‘My angel,’ she said to her dear friend, ‘you won’t get anything out of that man! He’s absurdly suspicious; he’s a skinflint, a brute, a fool, who will bring you nothing but trouble.’
Such things had passed between Monsieur Goriot and Madame de l’Ambermesnil that the comtesse could no longer bear to remain under the same roof as him. She left the next day, forgetting to pay six months’ rent and leaving personal effects worth all of five francs. Despite the grim determination with which Madame Vauquer carried out her enquiry, she was unable to track down the Comtesse de l’Ambermesnil’s whereabouts in Paris. She often talked about this deplorable affair, bewailing her trusting nature, although she was warier than a she-cat. However, she wouldn’t be the first person to mistrust her nearest and dearest yet confide in the first stranger who comes along: a strange but true quirk of behaviour, whose root is easily traced to the human heart. Some people perhaps have nothing left to gain from those they live with; having revealed the emptiness of their souls, they secretly feel themselves to be judged with deserved severity; however, as they have a powerful craving for the flattery they need but lack, or a burning desire to appear to possess qualities they do not have, they hope to take by surprise the heart and esteem of those who are strangers to them, at the risk of one day falling from grace. Meanwhile, there are some individuals who are born mercenary, who never do a kind deed for friends or family, because they owe it to them; but who will bend over backwards for people they don’t know in a bid to salvage some scrap of self-esteem: the narrower the circle of their intimates, the less they love them; the wider it is, the keener they are to offer their services. Madame Vauquer’s nature had something of both these types, at bottom loathsome, deceitful and mean.
‘If I’d been here,’ Vautrin would say to her, ‘that’s one mishap you’d have been spared! I’d have soon seen through that trickstress of yours. I’d recognize one of their boat-races anywhere.’
Like all narrow-minded people, Madame Vauquer tended not to look beyond her own version of events or to examine root causes. She preferred to blame others for her own failings. At the time when she incurred her loss, she decided that the honest vermicelli dealer was the source of her misfortune, and from then on, she said, began to come to her senses about him. Once she realized that her pointed coquetry and showy dress were getting her nowhere, it didn’t take her long to work out what the reason was. She noticed that her lodger already had his carryings-on, as she called them. This proved that the hope she had cherished so fondly was based on sheer fantasy and that she’d never get anything out of that man, as the comtesse had so forcefully put it, and after all, she had appeared to be something of an expert. Inevitably, she took her aversion further than she had her attraction. The intensity of her loathing was proportionate to her thwarted expectations, rather than to her love. Although the human heart may stop and rest as it climbs the peaks of an attachment, it rarely pauses on the slippery downward slope of hatred. But Monsieur Goriot was her boarder, and so the widow had to repress the outbursts of her wounded self-esteem, smother her sighs of disappointment and swallow her desire for vengeance, like a monk nettled by his prior. The small-minded satisfy their urges, good or bad, with endless pettiness. The widow channelled all her female cunning into inventing covert ways of persecuting her victim. She began by putting a stop to the extravagances which had found their way onto her table. ‘No more cornichons, no more anchovies: it’s all a perfect swindle!’ she said to Sylvie, on the morning when she resumed her original modus operandi. Monsieur Goriot had frugal tastes: the prerequisite parsimony of the self-made man had become a habit with him. Soup, boiled meat, a dish of vegetables were, and always would be, his favourite dinner. As Madame Vauquer was unable to deprive him of what he liked best, she found it hard to make her lodger’s life a misery. In desperation at her failure to make a dent in Goriot’s armour, she began to belittle him, infecting her boarders with her loathing, and as they made him their sport, they dished up her revenge. By the end of the first year, the widow had come to view him with such suspicion that she would wonder why this wealthy merchant, with a private income of seven to eight thousand livres, who owned such splendid silverware and jewels fine enough for any dancing girl, was staying at her boarding house and paying her such a paltry sum of money in proportion to his wealth. For most of this first year, Goriot had tended to dine out once or twice a week; until, little by little, it came to the point where he would dine in town only twice a month. Mister Goriot’s intimate little dinners out suited Madame Vauquer’s interests far too well for her not to be irritated by the