Old Man Goriot

by Balzac, Honore de

  ‘Ah! I remember now,’ said Eugène. ‘Madame de Restaud came to my attention at your ball; I went to call on her this morning.’

  ‘She must have found your visit rather irksome,’ said Madame de Beauséant, smiling.

  ‘Yes! indeed, I’m such an ignorant soul that I’ll turn everyone against me if you refuse to come to my aid. I can’t help thinking that in Paris it’s very hard to meet a woman who is young, beautiful, rich and unattached. I need someone to teach me what women are so good at explaining: life. I’ll come up against a Monsieur de Trailles wherever I go. So I came here to ask you to solve a mystery and to explain the nature of the blunder I made there. I mentioned a certain old man …’

  ‘Madame la Duchesse de Langeais,’ said Jacques, interrupting the student, who made the gesture of a man sorely vexed.

  ‘If you wish to succeed,’ said the vicomtesse in a low voice, ‘you must learn to hide your feelings.’

  ‘Ah! Good afternoon, my dear,’ she continued, standing up and going to greet the duchesse, whose hands she squeezed with as much warmth as if she were her sister, and to which the duchesse responded with the most charming display of affection.

  ‘Here are two good friends,’ Rastignac said to himself. ‘I’ll have two protectors now; the two women must have similar loyalties and this lady will surely take an interest in me.’

  ‘To what generous motive do I owe the pleasure of your call, my dear Antoinette?’ said Madame de Beauséant.

  ‘I happened to see Monsieur d’Ajuda-Pinto go into Monsieur de Rochefide’s house and I thought you must be alone.’

  Madame de Beauséant did not purse her lips or flush, her brow remained unruffled and her expression unchanged as the duchesse pronounced these lethal words.

  ‘If I’d known you had company …’ added the duchesse, turning to Eugène.

  ‘This is Monsieur Eugène de Rastignac, a cousin of mine,’ said the vicomtesse. ‘Have you any news of General Montriveau?’ she continued. ‘Sérisy was saying yesterday that we hardly ever see him these days – perhaps he called on you today?’

  The duchesse, who was believed to have been abandoned by Montriveau, with whom she was desperately in love, felt the sharp point of this question pierce her heart. She flushed, replying: ‘He was at the Elysée89 yesterday.’

  ‘On duty,’ said Madame de Beauséant.

  ‘Clara,’ continued the duchesse, her eyes glinting with mischief; ‘I expect you’ve heard about Monsieur d’Ajuda-Pinto and Mademoiselle de Rochefide? The banns are to be published tomorrow.’

  The blow was too harsh, the vicomtesse turned white and replied, laughing: ‘One of those rumours that keeps fools amused. Why would Monsieur d’Ajuda connect one of the noblest names in Portugal with that of the Rochefides, whose title dates from yesterday?’

  ‘They say that Berthe brings with her an annual income of two hundred thousand livres.’

  ‘Monsieur d’Ajuda is far too rich to care about such things.’

  ‘But my dear, Mademoiselle de Rochefide is charming.’

  ‘Really!’

  ‘In any case, he’s dining there tonight; all the arrangements have been agreed. I’m most surprised to find you know so little about it.’

  ‘So what was this blunder of yours, Monsieur?’ said Madame de Beauséant. ‘This poor boy is so recently come into society, my dear Antoinette, that he has no idea what we are talking about. For his sake, let us speak no more of this until tomorrow. Tomorrow, you know, it will all no doubt be official, and your friendly communication will have the authority of a decree.’

  The duchesse gave Eugène one of those disdainful stares which swallow a man whole, chew him up and spit him out.

  ‘Madame, I have unwittingly dealt a blow to Madame de Restaud’s heart. Unwittingly: there lies my mistake,’ said the student, whose presence of mind had served him well, and who had detected the biting commentary hidden behind the affectionate exchange between the two women.

  ‘You continue to receive – and you perhaps fear – people who secretly know how much pain they are causing you, whereas he who wounds without realizing how deeply he has wounded is seen as an oaf, a fool incapable of turning anything to account, and scorned by all.’

  Madame de Beauséant gave the student one of those melting looks which great souls are able to imbue with both gratitude and dignity. Her look was a balm that soothed the blow the duchesse had struck to his morale by sizing him up with the eye of a bailiff’s assessor.

  ‘You won’t believe’, continued Eugène, ‘that I had just managed to win favour with the Comte de Restaud; for’, he said, turning to the duchesse and adopting an air that was both humble and mischievous, ‘I must tell you, Madame, that I am still a poor devil of a student, very much alone, very poor …’

  ‘Keep that to yourself, Monsieur de Rastignac. We women never want what no one else will have.’

