Old Man Goriot (Penguin Classics)

by Honoré de Balzac

  ‘Vautrin is right: wealth equals virtue!’ he said to himself.

  As soon as he arrived at the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, he ran up to his room, came down with ten francs for the coachman, then went into the unsavoury dining room where he found the eighteen diners feeding like animals at the trough. He balked at the room’s appearance, at the sight of such wretchedness. The transition was too abrupt, the contrast too stark not to cause a sudden surge in his ambition. On the one hand, the fresh, delightful images of the most elegant creatures in society, young, animated faces, surrounded by the marvels of art and luxury, minds alive with passion and poetry; on the other, a series of murky portraits with begrimed edges, faces with nothing left showing but the ropes and pulleys of their passions. The teachings that the rage of a spurned woman had wrenched from Madame de Beauséant, her beguiling proposals, rose to the surface of his memory, and poverty provided a commentary on them all. Rastignac resolved to pursue two parallel lines of attack to make his fortune, to rely on both love and the law, to be a man of learning and a man of fashion. What a child he still was! These two lines are asymptotes104 and can never meet.

  ‘You seem rather solemn, Monsieur le Marquis,’ said Vautrin, giving him one of those penetrating stares with which he seemed to make himself privy to the most deeply buried secrets of the heart.

  ‘I’m not in the mood to put up with the jokes of those who call me Monsieur le Marquis,’ he replied. ‘In this city, to be a real marquis you need a hundred thousand livres a year, and when you lodge at the Maison Vauquer you’re hardly the favourite of Fortune.’

  Vautrin gave Rastignac a look that was both paternal and contemptuous, as if to say: ‘Brat! I’d make light work of you!’ Then he replied: ‘Perhaps you’re in a bad mood because you failed to impress the beautiful Comtesse de Restaud.’

  ‘Her door will be closed to me from now on because I mentioned that her father ate at our table,’ cried Rastignac.

  The diners looked at each other. Old man Goriot lowered his eyes and turned away to wipe them.

  ‘You flicked some snuff in my eye,’ he said to his neighbour.

  ‘From now on, anyone who upsets old man Goriot will answer to me,’ replied Eugène, glaring at the man sitting next to the old vermicelli dealer; ‘he’s worth more than all of us put together. Apart from the ladies,’ he said, turning to Mademoiselle Taillefer.

  These words fell like a thunderbolt, Eugène’s tone having silenced the diners. Only Vautrin replied, mockingly: ‘If you’re going to pick up old man Goriot’s tab and make yourself his keeper, you’ll need to know how to hold a sword and fire a pistol properly.’

  ‘And so I will,’ said Eugène.

  ‘So the campaign starts today?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ replied Rastignac. ‘But that’s my business and I’ll keep it to myself, seeing as I don’t go sticking my nose into other people’s goings-on at night.’

  Vautrin shot Rastignac a sidelong look.

  ‘Dear boy, if you don’t want to be fooled by puppets, you have to get right inside the theatre and not be content with peering through holes in the scenery. That’s enough talk,’ he added, seeing that Eugène was ready to press the point. ‘We can have a little chat about this whenever you want.’

  Dinner became a cold and glum affair. Old Goriot, still grieving over the student’s words, was unaware that the general attitude towards him had changed and that a young man capable of silencing his persecutors had come to his defence.

  ‘So the latest on Monsieur Goriot’, said Madame Vauquer in a low voice, ‘is that he’s the father of a comtesse?’

  ‘And of a baron’s wife,’ Rastignac replied.

  ‘What else could he be?’ said Bianchon to Rastignac; ‘I’ve felt his head and there’s only one bump, that of paternity: he’ll be an Eternal Father.’

  Eugène was too preoccupied to laugh at Bianchon’s joke. He wanted to turn Madame de Beauséant’s advice to good account and was wondering how and where he could get hold of some money. His brow furrowed as he pictured the savannahs of society stretching out before him, full and yet empty. After dinner, the others drifted out one by one, leaving him alone in the dining room.

  ‘So you saw my daughter?’ said Goriot, his voice choked with emotion.

  Awoken from his daydream, Eugène took the old fellow by the hand and, looking at him with warmth and pity, said: ‘You are a good and worthy man. We’ll talk about your daughters later.’ He stood up without waiting to hear old Goriot’s reply and withdrew to his room, where he wrote his mother the following letter:

  ‘Dearest Mother, see if you can’t perform a miracle and make milk flow from a third breast for your son. I’m in a position to swiftly make a fortune. I need twelve hundred francs, and I need them whatever it takes. Don’t mention my request to Father, as he may oppose it, and if I don’t have the money I’ll be racked with such despair that it may lead me to blow my brains out. I’ll explain my motives when I next come home, for I’d need to write volumes to make my situation clear to you. I haven’t been gambling, dear Mother, I have no debts; but if you care about preserving the life you gave me, you must find me this amount. You see, I’ll be calling on the Vicomtesse de Beauséant, who has taken me under her wing. I’ll be moving in the highest circles and I haven’t a sou to buy myself clean gloves. I can get by on bread and water and go without food if I have to; but I can’t do without the tools they use to tend the vines round here. For me, this is the difference between making my way or languishing in the mud. I know that you have placed all your hopes in me and I want to fulfil them just as soon as I can. Dearest Mother, sell some of your old jewellery, I will replace it shortly. I’m familiar enough with our family’s position to appreciate the enormity of such a sacrifice, and you must believe that I am not asking you to make it in vain or I’d be a monster. Do not interpret my plea as anything other than a cry of urgent need. Our entire future hangs on this grant with which I must open my campaign; for life in Paris is an eternal battle. If, to make up the amount, there is nothing for it but to sell my aunt’s lace, tell her that I will send her other, far more beautiful pieces.’ Etc.