increasing frequency with which her lodger took his meals in the boarding house. She attributed this change as much to a desire to annoy his hostess as to the gradual attrition of his wealth: one of the most unattractive habits of Lilliputian minds is to imagine that others share their pettiness. Unfortunately, at the end of the second year, Monsieur Goriot lent some substance to the gossip about him by asking Madame Vauquer if he could move up to the second floor, reducing his rent to nine hundred francs. His need to save money was so great that he went without a fire in his room all winter. Widow Vauquer wished to be paid in advance; Monsieur Goriot consented, and from then on she called him old man Goriot. The reasons behind his decline were anyone’s guess. No easy investigation! As the counterfeit comtesse had put it, old man Goriot was secretive, a dark horse. According to the logic of the empty-headed, who keep nothing secret because they hold nothing sacred, those who keep themselves to themselves must have something to hide. So it was that the highly respected merchant became a charlatan, the ladies’ man became an old rogue. Sometimes, according to Vautrin, who came to live at the Maison Vauquer around that time, old man Goriot was a lamb who, having been shorn of his fortune in the stock-market, would try and recoup his losses as a stag,38 in the forceful phraseology of financial language. At other times, he was one of those lightweight gamblers who have a flutter with ten francs every night and never win more than the same amount back. Sometimes, they decided he must be a spy with high-level police connections; but Vautrin said he wasn’t cunning enough to be one of them. Old man Goriot was also a miserly, small-time lender or a man who would always bet on the same number in the Lottery. Every kind of shady behaviour that vice, shame and impotence could produce was laid at his door. Only, however foul his behaviour or his vices might be, the general loathing he inspired did not extend to kicking him out: he paid his rent. Besides, he was useful – each boarder’s good or bad mood found an outlet in the little digs and jokes they aimed at him. The most widely credited and accepted opinion was that held by Madame Vauquer. To her mind, that man, in mint condition, as sound as a bell and who still had plenty left for a woman to enjoy, was a rake with unnatural appetites. These were the facts on which Madame Vauquer based her smear-mongering. When she was still in bed one morning – a few months after the departure of the catastrophic comtesse who had managed to live at her expense for six months – she heard the rustle of a silk dress on her staircase and the light tread of a dainty young woman, who then slipped through Goriot’s door, which had been conveniently left ajar. Big Sylvie immediately came to inform her mistress that a young lady who was too pretty to be proper, dressed like a goddess, wearing laced prunella39 boots without a spot of mud on them, had slipped like an eel from the street into her kitchen and asked for Monsieur Goriot’s room. Madame Vauquer and her cook duly pressed their ears against the door and detected a number of tenderly spoken words during the visit, which lasted some time. When Monsieur Goriot escorted out his lady friend, big Sylvie grabbed her basket and pretended she was off to market, so that she could shadow the loving couple.
‘Madame,’ she said to her mistress on her return, ‘Monsieur Goriot must be rolling in it, all the same, to be keeping them in that style. Just fancy! There was a splendid carriage waiting at the corner of the Rue de l’Estrapade,40 which she got in to.’
At dinner, Madame Vauquer went to draw a curtain, to block out a ray o
f sun that was shining in Goriot’s eyes.
‘Beauty loves you, Monsieur Goriot, even the sun comes looking for you,’ she said, alluding to the visit he had received. ‘My! What good taste you have; she was a pretty one.’
‘That was my daughter,’ he said proudly. The boarders interpreted this as the foolishness of an old man keeping up appearances.
A month after this visit, Monsieur Goriot received another. His daughter, who had come in morning dress the first time, appeared after dinner decked out for an evening in society. The boarders, busy gossiping in the drawing room, caught a glimpse of her, a slim-waisted pretty blonde, graceful and far too distinguished to be the daughter of someone like old man Goriot.
‘That makes two of ’em!’ said big Sylvie, failing to recognize her.
A few days later, another daughter, a tall, shapely brunette with dark hair and sparkling eyes, asked for Monsieur Goriot.
‘That makes three of ’em!’ said Sylvie.
This second daughter, who also visited her father in the morning the first time round, arrived in a carriage a few evenings later, wearing a ball gown.
‘That makes four of ’em!’ said Madame Vauquer and big Sylvie, unable to see in this grand lady the slightest trace of the girl who had been dressed so simply on the morning of her first visit.
