Old Man Goriot

by Balzac, Honore de

  ‘Oh! Give it to me,’ said old Goriot. ‘What! My daughter shed tears on this, my sweet Delphine, who never used to cry when she was small! Oh! I’ll buy you another, don’t wear it again, let me keep it. She should enjoy the use of her assets; those were the terms of her marriage contract. That’s it! I’ll go and see Derville, my solicitor, first thing tomorrow. I’ll insist that her fortune is invested in her own name. I know the law. I may be an old wolf but I’ll show them I still have teeth.’

  ‘Take this, Father. She wanted to give me a thousand francs of the winnings. Keep them safe for her, in the waistcoat.’

  Goriot looked at Eugène, stretched out a hand to take hold of his and let a tear fall onto it.

  ‘You’ll succeed in life,’ said the old man. ‘God is just, see? I know all about honesty, and let me tell you, there are very few men like you. So, will you be my dear child too? Off you go to bed. You’ll sleep easily; you’re not a father yet. She was crying, he tells me now, and there I was calmly eating my dinner like an idiot, while she was suffering; I, who would sell the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost to spare either of them a single tear.’

  ‘Well,’ Eugène said to himself as he got ready for bed, ‘I think I’ll be an honest man my whole life. There’s pleasure in following the promptings of your conscience.’

  Perhaps only those who believe in God do good in secret; Eugène believed in God.

  The next day, at the time of the ball, Rastignac went to the house of Madame de Beauséant, who was to take him with her and introduce him to the Duchesse de Carigliano. He received the most gracious welcome from the maréchale and soon caught sight of Madame de Nucingen among the guests. Delphine had dressed splendidly with the aim of pleasing all, the better to please Eugène, and was now impatiently waiting for him to look her way, deluding herself that she was hiding her impatience. A man capable of deciphering a woman’s feelings revels in a moment like this. What man has not frequently delighted in keeping his opinion to himself, hiding his pleasure, seeking some revealing response to the doubt he has sown, savouring the fears he’ll banish later with a smile? That evening, the student suddenly saw the full potential of his position and understood that being recognized as Madame de Beauséant’s cousin gave him a certain status in society. The conquest of Madame de Nucingen, which everyone already gave him credit for, made him the focus of so much attention, that the other young men cast envious looks in his direction; on noticing one or two of these, he had his first delicious taste of conceit. As he passed through each drawing room, moving from one group to the next, he heard his good fortune being complimented. The women predicted that he would go far. Delphine, fearing to lose him, promised to grant him tonight the kiss she had so stubbornly refused the night before last. Rastignac received several invitations at the ball. His cousin introduced him to a number of women, all with fashionable pretensions, whose houses were considered to be of note; he saw himself launched into the highest and finest Parisian society. Indeed, the evening had all the charm of a brilliant debut and he would remember it until his dying day, just as a young lady remembers the ball where she first triumphed.

  The next day at déjeuner, when Eugène was telling old Goriot and the other lodgers about his success, a devilish smile appeared on Vautrin’s face. ‘So you think’, exclaimed that ruthless logician, ‘that a young man of fashion can reside in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, at the Maison Vauquer? An infinitely respectable establishment by all accounts, I’ll give it that, but hardly what you might call modish. It’s commodious, has a fine well-to-do air, is proud to be the temporary abode of a Rastignac; but, in the end, it’s in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève and doesn’t know what luxury is, because it’s purely parochialorama.153 My young friend,’ continued Vautrin, with a mockingly paternal air, ‘if you want to cut a dash in Paris, you need three horses, a tilbury for the morning and a coupé for the evening; that’s nine thousand francs for your carriages alone. You’d be unworthy of your destiny if you didn’t spend three thousand francs at your tailor’s, six hundred francs at the perfumer’s, a hundred écus at the bootmakers and a hundred écus at the hatmakers. As for your laundress, she’ll cost you a thousand francs. A fashionable young man must be meticulous in the matter of his linen:154 isn’t that what he’ll be judged on, after all? Love and Religion require immaculate cloths on their altars. That brings us to fourteen thousand. Not to mention what you’ll fritter away at gambling, on bets, on gifts; it’s impossible to get by with less than two thousand francs of ready money. I’ve led that kind of life, I know what it costs. Add to these essentials three hundred louis for your feed, a thousand francs for your kennel. So, child, we need to have a sweet twenty-five thousand a year lined up, or we sink into the mud, make a fool of ourselves and are relieved of our future, our successes, our mistresses! I forgot the valet and the groom! Will Christophe deliver your billets doux? Will you write them on the paper you use now? It would be akin to suicide. Trust an old man of experience!’ he continued, with a sudden rinforzando boom of his bass voice. ‘Either lock yourself away virtuously in a garret and wed yourself to your work, or take another path.’ And Vautrin winked pointedly in Mademoiselle Taillefer’s direction, with a look meant to revive and resume the seductive arguments he had planted in the student’s heart to corrupt him.

