual lodger,
young or old. Yet, in spite of these stale horrors, the sitting-room
is as charming and as delicately perfumed as a boudoir, when compared
with the adjoining dining-room.

The paneled walls of that apartment were once painted some color, now
a matter of conjecture, for the surface is incrusted with accumulated
layers of grimy deposit, which cover it with fantastic outlines. A
collection of dim-ribbed glass decanters, metal discs with a satin
sheen on them, and piles of blue-edged earthenware plates of Touraine
ware cover the sticky surfaces of the sideboards that line the room.
In a corner stands a box containing a set of numbered pigeon-holes, in
which the lodgers' table napkins, more or less soiled and stained with
wine, are kept. Here you see that indestructible furniture never met
with elsewhere, which finds its way into lodging-houses much as the
wrecks of our civilization drift into hospitals for incurables. You
expect in such places as these to find the weather-house whence a
Capuchin issues on wet days; you look to find the execrable engravings
which spoil your appetite, framed every one in a black varnished
frame, with a gilt beading round it; you know the sort of
tortoise-shell clock-case, inlaid with brass; the green stove, the
Argand lamps, covered with oil and dust, have met your eyes before.
The oilcloth which covers the long table is so greasy that a waggish
_externe_ will write his name on the surface, using his thumb-nail as a
style. The chairs are broken-down invalids; the wretched little hempen
mats slip away from under your feet without slipping away for good;
and finally, the foot-warmers are miserable wrecks, hingeless,
charred, broken away about the holes. It would be impossible to give
an idea of the old, rotten, shaky, cranky, worm-eaten, halt, maimed,
one-eyed, rickety, and ramshackle condition of the furniture without
an exhaustive description, which would delay the progress of the story
to an extent that impatient people would not pardon. The red tiles of
the floor are full of depressions brought about by scouring and
periodical renewings of color. In short, there is no illusory grace
left to the poverty that reigns here; it is dire, parsimonious,
concentrated, threadbare poverty; as yet it has not sunk into the
mire, it is only splashed by it, and though not in rags as yet, its
clothing is ready to drop to pieces.

This apartment is in all its glory at seven o'clock in the morning,
when Mme. Vauquer's cat appears, announcing the near approach of his
mistress, and jumps upon the sideboards to sniff at the milk in the
bowls, each protected by a plate, while he purrs his morning greeting
to the world. A moment later the widow shows her face; she is tricked
out in a net cap attached to a false front set on awry, and shuffles
into the room in her slipshod fashion. She is an oldish woman, with a
bloated countenance, and a nose like a parrot's beak set in the middle
of it; her fat little hands (she is as sleek as a church rat) and her
shapeless, slouching figure are in keeping with the room that reeks of
misfortune, where hope is reduced to speculate for the meanest stakes.
Mme. Vauquer alone can breathe that tainted air without being
disheartened by it. Her face is as fresh as a frosty morning in
autumn; there are wrinkles about the eyes that vary in their
expression from the set smile of a ballet-dancer to the dark,
suspicious scowl of a discounter of bills; in short, she is at once
the embodiment and interpretation of her lodging-house, as surely as
her lodging-house implies the existence of its mistress. You can no
more imagine the one without the other, than you can think of a jail
without a turnkey. The unwholesome corpulence of the little woman is
produced by the life she leads, just as typhus fever is bred in the
tainted air of a hospital. The very knitted woolen petticoat that she
wears beneath a skirt made of an old gown, with the wadding protruding
through the rents in the material, is a sort of epitome of the
sitting-room, the dining-room, and the little garden; it discovers the
cook, it foreshadows the lodgers--the picture of the house is
completed by the portrait of its mistress.

Mme. Vauquer at the age of fifty is like all women who "have seen a
deal of trouble." She has the glassy eyes and innocent air of a
trafficker in flesh and blood, who will wax virtuously indignant to
obtain a higher price for her services, but who is quite ready to
betray a Georges or a Pichegru, if a Georges or a Pichegru were in
hiding and still to be betrayed, or for any other expedient that may
alleviate her lot. Still, "she is a good woman at bottom," said the
lodgers who believed that the widow was wholly dependent upon the
money that they paid her, and sympathized when they heard her cough
and groan like one of themselves.

What had M. Vauquer been? The lady was never very explicit on this
head. How had she lost her money? "Through trouble," was her answer.
He had treated her badly, had left her nothing but her eyes to cry
over his cruelty, the house she lived in, and the privilege of pitying
nobody, because, so she was wont to say, she herself had been through
every possible misfortune.

Sylvie, the stout cook, hearing her mistress' shuffling footsteps,
hastened to serve the lodgers' breakfasts. Beside those who lived in
the house, Mme. Vauquer took boarders who came for their meals; but
these _externes_ usually only came to dinner, for which they paid
thirty francs a month.

At the time when this story begins, the lodging-house contained seven
inmates. The best rooms in the house were on the first story, Mme.
Vauquer herself occupying the least important, while the rest were let
to a Mme. Couture, the widow of a commissary-general in the service of
the Republic. With her lived Victorine Taillefer, a schoolgirl, to
whom she filled the place of mother. These two ladies paid eighteen
hundred francs a year.

The two sets of rooms on the second floor were respectively occupied
by an old man named Poiret and a man of forty or thereabouts, the
wearer of a black wig and dyed whiskers, who gave out that he was a
retired merchant, and was addressed as M. Vautrin. Two of the four
rooms on the third floor were also let--one to an elderly spinster, a
Mlle. Michonneau, and the other to a retired manufacturer of
vermicelli, Italian paste and starch, who allowed the others to
address him as "Father Goriot." The remaining rooms were allotted to
various birds of passage, to impecunious students, who like "Father
Goriot" and Mlle. Michonneau, could only muster forty-five francs a
month to pay for their board and lodging. Mme. Vauquer had little
desire for lodgers of this sort; they ate too much bread, and she only
took them in default of better.