Goriot was still paying twelve hundred francs for his board and lodging. Madame Vauquer thought it quite natural for a rich man to have four or five mistresses and even thought it very clever of him to pass them off as his daughters. She saw nothing wrong in him receiving them at the Maison Vauquer. However, because these visits provided her with an explanation of her lodger’s indifference to her, from the second year onwards she allowed herself to call him an old goat. Finally, following her lodger’s descent to nine hundred francs, when she saw one of these ladies coming downstairs one day, she curtly asked him exactly what kind of establishment he thought this was. Old man Goriot replied that the lady was his eldest daughter.
‘Got thirty-six daughters, have you?’ said Madame Vauquer, sourly.
‘Just two,’ replied her lodger, with the meekness of a man who has come down in the world, his spirit broken by destitution.
Towards the end of the third year, Goriot reduced his costs still further, moving up to the third floor and dropping to forty-five francs a month. He went without snuff, dismissed his wigmaker and stopped powdering his hair. The first time old man Goriot appeared without powder, his landlady gasped with surprise when she saw the colour of his hair, a dirty, greenish grey. His face, upon which suppressed grief had, imperceptibly, day by day, left its stamp of sadness, now seemed the most woebegone of all those round the table. There could no longer be the slightest doubt. Goriot was an old rake and, without the skill of a doctor, the adverse effects of the treatments his diseases required would have cost him his eyesight. His vile hair colour was the consequence of his excesses and the drugs he had taken to allow him to prolong them. The old man’s physical and mental condition gave substance to these old wives’ tales. When he had worn out his trousseau, he bought calico at fourteen sous an ell41 to replace his fine linen. One by one, his diamonds, his gold snuff-box, his chain, his jewels all disappeared. Instead of his cornflower-blue coat, his opulent-looking outfits, he now wore, winter and summer, a frock-coat of coarse brown drab,42 a goat-hair waistcoat and grey woollen trousers. He became increasingly thin; his calves sagged; his face, once plump and satisfied with the pleasures of bourgeois life, became inordinately wrinkled; his forehead furrowed, his jaw sharpened. Four years after moving in to the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, he was no longer the same man. The worthy sixty-two-year-old vermicelli dealer who looked not a year over forty, the pot-bellied, prosperous bourgeois, with his frank and foolish face, whose jaunty bearing gladdened those he passed, whose smile still bore the trace of his youth, now had the appearance of a vacant, meandering, pasty-faced seventy year old. His blue eyes, once so full of life, took on a dull iron-grey tinge; they had faded, no longer watered, and their red rim seemed to weep blood. He inspired revulsion in some, pity in others. Some of the young medical students, having noted the droop of his lower lip and measured the extension of his facial angle,43 diagnosed him as suffering from cretinism, after their prolonged efforts to provoke him came to nothing. One evening, after dinner, when Madame Vauquer mockingly enquired, ‘Don’t they come and see you any more, those daughters of yours?’ in a way that cast doubt on his paternity, old man Goriot twitched as if his hostess had run him through.
‘They come from time to time,’ he replied, his voice choked with emotion.
‘A-ha! So you still see them from time to time!’ the students shouted to each other. ‘Bravo, old Goriot!’