  He wrote to each of his sisters, asking for their savings; and to ensure that the rest of the family did not hear of the sacrifice they would be only too happy to make on his behalf, he appealed to their discretion by touching the chords of honour which have such resonance and are so finely tuned in young hearts. Nonetheless, once he had written these letters, he felt an involuntary pang: his heart was racing, he was trembling. Despite his ambition, the young man recognized the nobility and purity of these souls hidden away in their solitude; he was well aware of the hardship he would cause his two sisters, and also of the joy, the pleasure, they would take from discussing their beloved brother in secret, deep in the vineyards. His heightened awareness showed them to him, counting out their modest pile of treasure in secret: he saw them using all the wily ingenuity young girls have at their disposal, to send him the money incognito, exalting themselves as they tried their hand at deceit for the first time. ‘A sister’s heart is as pure as a diamond, its kindness knows no bounds!’ he said to himself. He was ashamed of what he had written. How heartfelt their wishes would be, how pure the flight of their souls towards heaven! How exquisite the delight of their self-sacrifice! What grief his mother would feel, if she failed to send the full amount! These noble feelings, these terrible sacrifices, would be the stepping stones that would bring him to Delphine de Nucingen. A few tears, the last grains of incense laid on the sacred altar of the family, splashed from his eyes. He paced up and down in a torment of despair. Old Goriot, seeing him in this state through the half-open door, came in and asked, ‘What’s wrong, Monsieur?’

  ‘Ah! Dear neighbour, I am still a son and a brother, just as you are a father. You are right to tremble for Comtesse Anastasie; she has fallen into the hands of Monsieur Maxime de Trailles, who will ruin her.’

  Old man Goriot withdrew stammering something Eu
gène

  did not catch. The next day, Rastignac went out to post his letters. He hesitated right up to the last moment, but then threw them into the box, saying: ‘I will succeed!’ Such is the fatal motto of a gambler, or a great captain, one which destroys more men than it redeems.

  A few days later, Eugène went to call on Madame de Restaud and was not received. He went back three times and a further three times found her door closed to him, even though he called when the Comte Maxime de Trailles wasn’t there. The vicomtesse had been right. The student stopped studying. He turned up at lectures to answer the roll-call and took himself off as soon as he had been registered. He followed the same reasoning as most students. He would put off studying until it was time to sit his exams; he would let his second- and third-year courses pile up, then at the last minute apply himself seriously to learning law, in one short spurt. That left him at liberty to sail across the ocean of Paris for fifteen months, to throw himself into bartering for women or fishing for his fortune. During this week, he visited Madame de Beauséant twice, arriving just as the Marquis d’Ajuda’s carriage was leaving. That illustrious woman, the most poetic figure of the Faubourg Saint-Germain set, held sway for a few more days, and the marriage between Mademoiselle de Rochefide and the Marquis d’Ajuda-Pinto hung in the balance. But these last few days, which the fear of losing her happiness made the most passionate of all, would only serve to precipitate the catastrophe. The Marquis d’Ajuda, together with the Rochefides, viewed this falling-out and reconciliation as fortuitous, hoping that Madame de Beauséant would become accustomed to the idea of the marriage and end up renouncing her afternoons in favour of the future a man expects in life. Despite the most heartfelt promises, made afresh each day, Monsieur d’Ajuda was acting a part and the vicomtesse was enjoying playing along. ‘Instead of nobly throwing herself out of the window, she was letting herself be tricked into falling down the stairs,’ concluded the Duchesse de Langeais, her best friend. Nonetheless, these dying rays shone long enough to keep the vicomtesse in Paris, where she could be of use to her young relative, for whom she felt a sort of superstitious affection. Eugène had shown himself to be full of devotion and sensitivity towards her, in a situation where a woman sees neither pity nor true consolation in anyone’s eyes. If a man should speak sweet words to her at such a time, he does so from self-interest.

  As he wished to chart the lie of the land before attempting to storm the house of Nucingen, Rastignac undertook to acquaint himself with the facts of old man Goriot’s earlier life and collected a fair amount of reliable information, which may be summarized as follows.

