Old Man Goriot (Penguin Classics)

by Honoré de Balzac

  The father’s final sigh was to be one of joy. That sigh was the summation of his entire life: he was deceived to the last. Old man Goriot was respectfully laid back down on his pallet. From this point onwards, his features would bear the painful imprint of the ensuing struggle between death and life, in a system now devoid of the cerebral awareness which determines human feelings of pleasure and pain. It would only be a matter of time before there would be a complete collapse.

  ‘He’ll stay like this for a few hours and will die without our noticing; we won’t even hear a death-rattle. His brain must be completely congested.’

  Just then they heard the footsteps of a young woman, out of breath from the stairs.

  ‘She’s come too late,’ said Rastignac.

  It wasn’t Delphine, but Thérèse, her chambermaid.

  ‘Monsieur Eugène,’ she said; ‘a terrible scene blew up between Monsieur and Madame, over the money my poor mistress requested for her father. She fainted, the doctor came, she had to be bled, she kept calling out: “My father’s dying, I want to see Papa!” Why, she was weeping and wailing fit to break your heart.’

  ‘Enough, Thérèse. Even if she came now, there’d be no point. Monsieur Goriot is no longer conscious.’

  ‘The poor dear old gentleman, so he really is that ill!’ said Thérèse.

  ‘You don’t need me any more – got to go and get my dinner, it’s half four,’ said Sylvie as she went out, almost colliding with Madame de Restaud at the top of the stairs.

  The comtesse appeared, a grave and terrible apparition. She looked at the poorly lit death-bed with its one candle and was moved to tears to see her father’s mask-like features, still twitching with the last tremors of life. Bianchon withdrew discreetly.

  ‘I didn’t get away in time,’ the comtesse said to Rastignac.

  The student gave her a nod full of sadness. Madame de Restaud took hold of her father’s hand and kissed it.

  ‘Forgive me, Father! You used to say that my voice would summon you from the grave; please then, come back to life for just a moment and bless your repentant daughter. Please hear me. This is terrible! No one on earth but you will ever bless me again. Everyone hates me; you alone love me. Even my own children will despise me. Take me with you; I’ll love you, I’ll look after you. He can’t hear me any more, I must be mad.’ She fell to her knees and stared wild-eyed at her father’s poor exhausted body.

  ‘My misery is complete,’ she said, looking at Eugène. ‘Monsieur de Trailles has gone, leaving huge debts behind him, and I have found out that he was deceiving me. My husband will never forgive me and now has complete control over my fortune. I’ve lost all my illusions. Alas! Why did I forsake the only heart’ (here she gestured towards her father) ‘that held me in adoration! I ignored him, I pushed him away, I did him a thousand wrongs, despicable creature that I am!’

  ‘He knew,’ said Rastignac.

  Just then old Goriot opened his eyes, but it was only the effect of a convulsion. The comtesse’s desperate lurch of hope was no less dreadful a sight than that of the dying man’s eyes.

  ‘Could it be that he can hear me?’ cried the comtesse. ‘No,’ she said, sitting down next to the bed.

  As Madame de Restaud seemed to want to sit with her father, Eugène went downstairs for something to eat. The boarders were already assembled at the table.

  ‘Well, well,’ said the painter, ‘so it seems there’s to be a bit of a deathorama upstairs?’

  ‘Charles,’ said Eugène, ‘perhaps you could find a less morbid topic for your jokes.’

  ‘What, can’t we have a laugh round here any more?’ retorted the painter. ‘What difference does it make? Bianchon says the old chap isn’t compos mentis.’

  ‘Meaning’, said the museum clerk, ‘that he’ll die as he has lived.’

  ‘My father is dead,’ cried the comtesse.

  Hearing Madame de Restaud’s terrible wail, Sylvie, Rastignac and Bianchon rushed upstairs and found her in a faint. Once they had brought her round, they helped her into her carriage, which was still waiting. Eugène handed her into Thérèse’s safekeeping, giving orders to drive to Madame de Nucingen’s house.

  ‘Ah! Yes, he’s dead all right,’ said Bianchon, as he came downstairs.

  ‘Come along, Gentlemen, hurry up and sit down,’ said Madame Vauquer; ‘the soup’s going cold.’

