Two faces stood out in striking contrast to the majority of the boarders and lodgers. Although Mademoiselle Victorine Taillefer had the sickly complexion of a young lady suffering from chlorosis,24 and her habitual melancholy, troubled countenance and air of weakness and fragility blended seamlessly into the background of general suffering, at least she wasn’t old and her tongue and her movements were agile. This young unfortunate resembled a shrub with yellowing leaves, recently planted in the wrong kind of soil. Her sallow features, her slick of tawny hair, her painfully thin waist, gave her the kind of grace which modern poets have found in medieval statues. Her grey eyes flecked with black expressed a Christian gentleness and resignation, while her simple, inexpensive clothes showed off her youthful curves. Compared with the other boarders, she was pretty. If she had been happy, she would have been ravishing: happiness is a woman’s poetry, as powders and pomades are her persona. If the exhilaration of a ball could have imparted a rosy bloom to her pale face; if the sweet delights of an elegant life could have filled out her cheeks – already somewhat hollow – and made them glow; if love could have rekindled some spark in her downcast eyes, Victorine would have been the equal of the most beautiful of young women. She lacked what creates a woman anew: fine clothes and love letters. Her story would have made a good novel. Believing he had good reason not to recognize her as his daughter, her father refused to have her under his roof, gave her only six hundred francs per year and had wound up his estate so that his son would be the sole inheritor. Victorine’s mother had died of despair in the house of a distant relative, Madame Couture, who had cared for the orphan ever since as if she were her own child. Unfortunately the widow of the Commissary-General to the Armies of the Republic had nothing to her name but her dower and her pension; one day she might have to leave this poor girl, entirely without experience and resources, to the mercy of the world. The worthy woman took Victorine to Mass every Sunday and to Confession once a fortnight, to make her pious, if nothing else. With good reason. Her religious fervour gave the disowned child some hope for the future. She loved her father and tried, every year, to deliver in person her mother’s letter of forgiveness to him; but every year without fail she found the door of her father’s house closed to her. Her brother, her only possible intermediary, hadn’t once come to visit her in four years and sent her no assistance. She implored God to open her father’s eyes, to soften her brother’s heart, and prayed for both without condemning either. As far as Madame Couture and Madame Vauquer were concerned, there weren’t enough words in the dictionary of insults to describe such barbaric conduct. Whenever they spoke ill of the infamous millionaire, Victorine murmured words as gentle as the call of a wounded dove whose cry of pain still expresses love.
Eugène de Rastignac’s looks were typically southern: pale complexion, black hair, blue eyes. His bearing, his manners, his unfailing poise, all indicated that he had been born into a noble family, where every effort had been made to educate him in traditions of good taste. Although he was careful with his coats, although on a normal day you would find him still wearing out last year’s clothes, nonetheless, from time to time he was able to go out dressed like any fashionable young gentleman. Most days he wore an old frock-coat, a shabby waistcoat, the limp, sorry-looking, badly knotted black tie favoured by students, trousers in keeping with the rest and resoled boots.
