Father Goriot

H >> Honore de Balzac >> Father Goriot


"What ever can have happened?" she said. "M. Vautrin said to M.
Eugene, 'Let us have an explanation!' then he took him by the arm, and
there they are, out among the artichokes."

Vautrin came in while she was speaking. "Mamma Vauquer," he said
smiling, "don't frighten yourself at all. I am only going to try my
pistols under the lime-trees."

"Oh! monsieur," cried Victorine, clasping her hands as she spoke, "why
do you want to kill M. Eugene?"

Vautrin stepped back a pace or two, and gazed at Victorine.

"Oh! this is something fresh!" he exclaimed in a bantering tone, that
brought the color into the poor girl's face. "That young fellow yonder
is very nice, isn't he?" he went on. "You have given me a notion, my
pretty child; I will make you both happy."

Mme. Couture laid her hand on the arm of her ward, and drew the girl
away, as she said in her ear:

"Why, Victorine, I cannot imagine what has come over you this
morning."

"I don't want any shots fired in my garden," said Mme. Vauquer. "You
will frighten the neighborhood and bring the police up here all in a
moment."

"Come, keep cool, Mamma Vauquer," answered Vautrin. "There, there;
it's all right; we will go to the shooting-gallery."

He went back to Rastignac, laying his hand familiarly on the young
man's arm.

"When I have given you ocular demonstration of the fact that I can put
a bullet through the ace on a card five times running at thirty-five
paces," he said, "that won't take away your appetite, I suppose? You
look to me to be inclined to be a trifle quarrelsome this morning, and
as if you would rush on your death like a blockhead."

"Do you draw back?" asked Eugene.

"Don't try to raise my temperature," answered Vautrin, "it is not cold
this morning. Let us go and sit over there," he added, pointing to the
green-painted garden seats; "no one can overhear us. I want a little
talk with you. You are not a bad sort of youngster, and I have no
quarrel with you. I like you, take Trump--(confound it!)--take
Vautrin's word for it. What makes me like you? I will tell you
by-and-by. Meantime, I can tell you that I know you as well as if I
had made you myself, as I will prove to you in a minute. Put down your
bags," he continued, pointing to the round table.

Rastignac deposited his money on the table, and sat down. He was
consumed with curiosity, which the sudden change in the manner of the
man before him had excited to the highest pitch. Here was a strange
being who, a moment ago, had talked of killing him, and now posed as
his protector.

"You would like to know who I really am, what I was, and what I do
now," Vautrin went on. "You want to know too much, youngster. Come!
come! keep cool! You will hear more astonishing things than that. I
have had my misfortunes. Just hear me out first, and you shall have
your turn afterwards. Here is my past in three words. Who am I?
Vautrin. What do I do? Just what I please. Let us change the subject.
You want to know my character. I am good-natured to those who do me a
good turn, or to those whose hearts speak to mine. These last may do
anything they like with me; they may bruise my shins, and I shall not
tell them to 'mind what they are about'; but, _nom d'une pipe_, the
devil himself is not an uglier customer than I can be if people annoy
me, or if I don't happen to take to them; and you may just as well
know at once that I think no more of killing a man than of that," and
he spat before him as he spoke. "Only when it is absolutely necessary
to do so, I do my best to kill him properly. I am what you call an
artist. I have read Benvenuto Cellini's _Memoirs_, such as you see me;
and, what is more, in Italian: A fine-spirited fellow he was! From him
I learned to follow the example set us by Providence, who strikes us
down at random, and to admire the beautiful whenever and wherever it
is found. And, setting other questions aside, is it not a glorious
part to play, when you pit yourself against mankind, and the luck is
on your side? I have thought a good deal about the constitution of
your present social Dis-order. A duel is downright childish, my boy!
utter nonsense and folly! When one of two living men must be got out
of the way, none but an idiot would leave chance to decide which it is
to be; and in a duel it is a toss-up--heads or tails--and there you
are! Now I, for instance, can hit the ace in the middle of a card five
times running, send one bullet after another through the same hole,
and at thirty-five paces, moreover! With that little accomplishment
you might think yourself certain of killing your man, mightn't you.
Well, I have fired, at twenty paces, and missed, and the rogue who had
never handled a pistol in his life--look here!"--(he unbuttoned his
waistcoat and exposed his chest, covered, like a bear's back, with a
shaggy fell; the student gave a startled shudder)--"he was a raw lad,
but he made his mark on me," the extraordinary man went on, drawing
Rastignac's fingers over a deep scar on his breast. But that happened
when I myself was a mere boy; I was one-and-twenty then (your age),
and I had some beliefs left--in a woman's love, and in a pack of
rubbish that you will be over head and ears in directly. You and I
were to have fought just now, weren't we? You might have killed me.
Suppose that I were put under the earth, where would you be? You would
have to clear out of this, go to Switzerland, draw on papa's purse
--and he has none too much in it as it is. I mean to open your eyes to
your real position, that is what I am going to do: but I shall do it
from the point of view of a man who, after studying the world very
closely, sees that there are but two alternatives--stupid obedience or
revolt. I obey nobody; is that clear? Now, do you know how much you
will want at the pace you are going? A million; and promptly, too, or
that little head of ours will be swaying to and fro in the drag-nets
at Saint-Cloud, while we are gone to find out whether or no there is a
Supreme Being. I will put you in the way of that million."