  The two students sat down side by side.

  ‘What do we do now?’ said Eugène to Bianchon.

  ‘Well, I’ve closed his eyes and laid him out. Once we’ve had his death recorded and certified by the doctor at the town hall, he’ll be sewn up in a shroud and we’ll bury him. What else is there for him?’

  ‘He’ll never go sniffing his bread again, like this,’ said one boarder, mimicking the face the old man used to make.

  ‘For the love of God, Gentlemen,’ said the tutor, ‘just leave old man Goriot be and stop stuffing him down our throats, because you’ve been dishing him up with every possible sauce for the past hour. One of the privileges of the fine city of Paris is that you can be born, live and die here without anyone paying the blindest bit of notice to you. Let us therefore reap the benefits of civilization. There were sixty other deaths today: why don’t you go and weep over the hecatomb of all Paris? If old man Goriot has snuffed it, good for him! If you’re that fond of him, go and take care of him and leave the rest of us to eat our dinner in peace.’

  ‘Oh! I agree,’ said the widow. ‘Good for him! After all, he had nothing but troubles all his life, the poor man.’

  This was the only funeral oration spoken for a man who, in Eugène’s eyes, was Fatherhood incarnate. The fifteen boarders started chatting away as if nothing had happened. The clashing of forks and spoons, the laughter and banter, the expressions that flickered across those greedy and unconcerned faces, their indifference, made Eugène and Bianchon shudder with disgust. As soon as they had eaten, they set off to find a priest to keep vigil and pray by the dead man’s bedside through the night. They had to measure out the last respects to be paid to the old man against the paltry sum they could spare to pay for them. At around nine in the evening, the body was placed on the slats of the bedstead, between two candles, in that bare room, and a priest came to sit with it. Rastignac had asked the cleric the price of the service and the pallbearers, and, before going to bed, wrote to the Baron de Nucingen and the Comte de Restaud, requesting them to send sufficient funds through their representatives to meet the costs of the burial. He dispatched Christophe with the notes, then went to bed and fell fast asleep, utterly exhausted.

  Next morning, it fell to Bianchon and Rastignac to go and register the death, which was certified around midday. Two hours later, neither of the two sons-in-law had sent any money, nobody had turned up to represent them and Rastignac had already been obliged to pay the priest. As Sylvie had requested ten francs for laying the old man out and sewing him into a shroud, Eugène and Bianchon worked out that if the dead man’s relatives refused to contribute anything at all, they would be pushed to cover the costs. The medical student therefore decided to lay out the corpse himself and had a pauper’s coffin brought from the hospital, which he’d been able to buy at a discount.

  ‘Let’s play a prank on those rascally relatives of his,’ he said to Eugène. ‘Go and buy a plot of earth in Père Lachaise, for five years, and order a third-class funeral220 at the church and at the undertaker’s. If the sons-in-law and the daughters refuse to pay you back, then have the stone engraved with: “Here lies Monsieur Goriot, father of the Comtesse de Restaud and of the Baronne de Nucingen, whose burial was paid for by two students.” ’

  Eugène held off following his friend’s advice until he had called on Monsieur and Madame de Nucingen, and Monsieur and Madame de Restaud, without success. He made it no further than the doorstep. The valets had received strict orders.

  ‘Monsieur and Madame’, they said, ‘will see no one; their father has died and they are in the deepest mourning.’


  Eugène now had enough experience of Parisian society to know not to insist. He felt a strange pang of emotion when he found himself cut off from Delphine.

  ‘Sell some of your jewellery,’ he wrote to her in the porter’s lodge, ‘so that your father may be decently consigned to his last resting-place.’