  ‘No matter!’ said Eugène, ‘I’m only twenty-two, a man must learn to bear the hardships that come with his age. Besides, I’m at Confession; and I could hardly be kneeling in a prettier confessional: this is where a man commits the sins he admits to in the other kind.’

  The duchesse affected a cold expression on hearing such irreligious talk, whose poor taste she condemned by saying to the vicomtesse: ‘Monsieur has just arrived …’

  Madame de Beauséant began to laugh outright at both her cousin and the duchesse.

  ‘He has just arrived, my dear, and is looking for a governess to give him lessons in good taste.’

  ‘Madame la Duchesse,’ Eugène continued, ‘surely it’s natural for a man to wish to learn the secret of that which enchants him?’ (‘Dear me,’ he said to himself, ‘I’m sure I must sound just like a hairdresser.’)

  ‘But Madame de Restaud is, I believe, the pupil of Monsieur de Trailles,’ said the duchesse.

  ‘A circumstance I was entirely unaware of, Madame,’ continued the student. ‘And so I rashly threw myself between them. As I was saying, I was getting along fairly well with the husband, I had been tolerated for a while by the wife, when I took it upon myself to tell them that I knew a man I’d just seen leaving by a hidden staircase and who had kissed the comtesse at the end of a corridor.’

  ‘Who was that?’ asked the two women.

  ‘An old man who, like myself, poor student that I am, lives on two louis a month, holed up in the Faubourg Saint-Marceau; a truly wretched old man mocked by all, whom we call old man Goriot.’

  ‘Child that you are,’ cried the vicomtesse; ‘Madame de Restaud was once Mademoiselle Goriot.’

  ‘The daughter of a vermicelli dealer,’ continued the duchesse, ‘a woman of low birth who was presented at court on the same day as a pastry cook’s daughter. Don’t you remember, Clara? The King started to laugh and made a Latin bon mot, something to do with flour. People who are, how did it go? People who are …’

  ‘Ejusdem farinae,’90 said Eugène.

  ‘That was it,’ said the duchesse.

  ‘What! He’s her father?’ the student responded, with a gesture of horror.

  ‘Why, of course; the old fellow had two daughters, he dotes on them both, although they’ve near enough disowned him.’

  ‘Isn’t the other one’, said the vicomtesse, looking at Madame de Langeais, ‘married to a banker with a German name, a Baron de Nucingen or somesuch? Delphine, is that it? You know, that blonde woman with a side-box at the Opéra, who comes to the Bouffons as well and laughs too loudly in order to draw attention to herself?’

  The duchesse smiled, saying, ‘My dear, I do admire you. Why do you take so much interest in these people? You’d have to be madly in love, as Restaud was, to have covered yourself in flour for the sake of Mademoiselle Anastasie. Well! He’ll end up with precious little to show for it! Monsieur de Trailles has got his hands on her now and will be her ruin.’

  ‘They’ve disowned their father,’ repeated Eugène.

  ‘Indeed, yes, their father, the old man, a father,’ co
ntinued the vicomtesse, ‘a good father, who gave them, so I’ve heard, five or six hundred thousand francs91 apiece so they’d make a good match and be happy, keeping an annual income of just eight to ten thousand livres for himself, believing that his daughters would always be his daughters, that he’d be able to divide himself between two lives, two homes in which he’d be pampered and adored. In the space of two years, the sons-in-law had banished him from their sight, as if he was the lowliest of wretches …’

  Recently refreshed by the pure and sacrosanct feelings of his family, still in love with his youthful beliefs, Eugène’s eyes welled up with tears: this was his first day on the battlefield of Parisian civilization. Genuine emotion transmits itself so clearly that the three of them looked at each other for a while in silence.

  ‘Dear God!’ said Madame de Langeais, ‘how terrible that seems, and yet we see it every day. Is there not some underlying cause? Tell me, my dear, have you ever reflected on the nature of a son-in-law? A son-in-law is a man for whom we – you and I – will raise a dear little creature attached to us by a thousand bonds, who for seventeen years will be the family’s joy, its swan-white soul, as Lamartine92 might say, and who then becomes its scourge. When this man has taken her from us, the first thing he will do is wield love like an axe93 and sever every feeling in our angel’s heart that binds her to her family. Yesterday, our daughter was everything to us, we were everything to her; the next day she’s our enemy. Do we not see this tragedy played out every day? Here, a daughter-in-law is breathtakingly rude to her father-in-law, who sacrificed everything for his son. Elsewhere, a son-in-law turfs out his mother-in-law. I hear people asking where all the drama is in society these days; well, there’s the terrible tragedy of the son-in-law, not to mention the ridiculous farce of marriage. I know exactly what happened to the old vermicelli dealer. I think I recall that this Foriot94 of ours …’

  ‘Goriot, Madame.’

