So when the servant announced M. Eugene de Rastignac, the Marquis
d’Ajuda-Pinto trembled with joy. To be sure, a loving woman shows even
more ingenuity in inventing doubts of her lover than in varying the
monotony of his happiness; and when she is about to be forsaken, she
instinctively interprets every gesture as rapidly as Virgil’s courser
detected the presence of his companion by snuffing the breeze. It was
impossible, therefore, that Mme. de Beauseant should not detect that
involuntary thrill of satisfaction; slight though it was, it was
appalling in its artlessness.
Eugene had yet to learn that no one in Paris should present himself in
any house without first making himself acquainted with the whole history
of its owner, and of its owner’s wife and family, so that he may avoid
making any of the terrible blunders which in Poland draw forth the
picturesque exclamation, “Harness five bullocks to your cart!” probably
because you will need them all to pull you out of the quagmire into
which a false step has plunged you. If, down to the present day, our
language has no name for these conversational disasters, it is probably
because they are believed to be impossible, the publicity given in Paris
to every scandal is so prodigious. After the awkward incident at Mme. de
Restaud’s, no one but Eugene could have reappeared in his character
of bullock-driver in Mme. de Beauseant’s drawing-room. But if Mme. de
Restaud and M. de Trailles had found him horribly in the way, M. d’Ajuda
hailed his coming with relief.
“Good-bye,” said the Portuguese, hurrying to the door, as Eugene made
his entrance into a dainty little pink-and-gray drawing-room, where
luxury seemed nothing more than good taste.
“Until this evening,” said Mme. de Beauseant, turning her head to give
the Marquis a glance. “We are going to the Bouffons, are we not?”
“I cannot go,” he said, with his fingers on the door handle.
Mme. de Beauseant rose and beckoned to him to return. She did not
pay the slightest attention to Eugene, who stood there dazzled by the
sparkling marvels around him; he began to think that this was some story
out of the Arabian Nights made real, and did not know where to hide
himself, when the woman before him seemed to be unconscious of his
existence. The Vicomtesse had raised the forefinger of her right hand,
and gracefully signed to the Marquis to seat himself beside her. The
Marquis felt the imperious sway of passion in her gesture; he came back
towards her. Eugene watched him, not without a feeling of envy.
“That is the owner of the brougham!” he said to himself. “But is it
necessary to have a pair of spirited horses, servants in livery, and
torrents of gold to draw a glance from a woman here in Paris?”
The demon of luxury gnawed at his heart, greed burned in his veins, his
throat was parched with the thirst of gold.
He had a hundred and thirty francs every quarter. His father, mother,
brothers, sisters, and aunt did not spend two hundred francs a month
among them. This swift comparison between his present condition and the
aims he had in view helped to benumb his faculties.
“Why not?” the Vicomtesse was saying, as she smiled at the Portuguese.
“Why cannot you come to the Italiens?”
“Affairs! I am to dine with the English Ambassador.”
“Throw him over.”
When a man once enters on a course of deception, he is compelled to
add lie to lie. M. d’Ajuda therefore said, smiling, “Do you lay your
commands on me?”
“Yes, certainly.”
“That was what I wanted to have you say to me,” he answered, dissembling
his feelings in a glance which would have reassured any other woman.
He took the Vicomtesse’s hand, kissed it, and went.
Eugene ran his fingers through his hair, and constrained himself to bow.
He thought that now Mme. de Beauseant would give him her attention;
but suddenly she sprang forward, rushed to a window in the gallery, and
watched M. d’Ajuda step into his carriage; she listened to the order
that he gave, and heard the Swiss repeat it to the coachman:
“To M. de Rochefide’s house.”
Those words, and the way in which M. d’Ajuda flung himself back in the
carriage, were like a lightning flash and a thunderbolt for her; she
walked back again with a deadly fear gnawing at her heart. The most
terrible catastrophes only happen among the heights. The Vicomtesse
went to her own room, sat down at a table, and took up a sheet of dainty
notepaper.