  In the days before the Revolution, Jean-Joachim Goriot was an ordinary workman in the vermicelli trade, skilful, thrifty and canny enough to purchase his master’s business when chance made him a victim of the first uprising in 1789. He set up shop in the Rue de la Jussienne, near the Corn Exchange, and when invited to become president of his section, had the enormous good sense to accept, so that his business was protected by the most influential people at that dangerous time. This wise step was the making of him, when the food shortage, true or feigned, led to an exponential rise in the price of grain in Paris. Some people killed each other at bakery doors, while certain other people, without any uproar, went and bought Italian pasta at the grocers. During that year, citizen Goriot accumulated the capital which later allowed him to do business with the superior advantage that a vast quantity of cash confers on its owner. What happened to him is what happens to all men of only average ability. His mediocrity saved him. Moreover, as his wealth only became common knowledge at the time when it was no longer dangerous to be rich, he excited no one’s jealousy. The grain trade appeared to occupy his entire mind. Whether he was dealing in wheat, flour, middlings – recognizing their quality or origin, taking care of their storage, predicting prices, forecasting a good or poor harvest, procuring cheap cereals, buying in supplies from Sicily or the Ukraine – no man was a match for Goriot. To see him running his business, analysing the laws governing grain imports and exports, working out their spirit, seizing upon their loopholes, any man would have thought him capable of being a Minister of State. Patient, active, energetic, steadfast, quick to dispatch, he had an eagle eye, he was always a step ahead, he saw everything coming, knew everything, concealed everything: a diplomat in his design, a soldier in his stamina. Away from his speciality, from his simple, obscure place of work – on whose steps he lingered during his leisure time, leaning against the door-post – he reverted to his former self: the dull-witted, brutish workman, incapable of following an argument, oblivious to all the pleasures of the mind, the man who fell asleep at the theatre, one of those Parisian Dolibans105 who excel only in stupidity. Natures such as these are almost all the same. You will find that nearly all have some sublime feeling in their hearts. Two feelings alone had engrossed the vermicelli dealer’s heart, had absorbed its humidity, just as the grain trade had soaked up all his intellect. His wife, the only daughter of a rich farmer in the Brie region, was the sacred object of his devotion and boundless love. Goriot admired her nature, both fragile and robust, sensitive and appealing, so very different from his own. If a man has any innate feeling in his heart, surely it is pride at offering protection to a weaker being at any time? If you combine that with love, the intense gratitude felt by all sincere souls towards the source of their happiness, you will understand a whole host of behavioural peculiarities. After seven years of unclouded happiness, Goriot had the great misfortune to lose his wife, just as her influence over him was beginning to extend beyond the realm of feeling. Perhaps she would have sparked off his inert nature, perhaps she would have sown in it some seeds of understanding of the world and of life. In these new circumstances, Goriot’s paternal devotion deepened to an insane degree. He transferred his love, thwarted by death, to his two daughters, who at first fully satisfied his emotional needs. However brilliant the offers made by tradesmen or farmers eager to foist their daughters onto him, he preferred to remain a widower. His father-in-law, the only man he had any fondness for, claimed that he knew for a fact that Goriot had sworn never to be unfaithful to his wife. The men at the Corn Exchange, incapable of understanding this sublime piece of madness, cracked jokes about Goriot and gave him a grotesque nickname. The first man who thought fit to call him by it to his face, while raising his glass to clinch a deal, received such a blow on the shoulder from the vermicelli dealer that it sent him head first into a milestone in the Rue Oblin.106 Goriot’s unquestioning devotion, his easily triggered, delicately adjusted love for his daughters, was so well known that one day a competitor of his, to make him leave the Exchange so he would gain the upper hand in a deal, told him that Delphine had just been run over by a cabriolet. The vermicelli dealer, his face drained of colour, immediately left the Corn Exchange. The distressing feelings that this false alarm aroused in him laid him low for several days. Although he spared this man a lethal blow to the shoulder, Goriot did drive him out of the Corn Exchange by forcing him to go bankrupt in a critical situation.

  Naturally, he gave his two daughters an extravagant education. With an income of over sixty thousand livres per year and personal expenses of less than twelve hundred francs, Goriot’s only pleasure lay in granting his daughters’ every wish: the very best masters were instructed to equip them with the accomplishments that are the markers of a fine education; they had a companion – happily for them, she was a woman of intelligence and good taste; they rode, they had their own carriage, they lived as the mistresses of a rich old lord would live; they only had to express some expensive desire to see their father fall over himself to fulfil it; all he asked for was some sign of affection in return for his offerings. Goriot elevated his daughters to the rank of angels, and so he ranked them above himself, poor man! He even loved the pain they caused him. When his daughters reached a marriageable age, they were able to choose their husbands to suit their tastes: they had half their father’s fortune each as a dowry. Courted for her beauty by
the Comte de Restaud, Anastasie’s aristocratic aspirations led her to leave her father’s house for the higher echelons of society. Delphine loved money: she married Nucingen, a banker of German extraction, who became a baron of the Holy Roman Empire.107 Goriot remained a vermicelli dealer. Before long, his daughters and sons-in-law couldn’t bear to see him continue his trade, even though it was his entire life. After resisting their entreaties for five years, he consented to retire on the capital raised by the sale of his business and the profits of the last few years; resources which Madame Vauquer, in whose establishment he was to become a fixture, estimated would bring in an annual income of eight to ten thousand livres. It was his despair at seeing his two daughters forced by their husbands to refuse not only to have him to live with them, but even to receive him in public, that drove him to remove himself to the boarding house.