Old Man Goriot

by Balzac, Honore de

  Although touched by her sudden change of heart, as he went out Eugène said to himself: ‘Bow and scrape, do whatever it takes. What must the others be like, if, from one moment to the next, the best of women reneges on her promise of friendship and casts you off like an old shoe? So it’s every man for himself? At the same time, it’s true that her house isn’t a shop, and it’s wrong of me to need her help. I must turn myself into a cannonball, as Vautrin said.’ The student’s bitter musings were soon dispelled as he thought ahead to the pleasure of dining with the vicomtesse. And so, by a kind of inevitability, the slightest events in his life were conspiring to drive him in a direction, which – if the terrible sphinx of the Maison Vauquer was to be believed – would lead him, as on a battlefield, to kill or be killed, to deceive or be deceived; to leave his heart, his conscience at the gate, to wear a mask, to dupe other men mercilessly, and, as at Lacedaemonia,135 to win his laurels by stealthily seizing his chance. Upon his return, he found the vicomtesse full of the grace and kindness she had always previously shown him. Together they entered the dining room – whose table glittered with the luxury that, as everyone knows, reached its zenith during the Restoration136 – where the vicomte awaited his wife. Like many world-weary men, virtually the only pleasure left to Monsieur de Beauséant was that of dining well; indeed, his particular brand of gourmandise was on a par with that of Louis XVIII and the Duc d’Escars.137 His table was therefore doubly sumptuous, in terms of both what was served and what it was served in. Eugène could hardly believe his eyes, for this was the first time he had dined in a house where social grandeur was hereditary. The suppers held after balls under the Empire, where military men would fortify themselves to prepare for the internal and external struggles they faced, had just gone out of fashion. Eugène had only ever been to balls. The aplomb that would later serve him so well, which he was even now beginning to acquire, stopped him short of gawping like an idiot. But the sight of the ornate silverware and the thousand elegant details of a sumptuous table, the experience, for the very first time, of discreet and soundless service, made it hard for a man with an imagination as ardent as his not to prefer this infinitely stylish life over the life of privation he had vowed to embrace that morning. His thoughts transported him to the boarding house for a moment, making him shudder with such deep revulsion that he swore to leave in January, as much to take more salubrious lodgings as to flee Vautrin, whose heavy hand he still felt on his shoulder. If a man of good sense were to cast his mind over the thousand kinds of corruption, both spoken and unspoken, that are found in Paris, he would ask himself why on earth the State builds schools there, assembles young people there, how pretty women are ever respected there and how it is that the gold flaunted by moneychangers doesn’t magically take flight from their scale-pans. But considering how few crimes, or indeed misdemeanours, are committed by young men, we must surely show the greatest respect for these patient Tantalus types138 who battle with themselves and who almost always come out victorious! If his struggle with Paris were skilfully depicted, the Poor Student would be one of the most dramatic subjects of modern times. The looks Madame de Beauséant cast at Eugène inviting him to talk came to nothing; he did not wish to speak in front of the vicomte.

  ‘You’re taking me to the Italiens this evening?’ the vicomtesse asked her husband.

  ‘Why, nothing would give me greater pleasure,’ he replied with a mocking gallantry which entirely fooled the student, ‘but I have arranged to meet someone at the Variétés.’

  ‘His mistress,’ she said to herself.

  ‘You’re not seeing Ajuda this evening?’ asked the vicomte.

  ‘No,’ she replied, testily.

  ‘Well! If you absolutely must have an arm, take Monsieur de Rastignac’s.’

  The vicomtesse looked at Eugène, smiling. ‘It would be very compromising for you,’ she said.

  ‘As Monsieur de Chateaubriand once said, The Frenchman loves danger, for there he finds glory,’ replied Rastignac with a bow.

  Moments later he was in a coupé with Madame de Beauséant, being swiftly borne towards that most fashionable of theatres, and thought he must be in a fairy tale when he entered a box in the centre and realized that, together with the vicomtesse, who was magnificently dressed, every lorgnette in the house was trained upon him. Each new delight was proving more intoxicating than the last.