“When, instead of dining with the English Ambassador,”
she wrote, “you go to the Rochefides, you owe me an
explanation, which I am waiting to hear.”
She retraced several of the letters, for her hand was trembling so that
they were indistinct; then she signed the note with an initial C for
“Claire de Bourgogne,” and rang the bell.
“Jacques,” she said to the servant, who appeared immediately, “take
this note to M. de Rochefide’s house at half-past seven and ask for the
Marquis d’Ajuda. If M. d’Ajuda is there, leave the note without waiting
for an answer; if he is not there, bring the note back to me.”
“Madame la Vicomtess, there is a visitor in the drawing-room.”
“Ah! yes, of course,” she said, opening the door.
Eugene was beginning to feel very uncomfortable, but at last the
Vicomtesse appeared; she spoke to him, and the tremulous tones of her
voice vibrated through his heart.
“Pardon me, monsieur,” she said; “I had a letter to write. Now I am
quite at liberty.”
She scarcely knew what she was saying, for even as she spoke she
thought, “Ah! he means to marry Mlle. de Rochefide? But is he still
free? This evening the marriage shall be broken off, or else... But
before to-morrow I shall know.”
“Cousin...” the student replied.
“Eh?” said the Countess, with an insolent glance that sent a cold
shudder through Eugene; he understood what that “Eh?” meant; he had
learned a great deal in three hours, and his wits were on the alert. He
reddened:
“Madame...” he began; he hesitated a moment, and then went on.
“Pardon me; I am in such need of protection that the nearest scrap of
relationship could do me no harm.”
Mme. de Beauseant smiled but there was sadness in her smile; even now
she felt forebodings of the coming pain, the air she breathed was heavy
with the storm that was about to burst.
“If you knew how my family are situated,” he went on, “you would love to
play the part of a beneficent fairy godmother who graciously clears the
obstacles from the path of her protege.”
“Well, cousin,” she said, laughing, “and how can I be of service to
you?”
“But do I know even that? I am distantly related to you, and this
obscure and remote relationship is even now a perfect godsend to me. You
have confused my ideas; I cannot remember the things that I meant to say
to you. I know no one else here in Paris.... Ah! if I could only ask you
to counsel me, ask you to look upon me as a poor child who would fain
cling to the hem of your dress, who would lay down his life for you.”
“Would you kill a man for me?”
“Two,” said Eugene.
“You, child. Yes, you are a child,” she said, keeping back the tears
that came to her eyes; “you would love sincerely.”
“Oh!” he cried, flinging up his head.
The audacity of the student’s answer interested the Vicomtesse in him.
The southern brain was beginning to scheme for the first time. Between
Mme. de Restaud’s blue boudoir and Mme. de Beauseant’s rose-colored
drawing-room he had made a three years’ advance in a kind of law which
is not a recognized study in Paris, although it is a sort of higher
jurisprudence, and, when well understood, is a highroad to success of
every kind.
“Ah! that is what I meant to say!” said Eugene. “I met Mme. de Restaud
at your ball, and this morning I went to see her.
“You must have been very much in the way,” said Mme. de Beauseant,
smiling as she spoke.
“Yes, indeed. I am a novice, and my blunders will set every one against
me, if you do not give me your counsel. I believe that in Paris it is
very difficult to meet with a young, beautiful, and wealthy woman of
fashion who would be willing to teach me, what you women can explain so
well--life. I shall find a M. de Trailles everywhere. So I have come to
you to ask you to give me a key to a puzzle, to entreat you to tell me
what sort of blunder I made this morning. I mentioned an old man----”
“Madame la Duchess de Langeais,” Jacques cut the student short; Eugene
gave expression to his intense annoyance by a gesture.
“If you mean to succeed,” said the Vicomtesse in a low voice, “in the
first place you must not be so demonstrative.”
“Ah! good morning, dear,” she continued, and rising and crossing the
room, she grasped the Duchess’ hands as affectionately as if they had
been sisters; the Duchess responded in the prettiest and most gracious
way.