  He sealed the note and persuaded the baron’s porter to give it to Thérèse for her mistress; but the porter handed it over to the Baron de Nucingen, who threw it straight in the fire. Once he had made his final preparations, Eugène returned to the boarding house at around three and wept to see the coffin left stranded outside the openwork gate, draped in a black cloth that barely covered it, propped on two chairs in the empty road. A cheap holy-water sprinkler,221 as yet untouched, lay submerged in a silver-plated brass bowl of holy water. The door hadn’t even been draped in black. This was a pauper’s death, with no ceremony, no followers, no friends and no relatives. Bianchon, who was needed at the hospital, had left a note for Rastignac, letting him know what he’d decided about the church. The house doctor informed him that a Mass was too expensive, that they’d have to make do with the cheaper service at Vespers and that he’d sent Christophe with a note for the undertaker. As Eugène finished reading Bianchon’s hastily scribbled message, he caught sight of Madame Vauquer fingering the circular gold locket which held the two daughters’ locks of hair.

  ‘How could you dare to take that!’ he said to her.

  ‘Gracious! Did you want it to be buried with him?’ replied Sylvie. ‘It’s made of gold.’

  ‘Of course!’ Eugène said indignantly; ‘let him at least take with him the one thing that may stand in for his daughters.’

  When the hearse came, Eugène had the coffin lifted up, then prised it open and reverently put back on the old man’s chest the locket that held the likeness of a time when Delphine and Anastasie were young, untainted and pure, and ‘never questioned anything’, in the anguished words that he had cried out as he was dying. Rastignac and Christophe, with two undertakers, were the only followers of the hearse that took the poor man to Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, a church near the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève. When they arrived, the body was displayed in a small, dark, low-ceilinged chapel, around which the student looked in vain for old man Goriot’s daughters or their husbands. Apart from him, the only person there was Christophe, who felt obliged to pay his last respects to a man who had sent a few good tips his way. As they waited for the two priests, the altar-boy and the verger, Rastignac squeezed Christophe’s hand, unable to speak.

  ‘Yes, Monsieur Eugène,’ said Christophe, ‘he was a decent and an honest man, who never raised his voice, never harmed a soul and never did any wrong.’

  The two priests, the altar-boy and the verger arrived and did everything that can be done for seventy francs in an age when the Church isn’t rich enough to pray free of charge. The clergymen chanted a psalm, the Libera, the De profundis.222 The service lasted twenty minutes. There was one funeral carriage, for one of the priests and the altar-boy, who consented to take Eugène and Christophe with them.

  ‘There’s no one following,’ said the priest; ‘we can go fast so we won’t finish late, it’s half past five.’ However, just as the body was placed in the hearse, two emblazoned but empty carriages, belonging to the Comte de Restaud and the Baron de Nucingen, turned up and followed the convoy to Père Lachaise.223

  At six o’clock, old man Goriot’s body was lowered into his grave, watched by his daughters’ servants. As soon as the clergyman had said the short prayer for the dead man that the students’ money had purchased, they disappeared, and so did he. The two grave-diggers threw a few shovelfuls of earth onto the lid of the coffin, then straightened up and turned to Rastignac to ask for their tip. Eugène delved into his pockets, but, finding them empty, was forced to borrow twenty sous from Christophe. This detail, so slight in itself, filled Rastignac with unbearable sadness. Night was falling, the damp, drizzling dusk sapped his mind, he looked at the grave and buried in it his last young man’s tear, a tear that springs from the sacred emotion of a pure heart, the kind that splashes up from the ground where it falls and rises into heaven. He folded his arms and stared at the clouds. Seeing him thus preoccupied, Christophe left him.

  Alone now, Rastignac walked up towards the cemetery’s highest point and saw Paris below him, winding along the banks of the Seine, its lights beginning to sparkle. His eyes came to rest almost greedily on the area between the column on the Place Vendôme and the dome of the Invalides, the home of the beau monde, which he had been so determined to enter. He gave the droning hive a look that seemed to drain it of its honey in advance and pronounced these grand words: ‘Now let us fight it out!’

  And by way of firing an opening shot at Society, Rastignac went to have dinner with Madame de Nucingen.

  Saché,224 September 1834

  Notes

  1. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire: Balzac was an admirer of the famous ‘visionary naturalist’ Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772–1844), some of whose theories presaged Darwin. In his preface to the Human Comedy, Balzac declares his intention to apply scientific methods to the study of ‘social species’, which ‘have existed and always will exist, just as there are zoological species’. As a keen observer of the natural history of humanity, he is concerned with the way species adapt, or fail to adapt, to the ever-changing milieux in which they find themselves. See note 146 on Georges Cuvier and Introduction p. xx.