  ‘You wish to tell me something,’ said Madame de Beauséant. ‘Ah! look, there’s Madame de Nucingen, three boxes along. Her sister and Monsieur de Trailles are on the other side.’ As she was speaking, the vicomtesse glanced at the box where Mademoiselle de Rochefide ought to be, and when she saw that Monsieur d’Ajuda was not there, her face took on an extraordinary glow.

  ‘She’s lovely,’ said Eugène, taking a look at Madame de Nucingen.

  ‘She has pale eyelashes.’

  ‘Yes, but what a pretty, slim waist!’

  ‘She has big hands.’

  ‘Such beautiful eyes!’

  ‘Her face is rather long.’

  ‘But its length has refinement.’

  ‘Which is more than you could say about the rest of her. Look at the way she keeps raising and lowering her lorgnette! Every movement she makes betrays the Goriot in her,’ said the vicomtesse, to Eugène’s great astonishment.

  Indeed, Madame de Beauséant was scanning the house through her opera glasses, and, although she appeared to be paying no attention to Madame de Nucingen, hadn’t missed a single gesture she’d made. The theatre was packed full of exquisitely beautiful women. Delphine de Nucingen was more than a little flattered to be the sole object of the attentions of Madame de Beauséant’s young, handsome, elegant cousin: he had eyes only for her.

  ‘If you don’t stop staring at her like that, you will cause a scandal, Monsieur de Rastignac. You will never get anywhere by throwing yourself at a woman.’

  ‘Dear cousin,’ said Eugène, ‘you have already shown me such kindness; if you can see your way to finishing the work you have begun, all I ask of you is a service which would mean little to you and a great deal to me. I have lost my heart.’

  ‘So soon?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘To that woman?’

  ‘Would my suit be heard elsewhere?’ he said, looking meaningfully into his cousin’s eyes. ‘Madame la Duchesse de Carigliano is connected with Madame la Duchesse de Berry,’ he continued after a pause; ‘you are bound to see her – would you be kind enough to present me to her and take me to the ball she is giving on Monday? I’ll meet Madame de Nucingen there and I’ll enter the fray.’

  ‘Gladly,’ she said. ‘If you’ve taken a liking to her already, your love affair is off to a good start. De Marsay is in Princesse Galathionne’s box. Madame de Nucingen is writhing with pique. There’s no better time to approach a woman, particularly a banker’s wife. The ladies of the Chaussée d’Antin all yearn for vengeance.’

  ‘What would you do, in her place?’

  ‘I, dear cousin, would suffer in silence.’

  At this point the Marquis d’Ajuda stepped into Madame de Beauséant’s box.

  ‘I’ve messed up my affairs to come and meet you here,’ he said, ‘and I’m telling you so my sacrifice isn’t in vain.’

  The radiance which streamed from the vicomtesse’s face taught Eugène how to recognize the outpourings of genuine love and not to confuse them with the simpering airs of Parisian coquetry. Tongue-tied with admiration, he looked at his cousin and, with a sigh, gave up his seat to Monsieur d’Ajuda. ‘How noble, how sublime a creature a woman is who loves like this!’ he said to himself. ‘And here’s a man would betray her for some doll! How could anyone betray her?’ His heart filled with a childish rage. He wanted to throw himself at Madame de Beauséant’s feet, he wished for the demonic power to carry her away in his heart, as an eagle sweeps up a white suckling kid from the plain to its eyrie. He was ashamed to be in this great gallery of beauty without his own painting, without a mistress of his own. ‘To
have a mistress and to be as good as royal,’ he said to himself: ‘these are the emblems of power!’ And he looked at Madame de Nucingen as a man who has been challenged eyes his adversary. The vicomtesse turned towards him, discreetly expressing her heartfelt gratitude with a flicker of her eyelids. The first act ended.

  ‘Do you know Madame de Nucingen well enough to introduce Monsieur de Rastignac to her?’ she asked the Marquis d’Ajuda.

  ‘I’m sure she will be delighted to meet Monsieur,’ said the marquis.

  The handsome Portuguese nobleman stood up, took the student’s arm and, in the blink of an eye, Rastignac found himself at Madame de Nucingen’s side.

  ‘Madame la Baronne,’ said the marquis, ‘allow me to present to you the Chevalier Eugène de Rastignac, cousin of the Vicomtesse de Beauséant. You have made such a deep impression on him that I wanted to make his happiness complete by bringing him before his idol.’