Vautrin, the forty-year-old man with dyed side-whiskers, slotted in somewhere between these two characters and the other boarders. He was one of those men people call ‘the life and soul!’. He had broad shoulders, a powerful chest, bulging muscles and thick, square hands marked with distinctive growths of tufty, flame-red hair between the finger joints. His face, lined with premature wrinkles, showed signs of an intransigence which belied his accommodating and sociable ways. His bass-baritone voice, as booming as his hearty laugh, was far from displeasing. He was obliging and cheerful. If a lock was playing up, he would dismantle it, get it working, oil it, file it and put it back together again in an instant, saying, ‘I know a thing or two about that.’ Indeed, he knew a thing or two about everything: ships, the sea, France, foreign parts, business, men, current affairs, laws, grand houses and prisons. If someone had a fit of the grumbles, he offered them his services on the spot. He had on several occasions lent money to Madame Vauquer and some of her boarders; but despite his good-natured manner, those in his debt would have died rather than fail to return what they owed him, due to a certain piercing and steely look25 he had, which struck fear into the heart. His skill at aiming a stream of saliva hinted at unshakeable sang-froid, suggesting that he would stop at nothing, not even a crime, to get himself out of a tight situation. His eyes seemed to penetrate right to the heart of all matters, all consciences, all feelings, with the severity of a judge. He usually went out after déjeuner, coming back for dinner, then would disappear for the entire evening and return towards midnight, letting himself in with a master key which Madame Vauquer had let him have. He was the only one to enjoy this privilege. But then, he was on the best of terms with the widow, whom he would seize around the waist, calling her ‘Ma’, a baffling piece of flattery. The old bird still believed this feat to be within the reach of any man, but only Vautrin had long enough arms to squeeze her bulky circumference. One typically extravagant gesture of his was to pay fifteen francs a month for the gloria26 he took at dessert. Had any of the boarders been less superficial – the young caught up in the whirlwind of Parisian life, the old indifferent to anything which did not affect them directly – they might have looked beyond the ambiguous impression that Vautrin made on them. He knew or guessed the business of all those around him, while not one of them was able to read either his thoughts or his actions. Although he might cast his apparent conviviality and jollity, his constant willingness to oblige, as a barrier between himself and the others, he frequently revealed glimpses of the fearsome depths of his personality. Often, a flash of wit worthy of Juvenal27 – showing that he revelled in scoffing at the law, lashing out at high society, exposing its fecklessness – suggested that he had some score to settle with society and that there was some carefully buried mystery in his life.
Attracted, perhaps without realizing it, by the strength of the one and the beauty of the other, Mademoiselle Taillefer divided her furtive glances, her secret thoughts, between the forty-year-old man and the young student; but neither appeared to show any interest in her, even though, from one day to the next, chance might improve her lot and make her a wealthy match. None of these people, as it happened, ever bothered to question whether the alleged misfortunes of this or that person were genuine or false. They all felt a kind of mutual indifference mingled with distrust that arose from their respective situations. They knew they were powerless to do anything about their sufferings, and by dint of recounting them to each other had all drained the cup of sympathy dry. Like old couples, they had nothing left to say to each other. And so all that was left between them were the interrelated parts of the machinery of life, the cogs and wheels without the oil. They would all of them walk straight past a blind man in the road, listen unmoved to tales of woe and view a man’s death as a solution to the problem of the poverty which left them insensible to the most agonizing death throes. The happiest of these forlorn souls was Madame Vauquer, who reigned over this poorhouse with paying guests. She alone believed the little garden – silent and cold, parched and dank, and thus as monotonous as any steppe – to be a pleasant grove. For her alone this drab yellow building, smelling as strongly of verdigris28 as a counting-house, was a source of delight. These cells belonged to her. She fed these convicts – lifers sentenced to endless punishment – and they respected the authority she exerted over them. Where else in Paris would these poor creatures have found, at the price she was asking, adequate, wholesome food, and lodgings which they were at liberty to make, if not elegant or comfortable, at least clean and salubrious? Had she ever allowed herself some blatant act of injustice, the victim would have suffered it i
n silence.
Such a gathering should and did present in microcosm the elements that make up society as a whole. Among the eighteen boarders was to be found, as in every school, or throughout the world, one poor rejected creature, a figure of fun and the butt of all humour. At the start of his second year, this man began to stand out for Eugène de Rastignac from the rest of those among whom he was condemned to live for a further two years. Their whipping boy was the retired vermicelli dealer, old man Goriot: a painter would have shone all the light in the scene upon his face, as this historian will. What twist of fate had caused such a confusion of scorn and hatred, persecution and pity, such a lack of concern for his suffering, to rain down on the head of the oldest boarder? Had he brought it upon himself through one of those acts of ridicule or eccentricity that we find less pardonable than actual vice? Such issues lie behind many a social injustice. Perhaps it’s in human nature to reserve all suffering for the person who quietly endures everything, whether out of genuine humility, weakness or indifference. Don’t we all love to prove our strength at the expense of someone or something else? Even that most pathetic of creatures, the street urchin, rings all the doorbells when it’s freezing cold outside or shins up a gleaming monument to write his name on it.