  I. A RESPECTABLE BOARDING HOUSE

  2. Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève: Today, Rue Tournefort, running parallel to the Rue Mouffetard, south of the Panthéon. Balzac’s description does not tally exactly with the street layout at that time; he highlights features that emphasize its isolation and drabness.

  3. Faubourg Saint-Marceau: Balzac uses ‘Marceau’ here, ‘Marcel’ elsewhere. The district – named after Saint Marcel or Marceau (Bishop of Paris AD 417–36) – was known by both names.

  4. drama … tear-strewn literature: The drame romantique, which exploited the effects of melodrama, was in vogue at that time, and Balzac had recently written a review of Victor Hugo’s Hernani. ‘Tear-strewn’ perhaps refers us to that strand of popular Romantic literature whose intense emotion and despairing melancholy tended to tip over into sentimentality.

  5. intra muros et extra: Latin, ‘within and without the city walls’. A quotation from Book I of Horace’s Epistles.

  6. Jaggernaut: A reference to the Indian god Jagannatha, worshipped at Puri (Orissa) in the bay of Bengal. Jagannatha, ‘Lord of the World’, is one of the titles of Krishna (the eighth avatar of Vishnu). Every year, during the Rathayātrā festival, the deity is drawn through the streets of Puri on a richly decorated chariot, so huge and heavy that it takes hundreds of pilgrims to pull it. Accidents are frequent – hence the origins of the word ‘Juggernaut’, denoting a force that crushes whatever lies in its path.

  7. All is true: The alternative title of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII and the one by which it was known to its first audiences. Balzac may have taken this from an article on the play which preceded one of his short stories, ‘The Red Inn’, in the Revue de Paris, 1831.

  8. Val-de-Grâce … Panthéon: The first is a military hospital founded during the Revolution on the site of a seventeenth-century abbey; the second, originally a church dedicated to Sainte- Geneviève, founded by Louis XV, became a ‘pantheon’ during the Revolution, that is, a secular monument devoted to the memory of the ‘great men of the nation’.

  9. a stone’s throw away: At the Hôpital des Capucins, a former convent, where venereal diseases were treated.

  10. on his return to Paris in 1777: In fact, Voltaire returned – after twenty-eight years in exile – on 10 February 1778, just a few months before his death. He wrote this rhyming couplet for his friend the Marquis de Maisons.

  11. tapering fruit trees: Literally, ‘quenouille-trained’, a French pruning method where the fruit tree’s branches are trained to bend downwards, formin
g a conical or distaff shape.

  12. haircloth: A fabric popular with middle-class families and establishments in the nineteenth century, as it was extremely strong and long-wearing, but had a sheen which emulated the effect of expensive silk upholstery at a fraction of the cost.

  13. Telemachus: The scenic paper in question was designed around 1818 and blockprinted by the Paris firm Joseph Dufour et Cie. It was a long strip landscape paper (a continuous scene of non-repeating panels) based on Fénelon’s popular work Les aventures de Télémaque (1699), which recounts the education of Ulysses’ son by Athena, disguised as Mentor, who oversees his transformation from selfish youth to model ruler (it also operated as a commentary on the bellicosity and excesses of Louis XIV). The same paper was to be found at the Château de Saché, where Balzac wrote Old Man Goriot.

  Calypso was the nymph who imprisoned first Ulysses, then his son Telemachus – when he came in search of his missing father – on the island of Ogygia. She gave both food and promised them immortality. Balzac’s choice of wallpaper is not without significance, and humour.

  14. moiré: Ordinary tin plate treated with acids to give it a variegated appearance, otherwise known as crystallized tinplate. The moiré métallique technique was discovered in France in 1814.

  15. Argand lamps: The Argand oil lamp was invented in France in the early 1780s, and represented a significant breakthrough in household lighting, as it produced as much light as nine candles.

  16. discounter: Also ‘bill-discounter’. Someone (often Gobseck, in the Human Comedy) who purchases a bill of exchange (note 70) at a discount (that is, minus the difference between its present value and its value on the date it falls due) then sells it for its full worth at maturity, to make a profit.