  He spoke these words in a playful tone of voice that made palatable their rather blunt intention, albeit one which never displeases a woman if well expressed. Madame de Nucingen smiled and offered Eugène the seat which had just been vacated by her husband.

  ‘I dare not ask you to remain here with me, Monsieur,’ she said to him. ‘When a man has the good fortune to be close to Madame de Beauséant, he stays where he is.’

  ‘I rather think, Madame,’ murmured Eugène softly, ‘that I will best please my cousin by staying here with you. Before Monsieur le Marquis joined us, we were speaking of you and of your distinguished appearance,’ he said, raising his voice again.

  Monsieur d’Ajuda withdrew.

  ‘Monsieur,’ said the baronne, ‘are you really going to stay? Then we’ll get to know each other. Madame de Restaud has already given me a burning desire to meet you.’

  ‘She can’t have meant it, because she had me thrown out of her house.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Madame, I’ll gladly tell you why; but I must ask for your indulgence if I’m to reveal my secret. I lodge next door to your father. Not knowing that Madame de Restaud was his daughter, I was unwise enough to mention him, in all innocence, and this upset your dear sister and her husband. Madame la Duchesse de Langeais and my cousin found this display of filial disloyalty most unseemly. When I described the scene to them, they laughed until they cried. Then Madame de Beauséant spoke of you in extremely flattering terms, comparing you to your sister and saying how good you were to Monsieur Goriot, my neighbour. Indeed, how could you fail to love him? He worships you with such passion that I’m already jealous. We talked about you for two hours this morning. This evening, at dinner with my cousin, my head was so full of your father’s words that I said to her you couldn’t possibly be as beautiful as you were loving. No doubt wishing to encourage such warm admiration, Madame de Beauséant brought me with her tonight, mentioning with her customary delicacy that I would see you here.’

  ‘Dear me, Monsieur,’ said the banker’s wife; ‘so I owe you a debt of gratitude already? At this rate, we’ll soon be old friends.’

  ‘Although friendship with you must be beyond the realm of common feeling,’ said Rastignac, ‘I would never wish to be your friend.’

  Women always find delightful the foolish stock phrases trotted out by beginners; they only seem lame when read in cold blood. A young man’s gestures, looks, his intonation, give them inestimable value. Madame de Nucingen found Rastignac charming. Then, the way women do, when unable to respond to a question put as bluntly as the one the student had just left hanging in the air, she replied on another point.

  ‘Yes, my sister has let herself down by her behaviour towards our poor father, who has been divinely generous to us both. Monsieur de Nucingen had to order me point blank not to receive my father in the morning, before I gave in. But it’s been making me feel miserable for a while now. I cry whenever I think about it. His hostility, yet another example of the inhumanity of marriage, has been one of the most grievous causes of our domestic strife. Although in the eyes of the world I may be the happiest woman in Paris, in reality, I’m the unhappiest. You must think I’m mad to talk to you like this. But you know my father, which means I’m unable to see you as a stranger.’

  ‘You can never have met anyone’, Eugène said to her, ‘driven by a stronger desire to live for you alone. What do all women seek? Happiness,’ he continued, in a voice that went straight to the heart. ‘Well then, if, for a woman, happiness means being loved, adored, having a companion in whom to confide her desires, her thoughts, her grief, her joy; laying bare her soul, with its sweet imperfections and its fine qualities, without fear of betrayal: believe me, this devoted, ever ardent heart can only be found in a young man, full of illusions, who would surrender his life at a single sign from you, who still knows nothing of the world and wants to know nothing, since you are the world for him. As for me, well, you will smile at my naivety. I’ve just arrived from the provinces, wholly green, having only ever known good honest souls, and never thinking to find love here. It so happens that I’ve met my cousin, who has revealed almost too much of her heart; she has opened my eyes to the thousand treasures of passionate love; like Cherubino,139 I’ll be in love with all women until I can devote myself to one alone. When I came in and saw you, I was drawn towards you as if magnetically. You had already been so much in my thoughts! But I never dreamed that you’d be as beautiful as you are in reality. Madame de Beauséant told me to stop staring at you. She doesn’t know how irresistibly my eyes are drawn to your pretty red lips, your white skin, your soft eyes. I, too, am mad to speak such wild thoughts aloud, but let me say them anyway.’