“Two intimate friends!” said Rastignac to himself. “Henceforward I shall
have two protectresses; those two women are great friends, no doubt, and
this newcomer will doubtless interest herself in her friend’s cousin.”
“To what happy inspiration do I owe this piece of good fortune, dear
Antoinette?” asked Mme. de Beauseant.
“Well, I saw M. d’Ajuda-Pinto at M. de Rochefide’s door, so I thought
that if I came I should find you alone.”
Mme. de Beauseant’s mouth did not tighten, her color did not rise, her
expression did not alter, or rather, her brow seemed to clear as the
Duchess uttered those deadly words.
“If I had known that you were engaged----” the speaker added, glancing
at Eugene.
“This gentleman is M. Eugene de Rastignac, one of my cousins,” said the
Vicomtesse. “Have you any news of General de Montriveau?” she continued.
“Serizy told me yesterday that he never goes anywhere now; has he been
to see you to-day?”
It was believed that the Duchess was desperately in love with M. de
Montriveau, and that he was a faithless lover; she felt the question in
her very heart, and her face flushed as she answered:
“He was at the Elysee yesterday.”
“In attendance?”
“Claire,” returned the Duchess, and hatred overflowed in the glances she
threw at Mme. de Beauseant; “of course you know that M. d’Ajuda-Pinto
is going to marry Mlle. de Rochefide; the bans will be published
to-morrow.”
This thrust was too cruel; the Vicomtesse’s face grew white, but she
answered, laughing, “One of those rumors that fools amuse themselves
with. What should induce M. d’Ajuda to take one of the noblest names
in Portugal to the Rochefides? The Rochefides were only ennobled
yesterday.”
“But Bertha will have two hundred thousand livres a year, they say.”
“M. d’Ajuda is too wealthy to marry for money.”
“But, my dear, Mlle. de Rochefide is a charming girl.”
“Indeed?”
“And, as a matter of fact, he is dining with them to-day; the thing
is settled. It is very surprising to me that you should know so little
about it.”
Mme. de Beauseant turned to Rastignac. “What was the blunder that you
made, monsieur?” she asked. “The poor boy is only just launched into the
world, Antoinette, so that he understands nothing of all this that
we are speaking of. Be merciful to him, and let us finish our talk
to-morrow. Everything will be announced to-morrow, you know, and
your kind informal communication can be accompanied by official
confirmation.”
The Duchess gave Eugene one of those insolent glances that measure a man
from head to foot, and leave him crushed and annihilated.
“Madame, I have unwittingly plunged a dagger into Mme. de Restaud’s
heart; unwittingly--therein lies my offence,” said the student of law,
whose keen brain had served him sufficiently well, for he had detected
the biting epigrams that lurked beneath this friendly talk. “You
continue to receive, possibly you fear, those who know the amount of
pain that they deliberately inflict; but a clumsy blunderer who has no
idea how deeply he wounds is looked upon as a fool who does not know how
to make use of his opportunities, and every one despises him.”
Mme. de Beauseant gave the student a glance, one of those glances in
which a great soul can mingle dignity and gratitude. It was like balm
to the law student, who was still smarting under the Duchess’ insolent
scrutiny; she had looked at him as an auctioneer might look at some
article to appraise its value.
“Imagine, too, that I had just made some progress with the Comte de
Restaud; for I should tell you, madame,” he went on, turning to the
Duchess with a mixture of humility and malice in his manner, “that as
yet I am only a poor devil of a student, very much alone in the world,
and very poor----”
“You should not tell us that, M. de Rastignac. We women never care about
anything that no one else will take.”
“Bah!” said Eugene. “I am only two-and-twenty, and I must make up my
mind to the drawbacks of my time of life. Besides, I am confessing
my sins, and it would be impossible to kneel in a more charming
confessional; you commit your sins in one drawing-room, and receive
absolution for them in another.”