  Several days went by during which Rastignac led the most dissipated life. He dined almost every day with Madame de Nucingen, whom he escorted when she went out. He returned at three or four o’clock in the morning, rose at midday to wash and dress, then went and strolled in the Bois with Delphine when the weather was fine, squandering his time without being aware of its worth and absorbing all the precepts and enticements of luxury as eagerly as the calyx of the female date palm opens to receive the fertilizing pollen of its hymeneals. He played for high stakes, lost or won vast sums of money and with time became accustomed to the extravagant lifestyle of the young Parisian gentlemen. He took fifteen hundred francs out of his first winnings to repay his mother and his sisters, sending them handsome gifts along with the money.

  Despite having announced his desire to leave the Maison Vauquer, he was still there as January drew to a close and had no idea how to extricate himself. Virtually all young men are governed by a law that may seem inexplicable, but which owes its existence to their youth itself and their frenzied pursuit of pleasure. Whether rich or poor, they never have enough money for life’s necessities, but always find enough for their follies. Generous with anything they can get on credit, they’re stingy with everything that requires payment up front, and seem to be avenging themselves on what they don’t have by squandering everything that they could have. In a nutshell, a student takes far greater care of his hat than his suit. The tailor, whose profits are large, is ultimately more amenable to giving credit, while the modesty of the sums owed to the hatter make him one of the most inflexible figures a young man must parley with. Although the handsome young man in the balcony at the theatre puts on a dazzling display of waistcoat for the benefit of a pretty woman’s opera glasses, you can be fairly sure he isn’t wearing any socks; the hosier is yet another weevil in his purse. Rastignac had reached this stage. His purse – always empty for Madame Vauquer, always full for the requirements of his vanity – suffered temperamental set-backs and successes which were at variance with the most straightforward payments. If he wanted to leave this vile, stinking boarding house, this thorn in the side of his ambition, wouldn’t he have to pay his landlady one month’s rent and buy the furniture he needed to set himself up as a dandy? This was always impossible.

  Although Rastignac knew well enough how to raise money for gambling – by purchasing watches and gold chains from his jeweller, paid for dearly from his winnings, which he then took to the Mont-de-Piété, that gloomy and discreet friend of youth – he lacked both imagination and daring when it came to paying for his food and lodgings or purchasing the tools he needed to make capital out of a life of fashion. Debts incurred for needs he had
already satisfied, or for some vulgar necessity, no longer inspired him. Like many who lead the life of a chancer, he waited until the last minute to pay off debts considered sacrosanct by the middle-class citizen – like Mirabeau,155 who never paid for his bread until it assumed the draconian form of a bill of exchange.

  Around this time, Rastignac ran out of money and sank deep into debt. He began to understand that it would be impossible for him to continue this existence without having a permanent income. But even as he groaned to feel the sharp point of his precarious state, he felt unable to renounce the exorbitant pleasures of the life he was leading, and wanted it to continue at all cost. The lucky breaks he had been counting on to make his fortune were turning out to be pipe-dreams, while the real obstacles loomed ever larger. Now that he knew what went on between Monsieur and Madame de Nucingen behind closed doors, he realized he could only turn love into an instrument of fortune by drinking from the cup of shame and turning his back on the noble ideals that absolve youthful errors. This outwardly splendid life, riddled on the inside by the taenias156 of remorse and whose fleeting pleasures were paid for dearly by ever-present anxieties, was the one he had chosen, and he rolled in it, making himself a bed in the soft mud of the ditch like La Bruyère’s Absent-minded man;157 but so far, like that gentleman, he had only soiled his clothes.

  ‘So have we killed the mandarin?’ Bianchon asked him one day as he stood up to leave the table.

  ‘Not yet,’ he replied, ‘but he’s at his last gasp.’