In 1813, at around sixty-nine years of age, old man Goriot had withdrawn from business and retired to Madame Vauquer’s establishment. He had initially rented the rooms now occupied by Madame Couture and had paid twelve hundred francs for board and lodging with the air of a man for whom five louis more or less was a trifle. Madame Vauquer had spruced up the three rooms of this apartment on receipt of an advance payment, which covered, he was told, the cost of the tawdry furnishings: yellow calico curtains, varnished wooden armchairs upholstered in Utrecht velvet, a couple of cheap distemper-paintings and wallpaper at which suburban taverns would turn up their noses. Perhaps it was the casual generosity with which old man Goriot – at that time respectfully referred to as Monsieur Goriot – allowed himself to be duped that made her decide he was a fool without an ounce of business sense. Goriot arrived fitted out with an opulent wardrobe, the magnificent trousseau of a merchant with the means to treat himself on retiring from trade. Madame Vauquer had admired eighteen cambric shirts, whose exquisite quality she found all the more remarkable for the two pins joined by a fine chain, each set with a huge diamond, that the vermicelli dealer wore on his shirt frill. It was his custom to wear a cornflower-blue morning coat, and every day he chose a fresh white piqué waistcoat, beneath which his pear-shaped, protuberant belly would wobble around, causing a heavy gold chain hung with watch-charms to bounce up and down. His snuffbox, also made of gold, contained a locket full of hair, appearing to suggest he had stolen a few hearts. When his hostess accused him of being a bit of a ladies’ man, his lips widened into the glad smile of the bourgeois whose soft spot has just been touched. His armoires (which he pronounced ‘ormoires’29 as those of humble station do) were crammed with an abundance of his household silverware. The widow’s eyes lit up as she obligingly helped him to unpack and tidy away the ladles, serving spoons, cutlery, cruets, sauce boats, miscellaneous dishes, silver-gilt breakfast services, all more or less splendid pieces, worth a considerable weight in marks,30 and from which he couldn’t bear to be separated. These presents reminded him of special occasions in his family life. ‘This’, he said to Madame Vauquer, clutching a platter and small dish with two kissing turtle-doves on its cover, ‘is the first present my wife ever gave me, on our anniversary. Poor darling! It cost her every penny of her maiden’s savings. Let me tell you, Madame, I would rather scrape a living from the earth with my bare nails than part with this. Thank the Lord! I’ll be able to drink my coffee from this bowl every morning for the rest of my life. I have nothing to complain about, my bread will be buttered on both sides for a good while yet.’ Indeed, Madame Vauquer, with her magpie’s eye, had taken a good look at certain entries in the Grand-Livre,31 which, roughly totted up, indicated that the excellent Goriot had an income of around eight to ten thousand francs a year. From that day on, Madame Vauquer, née de Conflans, who only admitted to thirty-nine of her forty-eight years, began to get ideas. Although the lower lids of Goriot’s eyes were turned out, swollen and drooping, so that he was forever wiping them, she found his manner agreeable and proper. Moreover, his fleshy, bulging calves, not to mention his long square nose, betokened certain fine qualities the widow seemed to find attractive, and which were borne out by the old man’s moon-like and naively foolish face. He appeared to be a solidly built beast, more likely to be led by his heart than his head. His hair dressed in pigeon-wings, which the barber from the Ecole Polytechnique came to powder for him each morning, formed five points on his low forehead and framed his face well. Although a little countrified, he was so well turned out and took such generous pinches of snuff, inhaling it with the air of a man whose snuffbox is always bound to be full of Macouba,32 that on Monsieur Goriot’s first night under her roof, Madame Vauquer rolled in her blankets like a partridge wrapped in bacon and roasted in the flames of an overwhelming desire to throw off the shroud of Vauquer and rise out of the ashes as Goriot. To be married, sell her boarding house, give her arm to this prime specimen of the bourgeoisie, become one of the local