He stopped for a moment and looked at Eugene.

"Aha! you do not look so sourly at papa Vautrin now! At the mention of
the million you look like a young girl when somebody has said, 'I will
come for you this evening!' and she betakes herself to her toilette as
a cat licks its whiskers over a saucer of milk. All right. Come, now,
let us go into the question, young man; all between ourselves, you
know. We have a papa and mamma down yonder, a great-aunt, two sisters
(aged eighteen and seventeen), two young brothers (one fifteen, and
the other ten), that is about the roll-call of the crew. The aunt
brings up the two sisters; the cure comes and teaches the boys Latin.
Boiled chestnuts are oftener on the table than white bread. Papa makes
a suit of clothes last a long while; if mamma has a different dress
winter and summer, it is about as much as she has; the sisters manage
as best they can. I know all about it; I have lived in the south.

"That is how things are at home. They send you twelve hundred francs a
year, and the whole property only brings in three thousand francs all
told. We have a cook and a manservant; papa is a baron, and we must
keep up appearances. Then we have our ambitions; we are connected with
the Beauseants, and we go afoot through the streets; we want to be
rich, and we have not a penny; we eat Mme. Vauquer's messes, and we
like grand dinners in the Faubourg Saint-Germain; we sleep on a
truckle-bed, and dream of a mansion! I do not blame you for wanting
these things. What sort of men do the women run after? Men of
ambition. Men of ambition have stronger frames, their blood is richer
in iron, their hearts are warmer than those of ordinary men. Women
feel that when their power is greatest, they look their best, and that
those are their happiest hours; they like power in men, and prefer the
strongest even if it is a power that may be their own destruction. I
am going to make an inventory of your desires in order to put the
question at issue before you. Here it is:--

"We are as hungry as a wolf, and those newly-cut teeth of ours are
sharp; what are we to do to keep the pot boiling? In the first place,
we have the Code to browse upon; it is not amusing, and we are none
the wiser for it, but that cannot be helped. So far so good. We mean
to make an advocate of ourselves with a prospect of one day being made
President of a Court of Assize, when we shall send poor devils, our
betters, to the galleys with a T.F.[*] on their shoulders, so that the
rich may be convinced that they can sleep in peace. There is no fun in
that; and you are a long while coming to it; for, to begin with, there
are two years of nauseous drudgery in Paris, we see all the lollipops
that we long for out of our reach. It is tiresome to want things and
never to have them. If you were a pallid creature of the mollusk
order, you would have nothing to fear, but it is different when you
have the hot blood of a lion and are ready to get into a score of
scrapes every day of your life. This is the ghastliest form of torture
known in this inferno of God's making, and you will give in to it. Or
suppose that you are a good boy, drink nothing stronger than milk, and
bemoan your hard lot; you, with your generous nature, will endure
hardships that would drive a dog mad, and make a start, after long
waiting, as deputy to some rascal or other in a hole of a place where
the Government will fling you a thousand francs a year like the scraps
that are thrown to the butcher's dog. Bark at thieves, plead the cause
of the rich, send men of heart to the guillotine, that is your work!
Many thanks! If you have no influence, you may rot in your provincial
tribunal. At thirty you will be a Justice with twelve hundred francs a
year (if you have not flung off the gown for good before then). By the
time you are forty you may look to marry a miller's daughter, an
heiress with some six thousand livres a year. Much obliged! If you
have influence, you may possibly be a Public Prosecutor by the time
you are thirty; with a salary of a thousand crowns, you could look to
marry the mayor's daughter. Some petty piece of political trickery,
such as mistaking Villele for Manuel in a bulletin (the names rhyme,
and that quiets your conscience), and you will probably be a Procureur
General by the time you are forty, with a chance of becoming a deputy.
Please to observe, my dear boy, that our conscience will have been a
little damaged in the process, and that we shall endure twenty years
of drudgery and hidden poverty, and that our sisters are wearing
Dian's livery. I have the honor to call your attention to another
fact: to wit, that there are but twenty Procureurs Generaux at a time
in all France, while there are some twenty thousand of you young men
who aspire to that elevated position; that there are some mountebanks
among you who would sell their family to screw their fortunes a peg
higher. If this sort of thing sickens you, try another course. The
Baron de Rastignac thinks of becoming an advocate, does he? There's a
nice prospect for you! Ten years of drudgery straight away. You are
obliged to live at the rate of a thousand francs a month; you must
have a library of law books, live in chambers, go into society, go
down on your knees to ask a solicitor for briefs, lick the dust off
the floor of the Palais de Justice. If this kind of business led to
anything, I should not say no; but just give me the names of five
advocates here in Paris who by the time that they are fifty are making
fifty thousand francs a year! Bah! I would sooner turn pirate on the
high seas than have my soul shrivel up inside me like that. How will
you find the capital? There is but one way, marry a woman who has
money. There is no fun in it. Have you a mind to marry? You hang a
stone around your neck; for if you marry for money, what becomes of
our exalted notions of honor and so forth? You might as well fly in
the face of social conventions at once. Is it nothing to crawl like a
serpent before your wife, to lick her mother's feet, to descend to
dirty actions that would sicken swine--faugh!--never mind if you at
least make your fortune. But you will be as doleful as a dripstone if
you marry for money. It is better to wrestle with men than to wrangle
at home with your wife. You are at the crossway of the roads of life,
my boy; choose your way.