But the old man didn’t hear the mockery his reply had earned him; he had sunk back into a pensive mood, which those observing him superficially assumed to be a kind of senile torpor due to his lack of intelligence. Had they known him well, perhaps they would have taken a keen interest in the problem underlying his physical and mental state; but nothing could have been harder for them. Although it would have been easy enough to find out whether Goriot really had been a vermicelli dealer and how much money he had made, the older boarders whose curiosity he aroused never left the neighbourhood and clung to the boarding house like oysters to a rock. As for the others, as soon as they left the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, the relentless pace of Parisian life made them forget the poor old man they mocked. For the old and narrow-minded, as for the young and thoughtless, old man Goriot’s desiccated wretchedness and air of bemusement were incompatible with wealth or ability of any kind. As for the women he called his daughters, everyone agreed with Madame Vauquer, who said, with the unswerving logic of an old woman well practised in the art of conjecture, after so many evenings spent gossiping: ‘If old man Goriot’s daughters were as rich as all his lady visitors seem to be, he wouldn’t have taken lodgings on the third floor of my establishment, at forty-five francs a month, and he wouldn’t go round dressed like a pauper.’ There was nothing to give the lie to the facts as she presented them. And so, at the end of November 1819, when this drama began to unfold, everyone in the boarding house had already made up their mind about the poor old man. He had never had either a daughter or a wife; his overindulgence in the pleasures of life had made him a slug, an anthropomorphic mollusc to be classified among the Capiferae,44 said the museum clerk, one of the regular diners, a real card. Poiret was an eagle, a gentleman next to Goriot. Poiret could speak, reason, reply; true, he said nothing when he spoke, reasoned or replied, because he usually repeated in other words what someone else had just said; but he contributed to the conversation, he was alive, he seemed capable of feeling; while old man Goriot, the museum clerk continued, was constantly at zero-point on the Réaumur scale.45
Eugène de Rastignac had returned to Paris in a frame of mind well known to all young men of superior ability or those spurred on by difficult circumstances to achieve greatness. As law students are required to do very little work to pass their preliminary papers at the Faculty, during his first year, Eugène had been free to sample the obvious material delights of Paris. A student has no time to waste if he wishes to familiarize himself with the repertoire of each theatre, memorize each twist and turn of the Parisian labyrinth, know what is and isn’t done, learn the language and appreciate pleasures unique to the capital; exploring smart and seedy districts, attending the most entertaining lectures, ticking off lists of treasures in museums. This is a time when a student is excited by insignificant things which to him seem very grand. He has his great man, a professor of the Collège de France who is paid to stoop to the level of his listeners. He straightens his cravat and poses to attract the attention of a woman in the dress circle of the Opéra-Comique. As his initiation proceeds, he becomes more thick-skinned, broadens the scope of his expectations and finally works out how the human strata of society overlay each other. Although at first he merely admires the carriages that parade along the Ch
amps-Elysées on fine days, he soon begins to covet them. Without knowing it, Eugène had already completed this apprenticeship when he left for the vacation, after receiving his bachelor of arts and of law. His childhood illusions, his provincial mentality, had disappeared. On his return to the paternal manor-house and the bosom of his family, his sharpened intelligence and heightened ambition made him see both in a clearer light. Living on the small estate of Rastignac were his father, his mother, his two brothers, his two sisters and an aunt whose wealth consisted solely of annuities. These lands, with a yearly income of around three thousand francs, were subject to the insecurity which governs the laborious industry of wine-growing, and yet each year twelve hundred francs had to be pressed out of this sum for him. The sight of the constant hardship so generously hidden from him, the comparison he was forced to make between his sisters, who had seemed so beautiful to him as a child, and the Parisiennes who now fulfilled his dream of ideal beauty, the uncertain future of this large family, one that rested on his shoulders, the parsimonious care with which he watched them eke out the meagrest yield, keeping for themselves only the dregs of the wine-press, in all, a whole range of circumstances, which there is no need to list here, fuelled his desire to succeed and tripled his yearning for distinction. Like other noble souls, he wanted to succeed on merit alone. But he had the temperament of a Southerner; when the time came to act, his resolve would be weakened by the hesitation that paralyses a young man who finds himself on the open sea knowing neither how to put his energy to best use, nor how to trim the sails so they swell with wind. Although, at first, he resolved to throw himself wholeheartedly into his studies, he was soon side-tracked by the need to make the right connections, and having remarked how much influence women have on life in society, immediately decided to venture into the world and win himself a few female protectors: surely there’d be no shortage of takers for a passionate, witty young man, whose wit and passion were further enhanced by elegant bearing and a kind of highly strung beauty which women readily fall for. These thoughts filled his head as he walked through the fields with his sisters, who found him much changed from the cheerful companion he had once been. His aunt, Madame de Marcillac, who had been presented at court in days gone by, had known the most prominent aristocrats of the time. Suddenly, the ambitious young man saw, in the memories with which his aunt had so often lulled him to sleep, the raw material for several social victories at least as significant as those he was working towards at the law school; he questioned her about family connections which might still be revived. After shaking the branches of the family tree, the old lady deemed that, of all the people who might be of service to her nephew among their self-serving tribe of rich relatives, Madame la Vicomtesse de Beauséant would be the least recalcitrant. She wrote a letter in the old style to this young lady and handed it to Eugène, saying that if he succeeded in his dealings with the vicomtesse she would put him in touch with his other relatives. A few days after he arrived, Rastignac sent his aunt’s letter to Madame de Beauséant. The vicomtesse replied the following day with an invitation to a ball.