  ‘Yes, this Moriot, was president of his section95 during the Revolution; he had inside knowledge of the famous food shortage and made his fortune during that time by selling flour at ten times more than he bought it for. He was given any price he asked for. My grandmother’s intendant96 sold him vast quantities of it. Goriot, like the rest of his kind,97 probably shared the proceeds with the Committee of Public Safety.98 I remember the intendant telling my grandmother she could stay at Grandvilliers in all safety, wheat being a guarantee of good citizenship. Well, this Loriot, who sold wheat to those butchers, has only ever had one passion. They say he’s besotted with his daughters. He found the elder daughter a perch in the house of Restaud and grafted the other onto the Baron de Nucingen, a wealthy banker with royalist leanings.99 As you may well imagine, under the Empire, the two sons-in-law didn’t trouble their heads too much about having the old veteran of ’93100 at home; under Bonaparte, that still passed muster. But when the Bourbons were reinstated,101 the old fellow was a thorn in Monsieur de Restaud’s side, and even more so in the banker’s. The daughters, who still loved their father, perhaps, tried to accommodate chalk and cheese, father and husband; they received Goriot when no one else was there; they invented tender excuses. “Papa, come, we’ll be more at ease because we’ll be alone!” and so on. As for me, my dear, I believe that true feelings have eyes and an intelligence: and so the heart of this poor veteran of ’93 must have bled. He saw that his daughters were ashamed of him; that they loved their husbands, but that he was an embarrassment to his sons-in-law. He therefore had to sacrifice himself. He sacrificed himself because he was a father: he took himself into exile. Seeing his daughters happy, he understood that he had done the right thing. The father and his children were complicit in this petty crime. We see it everywhere. Wouldn’t old Doriot have been like a greasy stain in his daughters’ drawing rooms? He would have felt embarrassed to be there, it would have grieved him. What happened to this father can happen to even the prettiest girl at the hands of the man she loves most of all: if she importunes him with her love, he leaves, he behaves like a coward to escape her. That’s how it is with feelings. A heart is a treasure chest: empty it in one go and you are ruined. We are as unforgiving of a feeling for having revealed its depth as we are of a man for being penniless. He was a father who gave everything. For twenty years, he gave his soul, his love; as for his wealth, he gave that away in a day. Once the lemon had been squeezed dry, his daughters threw the peel into the road.’

  ‘The world is foul,’ said the vicomtesse, fiddling with the fringe of her shawl and without raising her eyes, for she was cut to the quick by the words meant for her that Madame de Langeais had slipped into this story.

  ‘Foul! No,’ countered the duchesse; ‘it follows its course, that’s all. If I’m talking about the world like this, it’s to show you that I’m not fooled by it. I think as you do,’ she said, pressing the vicomtesse’s hand. ‘The world is a quagmire, let us try to stay on high ground.’ She stood up and kissed Madame de Beauséant on the forehead, saying: ‘You’re very beautiful at the moment, my dear. You have the prettiest colour I’ve ever seen.’ Then she left, with a cursory nod in Rastignac’s direction.

  ‘Old man Goriot is sublime!’ said Eugène, remembering how he had seen him twist his silver-gilt on the night of the ball.

  Madame de Beauséant did not hear him; she was lost in thought. A few moments went by in silence and the poor student, paralysed with embarassment, dared neither to leave, nor to stay, nor speak.

  ‘Society is foul and evil,’ said the vicomtesse, at last. ‘As soon as misfortune comes our way, there is always a friend ready to come and tell us about it, piercing our heart with a dagger even as they invite us to admire the handle. Sarcasm and mockery – so soon! Well! I will defend myself.’ She raised her head like the noble lady she was, her proud eyes blazing. ‘Oh!’ she said, catching sight of Eugène. ‘You’re here.’

  ‘Still,’ he said sheepishly.