[*] Travaux forces, forced labour.

"But you have chosen already. You have gone to see your cousin of
Beauseant, and you have had an inkling of luxury; you have been to
Mme. de Restaud's house, and in Father Goriot's daughter you have seen
a glimpse of the Parisienne for the first time. That day you came back
with a word written on your forehead. I knew it, I could read
it--'_Success_!' Yes, success at any price. 'Bravo,' said I to myself,
'here is the sort of fellow for me.' You wanted money. Where was it
all to come from? You have drained your sisters' little hoard (all
brothers sponge more or less on their sisters). Those fifteen hundred
francs of yours (got together, God knows how! in a country where there
are more chestnuts than five-franc pieces) will slip away like
soldiers after pillage. And, then, what will you do? Shall you begin
to work? Work, or what you understand by work at this moment, means,
for a man of Poiret's calibre, an old age in Mamma Vauquer's
lodging-house. There are fifty thousand young men in your position at
this moment, all bent as you are on solving one and the same problem
--how to acquire a fortune rapidly. You are but a unit in that
aggregate. You can guess, therefore, what efforts you must make, how
desperate the struggle is. There are not fifty thousand good positions
for you; you must fight and devour one another like spiders in a pot.
Do you know how a man makes his way here? By brilliant genius or by
skilful corruption. You must either cut your way through these masses
of men like a cannon ball, or steal among them like a plague. Honesty
is nothing to the purpose. Men bow before the power of genius; they
hate it, and try to slander it, because genius does not divide the
spoil; but if genius persists, they bow before it. To sum it all up in
a phrase, if they fail to smother genius in the mud, they fall on their
knees and worship it. Corruption is a great power in the world, and
talent is scarce. So corruption is the weapon of superfluous
mediocrity; you will be made to feel the point of it everywhere. You
will see women who spend more than ten thousand francs a year on
dress, while their husband's salary (his whole income) is six thousand
francs. You will see officials buying estates on twelve thousand
francs a year. You will see women who sell themselves body and soul to
drive in a carriage belonging to the son of a peer of France, who has
a right to drive in the middle rank at Longchamp. You have seen that
poor simpleton of a Goriot obliged to meet a bill with his daughter's
name at the back of it, though her husband has fifty thousand francs a
year. I defy you to walk a couple of yards anywhere in Paris without
stumbling on some infernal complication. I'll bet my head to a head of
that salad that you will stir up a hornet's nest by taking a fancy to
the first young, rich, and pretty woman you meet. They are all dodging
the law, all at loggerheads with their husbands. If I were to begin to
tell you all that vanity or necessity (virtue is not often mixed up in
it, you may be sure), all that vanity and necessity drive them to do
for lovers, finery, housekeeping, or children, I should never come to
an end. So an honest man is the common enemy.