  Nothing pleases a woman more than to have such an outpouring of sweet words murmured in her ear. The most fervent church-goer will listen to them, even if she won’t allow herself to reply. Having started in this vein, Rastignac went on to recite his rosary in a low, but warm, voice; and Madame de Nucingen encouraged Eugène with her smiles, all the while keeping an eye on de Marsay, who didn’t once leave Princesse Galathionne’s box. Rastignac stayed sitting next to Madame de Nucingen until her husband came to take her home.

  ‘Madame,’ Eugène said to her, ‘I shall have the pleasure of calling on you before the Duchesse de Carigliano’s ball.’

  ‘Ssince Matame hass inwited you,’ said the baron, a thickset man of Alsace, whose round face had a dangerously sharp expression, ‘you’re pound to be vell resseeft.’140

  ‘I’m off to a good start: she didn’t shy away when I asked her if she could love me. The horse has taken the bit; now we must leap astride and seize the reins,’ Eugène said to himself, as he went to bid farewell to Madame de Beauséant, who had risen and was about to leave with d’Ajuda. The poor student didn’t know that the baronne’s thoughts had been quite elsewhere, as she was expecting one of those devastatingly conclusive letters from de Marsay. Delighted with his illusory success, Eugène accompanied the vicomtesse out to the porchway to wait for her carriage.

  ‘Your cousin has changed beyond recognition,’ said the Portuguese count to the vicomtesse, laughing, when Eugène had left them. ‘He’s going to break the bank. He’s as slippery as an eel and I’m sure he’ll go far. Only you could have picked out a woman for him at precisely the time she’s most in need of consolation.’

  ‘Although it remains to be seen’, said Madame de Beauséant, ‘whether she’s still in love with the man who’s about to jilt her.’

  The student walked back from the Théâtre-Italien to the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, making the sweetest plans. He hadn’t failed to notice how attentively Madame de Restaud had scrutinized him, both in the vicomtesse’s box and in that of Madame de Nucingen, and he presumed that the comtesse’s door would no longer be closed to him. This meant that he was already on the verge of acquiring four major connections – for he was counting on winning over the maréchale – at the heart of Parisian high society. Without dwelling too much on ways and means, he had already worked out that in society’s complex game of interes
ts he needed a cog to ride on to get to the top of the machine; once there, he felt he had it in his powers to put a spoke or two in its wheel. ‘If Madame de Nucingen shows an interest in me, I’ll teach her how to handle her husband. That husband of hers turns everything he touches into gold; with his help, I could make my fortune in no time.’ He didn’t put this to himself so bluntly: he wasn’t yet politically minded enough to estimate, evaluate and calculate a situation; his ideas drifted across the horizon in the shape of light clouds, and, although they lacked the vehemence of those of Vautrin, if they’d been tested in the crucible of conscience they’d have yielded nothing pure. It is by a series of transactions of this nature that men arrive at the loose morality professed by our current age. Today, more than ever before, they have become a rarity, those singular men of rectitude, those strong wills that never yield to evil, for whom even the slightest deviation from the straight and narrow seems criminal; magnificent icons of probity who have given us two masterpieces: Molière’s Alceste and, recently, Jeanie Deans and her father, in Walter Scott’s novel.141 Perhaps a work portraying the opposite, a depiction of the tortuous route taken by the conscience of an ambitious man of the world, as he flirts with evil in an attempt to achieve his goal while keeping up appearances, would be no less fine or dramatic. By the time he reached the boarding house, Rastignac had fallen for Madame de Nucingen, who had seemed so slim, as slender as a swallow. The dizzying softness of her eyes, the silkiness of her skin, so delicately textured he could almost see the blood that flowed beneath it, the enchanting sound of her voice, her blonde hair: he remembered everything; and perhaps the walk, by stirring his blood, had also played a role in his infatuation. The student banged on old man Goriot’s door.

  ‘Neighbour,’ he said, ‘I’ve just seen Madame Delphine.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘At the Italiens.’

  ‘Was she enjoying herself? Come in, come in.’ And the old man got up to open the door in his nightshirt, then immediately hopped back into bed. ‘So – tell me all about her,’ he demanded.