  The medical student took this to be a joke, but it wasn’t. Eugène, dining at the boarding house for the first time in a while, had remained deep in thought during the meal. Instead of leaving at dessert, he stayed sitting in the dining room next to Mademoiselle Taillefer, sending meaningful glances her way from time to time. A few guests were still at the table, eating walnuts, others were strolling around continuing discussions begun earlier. As on most evenings, each boarder left when he felt like it, depending on the level of interest he had in the conversation, or the sluggishness of his digestion. In winter, it was rare for the dining room to clear before eight o’clock, at which hour the four women stayed on alone and avenged themselves on the silence their sex forced them to keep among this gathering of men.

  Intrigued by Eugène’s air of preoccupation, Vautrin, who had at first seemed in a hurry to leave, stayed behind in the dining room, continually changing position to avoid being seen by Eugène, who would think he had left. Then, instead of following the last stragglers out of the room, he stationed himself stealthily in the drawing room. He had looked into the student’s soul and seen the clear signs of a crisis. Indeed, Rastignac found himself in a bewildering situation familiar to many young men. Whether or not she loved him or was toying with his affections, Madame de Nucingen had made Rastignac suffer all the pangs of genuine passion, by practising upon him every skill known to female diplomacy in Paris. Although she had compromised herself in public so as to bind Madame de Beauséant’s cousin to her, in private she was reluctant to grant him the rights he appeared to enjoy. Over the past month she had kindled Eugène’s desire so effectively that its flames had begun to lick at his heart. Although the student had believed himself to have the upper hand in the early stages of the affair, Madame de Nucingen had since proved the stronger of the two, with the aid of those manoeuvres which stirred up in Eugène all the feelings, good or bad, of the two or three kinds of men found within a young man of Paris. Was it calculated on her part? No; women are always genuine, even when at their most duplicitous, for they are yielding to some natural feeling. After allowing this young man to gain such a hold on her and having shown him too much affection in such a short space of time, perhaps Delphine was being true to her sense of dignity, which made her either withdraw the privileges she had granted or take pleasure in suspending them. It comes naturally to a Parisienne, even as she is transported by passion, to pause as she falls, to test the heart of the man to whom she will surrender her future!

  Madame de Nucingen’s hopes had already been deceived once, and her loyalty tossed aside by a self-seeking young man. She had good reason to be wary. Perhaps she had detected in Eugène’s manner a lack of respect caused by the peculiarity of their situation; his rapid success had made him complacent. No doubt she wished to appear imposing to a man of his age and to look down on him, having for so long been made to look up to the man who had abandoned her. She didn’t want Eugène to think she was an easy conquest, precisely because he knew that she had belonged to de Marsay. Finally, after having submitted to the degrading pleasure of that out-and-out monster, a young libertine, she was taking such delight in strolling through the flowery dells of love that it must have been blissful to admire its every aspect, to linger there listening to the leaves sighing and to let herself be caressed by chaste and leisurely breezes. True love was paying the price of false love. Sadly, such misunderstandings will persist until men realize just how many flowers are cut down in a young woman’s heart by the first cruel swipes of betrayal. Whatever her reasons, Delphine was playing with Rastignac and enjoying playing with him, no doubt because she knew that she was loved and would put an end to her lover’s suffering whenever it was her right royal pleasure as a woman to do so.

  As far as his own self-respect was concerned, Eugène didn’t want to see his first skirmish end in defeat and continued in hot pursuit, like a hunter who must at all cost kill a partridge on his first Saint Hubert’s day158 outing. His fears, his wounded pride, his despair, genuine or pretended, bound him all the more closely to this woman. The whole of Paris gave him credit for the conquest of Madame de Nucingen, yet he was still no further on than the first day he saw her. As he was not yet aware that a woman’s coquetry may offer a man more delights than her love may give him pleasure, he fell into foolish rages.

  Although the season in which a woman contests love was bringing Rastignac an early crop of fruit, he was starting to find them as costly as they were green, tart and delicious to the taste. Sometimes, when he pictured himself without a sou, without a future, he thought, despite the voice of his conscience, about his chances of becoming wealthy by marrying Mademoiselle Taillefer, which Vautrin had led him to believe was a possibility. And so, having reached the point where the voice of his poverty was making itself heard, almost without thinking he strayed within reach of the claws of the terrible sphinx whose stare so often transfixed him. When Poiret and Mademoiselle Michonneau went upstairs to their rooms, Rastignac, thinking he was alone apart from Madame Vauquer and Madame Couture, who was knitting some woollen sleeves for herself as she dozed off next to the stove, gave Mademoiselle Taillefer a look of such tenderness it made her lower her eyes.

  ‘Is something perhaps troubling you, Monsieur Eugène?’ Victorine asked him after a moment’s silence.