  ‘Well, Monsieur de Rastignac, treat this world as it deserves to be treated. You want to succeed, and I will help you. You will plumb the depths of female depravity, you will gauge the breadth of the contemptible vanity of men. Although I’ve read widely in the book of society, there were a few pages even I knew nothing about. Now, I know them all. The more coldly calculating you are, the further you will go. Strike ruthlessly and you’ll be respected. Accept that men and women are post-horses that you ride into the ground then leave at each stage, and you’ll reach the pinnacle of your desires. Remember, you’ll be nothing here without a woman to further your interests. You need one who is young, wealthy and elegant. But if you have a single genuine feeling, bury it like treasure; don’t ever let others suspect its existence or you’ll be lost. Instead of being the torturer, you’ll become the victim. If you ever fall in love, guard your secret well! Don’t reveal a thing until you have made sure of the person to whom you are opening your heart. From now on, to protect this love which does not yet exist, learn to be wary of this world of ours. Listen to me, Miguel …’ (she innocently called him by the wrong name without realizing), ‘there is something even more terrible than the neglect of the father by his two daughters, who wish him dead. And that is the rivalry between the two sisters. Restaud has birth, his wife has been recognized, she has been presented at court; but her sister, her rich sister, the beautiful Madame Delphine de Nucingen, the wife of a money-man, is dying of pique; she’s consumed by jealousy, she’s a thousand leagues behind her sister; her sister is no longer her sister; the two women disown each other just as each disowns her father. And that’s why Madame de Nucingen would lap up all the mud that lies between the Rue Saint-Lazare and the Rue de Grenelle to enter my drawing room. She thought that de Marsay would help her reach her goal, so she has made herself de Marsay’s slave and is boring de Marsay to tears. De Marsay cares little for her. If you introduce her to me, you’ll become her favourite, she’ll worship you. Love her afterwards, if you can, otherwise, make use of her. I’ll acknowledge her once or twice at large parties, among the cr
owd; but I will never receive her in the morning. I’ll bow to her, that will suffice. By uttering the name of old man Goriot you have ensured that the comtesse’s door will always be closed to you. Yes, my dear, go and call on Madame de Restaud twenty times, and twenty times you will find she is not at home. You are in her black books. Now, let old man Goriot introduce you to Madame Delphine de Nucingen. The beautiful Madame de Nucingen will be your ensign. Be the man she singles out and women will fall at your feet. Her rivals, her friends, her closest friends, will all try and take you away from her. Some women prefer a man who has already been chosen by another woman, just as a poor bourgeoise hopes that by wearing the same hats as we do, she will acquire our poise. Be successful. In Paris, success is everything, it’s the key to power. If the women find you witty and talented, that’s what the men will believe, if you don’t undeceive them. Then you can set your sights on anything you wish, you’ll have a foot in everyone’s door. And then you will know what society really is, a bunch of frauds and knaves. Do not join either one faction or another. I will lend you my name; it will guide you through this labyrinth like Ariadne’s thread.102 Do not compromise it,’ she said, arching her neck and casting a regal glance at the student; ‘I want it returned to me in perfect condition. Go now, and leave me. We women have our own battles to fight.’

  ‘Should you ever need a man willing to spring a mine,’ said Eugène, interrupting her.

  ‘If I should?’ she asked.

  He struck his heart, smiled to see his cousin smile and left. It was five o’clock. Eugène was hungry; he feared he might not arrive in time for dinner. This fear made him appreciate the delight of crossing Paris swiftly in a carriage. The pleasure this brought was purely automatic, leaving him at liberty to pursue the thoughts jostling for position in his mind. When a young man of his age is scorned, he loses his temper, he frets, he shakes his fist at the whole of society, he wants to avenge himself, ‘and yet he is prone to self-doubt. Rastignac’s head was still ringing with the words: You have ensured that the comtesse’s door will always be closed to you. ‘I will go there!’ he said to himself, ‘and if Madame de Beauséant is right, if I am barred … I … Madame de Restaud will find me in every drawing room she enters. I will learn to fence, to fire a pistol, I’ll kill her Maxime!’ – ‘And what about money!’ his conscience cried out to him; ‘where will you get that?’ Suddenly the ostentatious wealth on display at the Comtesse de Restaud’s house glittered before his eyes. There, he had seen the kind of luxury which a Mademoiselle Goriot was bound to find attractive, gildings, showpieces that drew attention to their cost, the undiscerning luxury of the parvenu, the extravagance of the kept woman. This glittering mirage was suddenly outshone by the majestic Hôtel de Beauséant. His imagination, soaring among the highest peaks of Parisian society, sowed a thousand base thoughts in his heart, as it stretched his head and mind. He recognized the world for what it is – a place where laws and morality have no power over the rich – and he saw in wealth the ultima ratio mundi.103