"But do you know what an honest man is? Here, in Paris, an honest man
is the man who keeps his own counsel, and will not divide the plunder.
I am not speaking now of those poor bond-slaves who do the work of the
world without a reward for their toil--God Almighty's outcasts, I call
them. Among them, I grant you, is virtue in all the flower of its
stupidity, but poverty is no less their portion. At this moment, I
think I see the long faces those good folk would pull if God played a
practical joke on them and stayed away at the Last Judgment.

"Well, then, if you mean to make a fortune quickly, you must either be
rich to begin with, or make people believe that you are rich. It is no
use playing here except for high stakes; once take to low play, it is
all up with you. If in the scores of professions that are open to you,
there are ten men who rise very rapidly, people are sure to call them
thieves. You can draw your own conclusions. Such is life. It is no
cleaner than a kitchen; it reeks like a kitchen; and if you mean to
cook your dinner, you must expect to soil your hands; the real art is
in getting them clean again, and therein lies the whole morality of
our epoch. If I take this tone in speaking of the world to you, I have
the right to do so; I know it well. Do you think that I am blaming it?
Far from it; the world has always been as it is now. Moralists'
strictures will never change it. Mankind are not perfect, but one age
is more or less hypocritical than another, and then simpletons say
that its morality is high or low. I do not think that the rich are any
worse than the poor; man is much the same, high or low, or wherever he
is. In a million of these human cattle there may be half a score of
bold spirits who rise above the rest, above the laws; I am one of
them. And you, if you are cleverer than your fellows, make straight to
your end, and hold your head high. But you must lay your account with
envy and slander and mediocrity, and every man's hand will be against
you. Napoleon met with a Minister of War, Aubry by name, who all but
sent him to the colonies.

"Feel your pulse. Think whether you can get up morning after morning,
strengthened in yesterday's purpose. In that case I will make you an
offer that no one would decline. Listen attentively. You see, I have
an idea of my own. My idea is to live a patriarchal life on a vast
estate, say a hundred thousand acres, somewhere in the Southern States
of America. I mean to be a planter, to have slaves, to make a few snug
millions by selling my cattle, timber, and tobacco; I want to live an
absolute monarch, and to do just as I please; to lead such a life as
no one here in these squalid dens of lath and plaster ever imagines. I
am a great poet; I do not write my poems, I feel them, and act them.
At this moment I have fifty thousand francs, which might possibly buy
forty negroes. I want two hundred thousand francs, because I want to
have two hundred negroes to carry out my notions of the patriarachal
life properly. Negroes, you see, are like a sort of family ready
grown, and there are no inquisitive public prosecutors out there to
interfere with you. That investment in ebony ought to mean three or
four million francs in ten years' time. If I am successful, no one
will ask me who I am. I shall be Mr. Four Millions, an American
citizen. I shall be fifty years old by then, and sound and hearty
still; I shall enjoy life after my own fashion. In two words, if I
find you an heiress with a million, will you give me two hundred
thousand francs? Twenty per cent commission, eh? Is that too much?
Your little wife will be very much in love with you. Once married, you
will show signs of uneasiness and remorse; for a couple of weeks you
will be depressed. Then, some night after sundry grimacings, comes the
confession, between two kisses, 'Two hundred thousand francs of debts,
my darling!' This sort of farce is played every day in Paris, and by
young men of the highest fashion. When a young wife has given her
heart, she will not refuse her purse. Perhaps you are thinking that
you will lose the money for good? Not you. You will make two hundred
thousand francs again by some stroke of business. With your capital
and your brains you should be able to accumulate as large a fortune as
you could wish. _Ergo_, in six months you will have made your own
fortune, and our old friend Vautrin's, and made an amiable woman very
happy, to say nothing of your people at home, who must blow on their
fingers to warm them, in the winter, for lack of firewood. You need
not be surprised at my proposal, nor at the demand I make. Forty-seven
out of every sixty great matches here in Paris are made after just
such a bargain as this. The Chamber of Notaries compels my gentleman
to----"

"What must I do?" said Rastignac, eagerly interrupting Vautrin's
speech.