worthies, collecting money for the poor, driving out to Choisy, Soissy, Gentilly33 on Sundays; going to the theatre whenever she felt like it and sitting in a box, without having to wait for some boarder to pass on a free ticket in July:34 the Eldorado she dreamed of was that of any modest Parisian householder. She had told no one about the forty thousand francs she owned, scraped together penny by penny. In terms of wealth, she confidently believed herself to be a decent match. ‘As for the rest, I’m certainly good enough for that old chap!’ she said to herself in bed, turning onto her side as if to provide herself with evidence of the alluring contours which big Sylvie found moulded into the hollows of the mattress each morning. From that day on, for around three months, the widow Vauquer took advantage of Monsieur Goriot’s barber and spent a fair amount of money on her appearance, which she justified by the need to ensure that the standing of her establishment was in keeping with the dignitaries who patronized it. She plotted and schemed to bring in a different class of boarder, and made no secret of the fact that, from now on, she would only accept persons of the highest distinction in every respect. If a stranger showed up, she boasted to him of the preference that Monsieur Goriot, one of the most important and respected merchants in Paris, had shown for her establishment. She distributed brochures with the heading MAISON VAUQUER. ‘It was’, she wrote, ‘one of the most longstanding and highly esteemed boarding houses in the vicinity of the Latin Quarter. It had a charming view over the Gobelins valley (you could just about see it from the third floor) and a delightful garden, at one end of which was a LONG ARBOUR of lime trees.’ She also mentioned the clean air and seclusion. This brochure brought her Madame la Comtesse d’Ambermesnil, a thirty-six-year-old woman, who was awaiting completion of the settlement and payment of a pension due to her as the widow of a general who had died in the fields of battle. Madame Vauquer introduced certain refinements to her table, lit a fire in her drawing room for almost six months and kept the promises made in her brochure so well that she really invested herself. The comtesse even told Madame Vauquer, whom she called her dear friend, that she would bring her the Baronne de Vaumerland and the widow of Colonel Comte Picqoiseau, two friends of hers, who would, at the end of the quarter, be leaving a boarding house in the Marais that cost more than the Maison Vauquer. Of course, these ladies would be extremely well off once the War Office had sorted out their affairs. ‘But’, she said, ‘the paperwork is always interminable.’ The two widows would retire to Madame Vauquer’s rooms after dinner, where they had little chats, drinking cassis and nibbling delicacies reserved for the delectation of the mistress of the house. Madame de l’Ambermesnil greatly approved of her hostess’s views on Goriot, excellent views, which she had of course guessed from the start; she thought
he was just perfect.
‘Oh! My dear lady! A man as sound as a bell,’ the widow said to her, ‘a man in mint condition, with plenty left for a woman to enjoy.’
The comtesse generously gave Madame Vauquer the benefit of her opinion: her wardrobe needed to be brought in line with her aspirations. ‘We must set you on a war-footing,’ she said to her. After much calculation, the two widows set off together to the Galeries de Bois35 at the Palais-Royal, where they bought a plumed hat and a bonnet. The comtesse then took her friend to La Petite Jeannette,36 and at this shop they chose a dress and a shawl. When the ammunition had been loaded and the widow presented arms, she bore a striking resemblance to the signboard of the Boeuf à la mode.37 Despite this, she found her appearance so much improved that she felt she owed the comtesse, and although not one for giving presents, begged her to accept a hat costing twenty francs. As it happened, she wanted to ask her a favour: to sound out Goriot and sing her praises to him. Madame de l’Ambermesnil went along with this little game most obligingly. She cornered the old vermicelli dealer and managed to confer with him; but finding that her efforts, inspired by her particular wish to seduce him on her own behalf, were met with prudishness, if not consternation, she came out disgusted by his rudeness.
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