  ‘All men are troubled by something!’ replied Rastignac. ‘If only we young men could be sure of being truly loved, with the kind of devotion that would reward us for the sacrifices we are always ready to make, then perhaps we would never have any troubles.’

  In reply, Mademoiselle Taillefer gave Rastignac a look that left him in no doubt as to her feelings.

  ‘You, Mademoiselle, may believe yourself sure of your heart today, but could you guarantee it would never change?’

  A smile appeared on the poor girl’s lips like a ray of light bursting from her soul and made her face glow so radiantly that Eugène was shocked at having provoked such a violent explosion of feeling.

  ‘What! If you were to become rich and happy tomorrow, if a vast fortune fell at your feet from out of the blue, would you still love the poor young man who found favour with you when times were hard?’

  She nodded prettily.

  ‘A most unfortunate young man?’

  Another nod.

  ‘What claptrap are you talking over there?’ called out Madame Vauquer.

  ‘Never you mind,’ replied Eugène; ‘we understand each other well enough.’

  ‘So it
seems that Monsieur le Chevalier Eugène de Rastignac and Mademoiselle Victorine Taillefer have come to an understanding?’ boomed Vautrin, suddenly appearing at the dining- room door.

  ‘Oh! You scared me,’ said Madame Couture and Madame Vauquer at the same time.

  ‘I could do worse,’ replied Eugène, with a laugh, although Vautrin’s voice had just given him the worst shock of his life.

  ‘None of your tasteless jokes please, Gentlemen!’ said Madame Couture. ‘Let us go upstairs to our rooms now, child.’

  Madame Vauquer followed hot on the heels of her two lodgers, with a view to saving her candle and firewood by spending the evening with them. Eugène found himself alone, face to face with Vautrin.

  ‘I knew you’d come round in the end,’ said Vautrin, as unshakeably cool as ever. ‘Now listen! I have just as many scruples as the next man. Don’t make a snap decision, you’re not yourself today. You’ve run up a few debts. I don’t want it to be passion, or despair, but reason which brings you round to my way of thinking. Perhaps a couple of thousand écus wouldn’t go amiss? Take this, here.’

  That demon took a wallet from his pocket and pulled three banknotes out of it, which he fluttered before the student’s eyes. Eugène found himself facing the cruellest dilemma. He had debts of honour to the tune of one hundred louis lost to the Marquis d’Ajuda and the Comte de Trailles. He didn’t have the money and so didn’t have the face to go and spend the evening at Madame de Restaud’s house, where he was expected. It was to be one of those delightfully informal evenings where you nibble little cakes and sip tea, while effortlessly losing six thousand francs at whist.

  ‘Monsieur,’ Eugène replied, barely repressing a convulsive shudder; ‘after everything you’ve told me, surely you must understand that it’s impossible for me to come under any obligation to you.’

  ‘Well, you’d have disappointed me had you answered any other way,’ the tempter continued. ‘You’re a handsome young man, scrupulous, proud as a lion and as tender as a virgin. You’d be easy prey for the devil. You’re a young man of calibre – I like that. A little more scheming reflection and you’ll see society for what it is: a stage on which a man of superior talent acts out a couple of virtuous little scenes and thereby fulfils all his fantasies to thunderous applause from the idiots in the stalls. You’ll be ours in a few days’ time. Ah! If you chose to be my pupil, I’d give you everything you wanted. Every wish that came into your head would be granted immediately, whatever you might desire: honour, fortune, women. We would turn all civilization into ambrosian nectar for you. You would be our spoilt child, our youngest and dearest; we would happily efface ourselves for you. Every obstacle that stood in your way would be obliterated. Just because you’re still clinging to a few scruples, you take me for a scoundrel? Well now, Monsieur de Turenne,159 a man with as much integrity as you believe you still have, made little deals with brigands and never thought it would jeopardize his reputation. You don’t want to be in my debt, eh? We won’t let that stand in our way, will we?’ continued Vautrin, with a smile. ‘Take these bits of paper’, he said, producing a stamp, ‘and write on them for me, right here: Accepted the sum of three thousand five hundred francs payable in one year’s time. And add the date! The interest is high enough to rid you of any scruples; you can call me a Jew and consider your debt of gratitude paid in full. I’ll let you loathe me today because I know for certain that you’ll love me later. You may find me full of those vertiginous depths, those vast pools of feeling that the foolish call vices, but you will never find me cowardly or ungrateful. In short, my boy, I’m neither a pawn nor a bishop, but a castle.’