"Next to nothing," returned the other, with a slight involuntary
movement, the suppressed exultation of the angler when he feels a bite
at the end of his line. "Follow me carefully! The heart of a girl
whose life is wretched and unhappy is a sponge that will thirstily
absorb love; a dry sponge that swells at the first drop of sentiment.
If you pay court to a young girl whose existence is a compound of
loneliness, despair, and poverty, and who has no suspicion that she
will come into a fortune, good Lord! it is quint and quatorze at
piquet; it is knowing the numbers of the lottery before-hand; it is
speculating in the funds when you have news from a sure source; it is
building up a marriage on an indestructible foundation. The girl may
come in for millions, and she will fling them, as if they were so many
pebbles, at your feet. 'Take it, my beloved! Take it, Alfred, Adolphe,
Eugene!' or whoever it was that showed his sense by sacrificing
himself for her. And as for sacrificing himself, this is how I
understand it. You sell a coat that is getting shabby, so that you can
take her to the _Cadran bleu_, treat her to mushrooms on toast, and
then go to the Ambigu-Comique in the evening; you pawn your watch to
buy her a shawl. I need not remind you of the fiddle-faddle
sentimentality that goes down so well with all women; you spill a few
drops of water on your stationery, for instance; those are the tears
you shed while far away from her. You look to me as if you were
perfectly acquainted with the argot of the heart. Paris, you see, is
like a forest in the New World, where you have to deal with a score of
varieties of savages--Illinois and Hurons, who live on the proceed of
their social hunting. You are a hunter of millions; you set your
snares; you use lures and nets; there are many ways of hunting. Some
hunt heiresses, others a legacy; some fish for souls, yet others sell
their clients, bound hand and foot. Every one who comes back from the
chase with his game-bag well filled meets with a warm welcome in good
society. In justice to this hospitable part of the world, it must be
said that you have to do with the most easy and good-natured of great
cities. If the proud aristocracies of the rest of Europe refuse
admittance among their ranks to a disreputable millionaire, Paris
stretches out a hand to him, goes to his banquets, eats his dinners,
and hobnobs with his infamy."

"But where is such a girl to be found?" asked Eugene.

"Under your eyes; she is yours already."

"Mlle. Victorine?"

"Precisely."

"And what was that you said?"

"She is in love with you already, your little Baronne de Rastignac!"

"She has not a penny," Eugene continued, much mystified.

"Ah! now we are coming to it! Just another word or two, and it will
all be clear enough. Her father, Taillefer, is an old scoundrel; it is
said that he murdered one of his friends at the time of the
Revolution. He is one of your comedians that sets up to have opinions
of his own. He is a banker--senior partner in the house of Frederic
Taillefer and Company. He has one son, and means to leave all he has
to the boy, to the prejudice of Victorine. For my part, I don't like
to see injustice of this sort. I am like Don Quixote, I have a fancy
for defending the weak against the strong. If it should please God to
take that youth away from him, Taillefer would have only his daughter
left; he would want to leave his money to some one or other; an absurd
notion, but it is only human nature, and he is not likely to have any
more children, as I know. Victorine is gentle and amiable; she will
soon twist her father round her fingers, and set his head spinning
like a German top by plying him with sentiment! She will be too much
touched by your devotion to forget you; you will marry her. I mean to
play Providence for you, and Providence is to do my will. I have a
friend whom I have attached closely to myself, a colonel in the Army
of the Loire, who has just been transferred into the _garde royale_. He
has taken my advice and turned ultra-royalist; he is not one of those
fools who never change their opinions. Of all pieces of advice, my
cherub, I would give you this--don't stick to your opinions any more
than to your words. If any one asks you for them, let him have them
--at a price. A man who prides himself on going in a straight line
through life is an idiot who believes in infallibility. There are no
such things as principles; there are only events, and there are no
laws but those of expediency: a man of talent accepts events and the
circumstances in which he finds himself, and turns everything to his
own ends. If laws and principles were fixed and invariable, nations
would not change them as readily as we change our shirts. The
individual is not obliged to be more particular than the nation. A man
whose services to France have been of the very slightest is a fetich
looked on with superstitious awe because he has always seen everything
in red; but he is good, at the most, to be put into the Museum of Arts
and Crafts, among the automatic machines, and labeled La Fayette;
while the prince at whom everybody flings a stone, the man who
despises humanity so much that he spits as many oaths as he is asked
for in the face of humanity, saved France from being torn in pieces at
the Congress of Vienna; and they who should have given him laurels
fling mud at him. Oh! I know something of affairs, I can tell you; I
have the secrets of many men! Enough. When I find three minds in
agreement as to the application of a principle, I shall have a fixed
and immovable opinion--I shall have to wait a long while first. In the
Tribunals you will not find three judges of the same opinion on a
single point of law. To return to the man I was telling you of. He
would crucify Jesus Christ again, if I bade him. At a word from his
old chum Vautrin he will pick a quarrel with a scamp that will not
send so much as five francs to his sister, poor girl, and" (here
Vautrin rose to his feet and stood like a fencing-master about to
lunge)--"turn him off into the dark!" he added.