At that time one of the rooms was tenanted by a law student, a young
man from the neighborhood of Angouleme, one of a large family who
pinched and starved themselves to spare twelve hundred francs a year
for him. Misfortune had accustomed Eugene de Rastignac, for that was
his name, to work. He belonged to the number of young men who know as
children that their parents' hopes are centered on them, and
deliberately prepare themselves for a great career, subordinating
their studies from the first to this end, carefully watching the
indications of the course of events, calculating the probable turn
that affairs will take, that they may be the first to profit by them.
But for his observant curiosity, and the skill with which he managed
to introduce himself into the salons of Paris, this story would not
have been colored by the tones of truth which it certainly owes to
him, for they are entirely due to his penetrating sagacity and desire
to fathom the mysteries of an appalling condition of things, which was
concealed as carefully by the victim as by those who had brought it to
pass.

Above the third story there was a garret where the linen was hung to
dry, and a couple of attics. Christophe, the man-of-all-work, slept in
one, and Sylvie, the stout cook, in the other. Beside the seven
inmates thus enumerated, taking one year with another, some eight law
or medical students dined in the house, as well as two or three
regular comers who lived in the neighborhood. There were usually
eighteen people at dinner, and there was room, if need be, for twenty
at Mme. Vauquer's table; at breakfast, however, only the seven lodgers
appeared. It was almost like a family party. Every one came down in
dressing-gown and slippers, and the conversation usually turned on
anything that had happened the evening before; comments on the dress
or appearance of the dinner contingent were exchanged in friendly
confidence.

These seven lodgers were Mme. Vauquer's spoiled children. Among them
she distributed, with astronomical precision, the exact proportion of
respect and attention due to the varying amounts they paid for their
board. One single consideration influenced all these human beings
thrown together by chance. The two second-floor lodgers only paid
seventy-two francs a month. Such prices as these are confined to the
Faubourg Saint-Marcel and the district between La Bourbe and the
Salpetriere; and, as might be expected, poverty, more or less
apparent, weighed upon them all, Mme. Couture being the sole exception
to the rule.

The dreary surroundings were reflected in the costumes of the inmates
of the house; all were alike threadbare. The color of the men's coats
were problematical; such shoes, in more fashionable quarters, are only
to be seen lying in the gutter; the cuffs and collars were worn and
frayed at the edges; every limp article of clothing looked like the
ghost of its former self. The women's dresses were faded,
old-fashioned, dyed and re-dyed; they wore gloves that were glazed
with hard wear, much-mended lace, dingy ruffles, crumpled muslin
fichus. So much for their clothing; but, for the most part, their
frames were solid enough; their constitutions had weathered the storms
of life; their cold, hard faces were worn like coins that have been
withdrawn from circulation, but there were greedy teeth behind the
withered lips. Dramas brought to a close or still in progress are
foreshadowed by the sight of such actors as these, not the dramas that
are played before the footlights and against a background of painted
canvas, but dumb dramas of life, frost-bound dramas that sere hearts
like fire, dramas that do not end with the actors' lives.

Mlle. Michonneau, that elderly young lady, screened her weak eyes from
the daylight by a soiled green silk shade with a rim of brass, an
object fit to scare away the Angel of Pity himself. Her shawl, with
its scanty, draggled fringe, might have covered a skeleton, so meagre
and angular was the form beneath it. Yet she must have been pretty and
shapely once. What corrosive had destroyed the feminine outlines? Was
it trouble, or vice, or greed? Had she loved too well? Had she been a
second-hand clothes dealer, a frequenter of the backstairs of great
houses, or had she been merely a courtesan? Was she expiating the
flaunting triumphs of a youth overcrowded with pleasures by an old age
in which she was shunned by every passer-by? Her vacant gaze sent a
chill through you; her shriveled face seemed like a menace. Her voice
was like the shrill, thin note of the grasshopper sounding from the
thicket when winter is at hand. She said that she had nursed an old
gentleman, ill of catarrh of the bladder, and left to die by his
children, who thought that he had nothing left. His bequest to her, a
life annuity of a thousand francs, was periodically disputed by his
heirs, who mingled slander with their persecutions. In spite of the
ravages of conflicting passions, her face retained some traces of its
former fairness and fineness of tissue, some vestiges of the physical
charms of her youth still survived.

M. Poiret was a sort of automaton. He might be seen any day sailing
like a gray shadow along the walks of the Jardin des Plantes, on his
head a shabby cap, a cane with an old yellow ivory handle in the tips
of his thin fingers; the outspread skirts of his threadbare overcoat
failed to conceal his meagre figure; his breeches hung loosely on his
shrunken limbs; the thin, blue-stockinged legs trembled like those of
a drunken man; there was a notable breach of continuity between the
dingy white waistcoat and crumpled shirt frills and the cravat twisted
about a throat like a turkey gobbler's; altogether, his appearance set
people wondering whether this outlandish ghost belonged to the
audacious race of the sons of Japhet who flutter about on the
Boulevard Italien. What devouring kind of toil could have so shriveled
him? What devouring passions had darkened that bulbous countenance,
which would have seemed outrageous as a caricature? What had he been?
Well, perhaps he had been part of the machinery of justice, a clerk in
the office to which the 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.