The Duchess’ expression grew colder, she did not like the flippant tone
of these remarks, and showed that she considered them to be in bad
taste by turning to the Vicomtesse with--“This gentleman has only just
come----”
Mme. de Beauseant began to laugh outright at her cousin and at the
Duchess both.
“He has only just come to Paris, dear, and is in search of some one who
will give him lessons in good taste.”
“Mme. la Duchesse,” said Eugene, “is it not natural to wish to be
initiated into the mysteries which charm us?” (“Come, now,” he said to
himself, “my language is superfinely elegant, I’m sure.”)
“But Mme. de Restaud is herself, I believe, M. de Trailles’ pupil,” said
the Duchess.
“Of that I had no idea, madame,” answered the law student, “so I rashly
came between them. In fact, I got on very well with the lady’s husband,
and his wife tolerated me for a time until I took it into my head to
tell them that I knew some one of whom I had just caught a glimpse as he
went out by a back staircase, a man who had given the Countess a kiss at
the end of a passage.”
“Who was it?” both women asked together.
“An old man who lives at the rate of two louis a month in the Faubourg
Saint-Marceau, where I, a poor student, lodge likewise. He is a truly
unfortunate creature, everybody laughs at him--we all call him ‘Father
Goriot.’”
“Why, child that you are,” cried the Vicomtesse, “Mme. de Restaud was a
Mlle. Goriot!”
“The daughter of a vermicelli manufacturer,” the Duchess added; “and
when the little creature went to Court, the daughter of a pastry-cook
was presented on the same day. Do you remember, Claire? The King began
to laugh, and made some joke in Latin about flour. People--what was
it?--people----”
“_Ejusdem farinoe_,” said Eugene.
“Yes, that was it,” said the Duchess.
“Oh! is that her father?” the law student continued, aghast.
“Yes, certainly; the old man had two daughters; he dotes on them, so to
speak, though they will scarcely acknowledge him.”
“Didn’t the second daughter marry a banker with a German name?” the
Vicomtesse asked, turning to Mme. de Langeais, “a Baron de Nucingen? And
her name is Delphine, is it not? Isn’t she a fair-haired woman who has
a side-box at the Opera? She comes sometimes to the Bouffons, and laughs
loudly to attract attention.”
The Duchess smiled and said:
“I wonder at you, dear. Why do you take so much interest in people of
that kind? One must have been as madly in love as Restaud was, to be
infatuated with Mlle. Anastasie and her flour sacks. Oh! he will not
find her a good bargain! She is in M. de Trailles’ hands, and he will
ruin her.”
“And they do not acknowledge their father!” Eugene repeated.
“Oh! well, yes, their father, the father, a father,” replied the
Vicomtesse, “a kind father who gave them each five or six hundred
thousand francs, it is said, to secure their happiness by marrying
them well; while he only kept eight or ten thousand livres a year for
himself, thinking that his daughters would always be his daughters,
thinking that in them he would live his life twice over again, that
in their houses he should find two homes, where he would be loved
and looked up to, and made much of. And in two years’ time both his
sons-in-law had turned him out of their houses as if he were one of the
lowest outcasts.”
Tears came into Eugene’s eyes. He was still under the spell of youthful
beliefs, he had just left home, pure and sacred feelings had been
stirred within him, and this was his first day on the battlefield of
civilization in Paris. Genuine feeling is so infectious that for a
moment the three looked at each other in silence.
“_Eh, mon Dieu!_” said Mme. de Langeais; “yes, it seems very horrible,
and yet we see such things every day. Is there not a reason for it?
Tell me, dear, have you ever really thought what a son-in-law is? A
son-in-law is the man for whom we bring up, you and I, a dear little
one, bound to us very closely in innumerable ways; for seventeen years
she will be the joy of her family, its ‘white soul,’ as Lamartine says,
and suddenly she will become its scourge. When HE comes and takes her
from us, his love from the very beginning is like an axe laid to the
root of all the old affection in our darling’s heart, and all the ties
that bound her to her family are severed. But yesterday our little
daughter thought of no one but her mother and father, as we had no
thought that was not for her; by to-morrow she will have become a
hostile stranger. The tragedy is always going on under our eyes. On the
one hand you see a father who has sacrificed himself to his son, and
his daughter-in-law shows him the last degree of insolence. On the other
hand, it is the son-in-law who turns his wife’s mother out of the house.
I sometimes hear it said that there is nothing dramatic about society in
these days; but the Drama of the Son-in-law is appalling, to say nothing
of our marriages, which have come to be very poor farces. I can explain
how it all came about in the old vermicelli maker’s case. I think I
recollect that Foriot----”
“Goriot, madame.”
“Yes, that Moriot was once President of his Section during the
Revolution. He was in the secret of the famous scarcity of grain, and
laid the foundation of his fortune in those days by selling flour for
ten times its cost. He had as much flour as he wanted. My grandmother’s
steward sold him immense quantities. No doubt Noriot shared the plunder
with the Committee of Public Salvation, as that sort of person always
did. I recollect the steward telling my grandmother that she might live
at Grandvilliers in complete security, because her corn was as good as
a certificate of civism. Well, then, this Loriot, who sold corn to
those butchers, has never had but one passion, they say--he idolizes his
daughters. He settled one of them under Restaud’s roof, and grafted the
other into the Nucingen family tree, the Baron de Nucingen being a rich
banker who had turned Royalist. You can quite understand that so long as
Bonaparte was Emperor, the two sons-in-law could manage to put up with
the old Ninety-three; but after the restoration of the Bourbons, M. de
Restaud felt bored by the old man’s society, and the banker was still
more tired of it. His daughters were still fond of him; they wanted
‘to keep the goat and the cabbage,’ so they used to see Joriot whenever
there was no one there, under pretence of affection. ‘Come to-day, papa,
we shall have you all to ourselves, and that will be much nicer!’
and all that sort of thing. As for me, dear, I believe that love has
second-sight: poor Ninety-three; his heart must have bled. He saw that
his daughters were ashamed of him, that if they loved their husbands
his visits must make mischief. So he immolated himself. He made the
sacrifice because he was a father; he went into voluntary exile. His
daughters were satisfied, so he thought that he had done the best thing
he could; but it was a family crime, and father and daughters were
accomplices. You see this sort of thing everywhere. What could this old
Doriot have been but a splash of mud in his daughters’ drawing-rooms? He
would only have been in the way, and bored other people, besides being
bored himself. And this that happened between father and daughters may
happen to the prettiest woman in Paris and the man she loves the best;
if her love grows tiresome, he will go; he will descend to the basest
trickery to leave her. It is the same with all love and friendship. Our
heart is a treasury; if you pour out all its wealth at once, you are
bankrupt. We show no more mercy to the affection that reveals its utmost
extent than we do to another kind of prodigal who has not a penny left.
Their father had given them all he had. For twenty years he had given
his whole heart to them; then, one day, he gave them all his fortune
too. The lemon was squeezed; the girls left the rest in the gutter.”
“The world is very base,” said the Vicomtesse, plucking at the threads
of her shawl. She did not raise her head as she spoke; the words that
Mme. de Langeais had meant for her in the course of her story had cut
her to the quick.
“Base? Oh, no,” answered the Duchess; “the world goes its own way, that
is all. If I speak in this way, it is only to show that I am not duped
by it. I think as you do,” she said, pressing the Vicomtesse’s hand.
“The world is a slough; let us try to live on the heights above it.”
She rose to her feet and kissed Mme. de Beauseant on the forehead as
she said: “You look very charming to-day, dear. I have never seen such a
lovely color in your cheeks before.”
Then she went out with a slight inclination of the head to the cousin.
“Father Goriot is sublime!” said Eugene to himself, as he remembered how
he had watched his neighbor work the silver vessel into a shapeless mass
that night.
Mme. de Beauseant did not hear him; she was absorbed in her own
thoughts. For several minutes the silence remained unbroken till the
law student became almost paralyzed with embarrassment, and was equally
afraid to go or stay or speak a word.
