Father Goriot by Honoré de Balzac (bookstand for reading TXT) 📕

he could not see. He used to spend his hours of leisure on the threshold of his shop, leaning against the framework of the door. Take him from his dark little counting-house, and he became once more the rough, slow-witted workman, a man who cannot understand a piece of reasoning, who is indifferent to all intellectual pleasures, and falls asleep at the play, a Parisian Dolibom in short, against whose stupidity other minds are powerless.

Natures of this kind are nearly all alike; in almost all of them you will find some hidden depth of sublime affection. Two all-absorbing affections filled the vermicelli maker's heart to the exclusion of every other feeling; into them he seemed to put all the forces of his nature, as he put the whole power of his brain into the corn trade. He had regarded his wife, the only daughter of a rich farmer of La Brie, with a devout admiration; his love for her had been boundless. Goriot had felt the charm of a lovely and sensitive nature, which, in its delicate strength, was the very opposite of his own. Is there any instinct more deeply implanted in the heart of man than the pride of protection, a protection which is constantly exerted for a fragile and defenceless creature? Join love thereto, the warmth of gratitude that all generous souls feel for the source of their pleasures, and you have the explanation of many strange incongruities in human nature.

After seven years of unclouded happiness, Goriot lost his wife. It was very unfortunate for him. She was beginning to gain an ascendency over him in other ways; possibly she might have brought that barren soil under cultivation, she might have widened his ideas and given other directions to his thoughts. But when she was dead, the instinct of fatherhood developed in him till it almost became a mania. All the affection balked by death seemed to turn to his daughters, and he found full satisfaction for his heart in loving them. More or less brilliant proposals were made to him from time to time; wealthy merchants or farmers with daughters vied with each other in offering inducements to him to marry again; but he determined to remain a widower. His father-in-law, the only man for whom he felt a decided friendship, gave out that Goriot had made a vow to be faithful to his wife's memory. The frequenters of the Corn Exchange, who could not comprehend this sublime piece of folly, joked about it among themselves, and found a ridiculous nickname for him. One of them ventured (after a glass over a bargain) to call him by it, and a blow from the vermicelli maker's fist sent him headlong into a gutter in the Rue Oblin. He could think of nothing else when his children were concerned; his love for them made him fidgety and anxious; and this was so well known, that one day a competitor, who wished to get rid of him to secure the field to himself, told Goriot that Delphine had just been knocked down by a cab. The vermicelli maker turned ghastly pale, left the Exchange at once, and did not return for several days afterwards; he was ill in consequence of the shock and the subsequent relief on discovering that it was a false alarm. This time, however, the offender did not escape with a bruised shoulder; at a critical moment in the man's affairs, Goriot drove him into bankruptcy, and forced him to disappear from the Corn Exchange.

As might have been expected, the two girls were spoiled. With an income of sixty thousand francs, Goriot scarcely spent twelve hundred on himself, and found all his happiness in satisfying the whims of the two girls. The best masters were engaged, that Anastasie and Delphine might be endowed with all the accomplishments which distinguish a good education. They had a chaperon--luckily for them, she was a woman who had good sense and good taste;--they learned to ride; they had a carriage for their use; they lived as the mistress of a rich old lord might live; they had only to express a wish, their father would hasten to give them their most extravagant desires, and asked nothing of them in return but a kiss. Goriot had raised the two girls to the level of the angels; and, quite naturally, he himself was left beneath them. Poor man! he loved them even for the pain that they gave him.

When the girls were old enough to be married, they were left free to choose for themselves. Each had half her father's fortune as her dowry; and when the Comte de Restaud came to woo Anastasie for her beauty, her social aspirations led her to leave her father's house for a more exalted sphere. Delphine wished for money; she married Nucingen, a banker of German extraction, who became a Baron of the Holy Roman Empire. Goriot remained a vermicelli maker as before. His daughters and his sons-in-law began to demur; they did not like to see him still engaged in trade, though his whole life was bound up with his business. For five years he stood out against their entreaties, then he yielded, and consented to retire on the amount realized by the sale of his business and the savings of the last few years. It was this capital that Mme. Vauquer, in the early days of his residence with her, had calculated would bring in eight or ten thousand livres in a year. He had taken refuge in her lodging-house, driven there by despair when he knew that his daughters were compelled by their husbands not only to refuse to receive him as an inmate in their houses, but even to see him no more except in private.

This was all the information which Rastignac gained from a M. Muret who had purchased Goriot's business, information which confirmed the Duchesse de Langeais' suppositions, and herewith the preliminary explanation of this obscure but terrible Parisian tragedy comes to an end.

Towards the end of the first week in December Rastignac received two letters--one from his mother, and one from his eldest sister. His heart beat fast, half with happiness, half with fear, at the sight of the familiar handwriting. Those two little scraps of paper contained life or death for his hopes. But while he felt a shiver of dread as he remembered their dire poverty at home, he knew their love for him so well that he could not help fearing that he was draining their very life-blood. His mother's letter ran as follows:--

"MY DEAR CHILD,--I am sending you the money that you asked for.
Make a good use of it. Even to save your life I could not raise so
large a sum a second time without your father's knowledge, and
there would be trouble about it. We should be obliged to mortgage
the land. It is impossible to judge of the merits of schemes of
which I am ignorant; but what sort of schemes can they be, that
you should fear to tell me about them? Volumes of explanation
would not have been needed; we mothers can understand at a word,
and that word would have spared me the anguish of uncertainty. I
do not know how to hide the painful impression that your letter
has made upon me, my dear son. What can you have felt when you
were moved to send this chill of dread through my heart? It must
have been very painful to you to write the letter that gave me so
much pain as I read it. To what courses are you committed? You are
going to appear to be something that you are not, and your whole
life and success depends upon this? You are about to see a society
into which you cannot enter without rushing into expense that you
cannot afford, without losing precious time that is needed for
your studies. Ah! my dear Eugene, believe your mother, crooked
ways cannot lead to great ends. Patience and endurance are the two
qualities most needed in your position. I am not scolding you; I
do not want any tinge of bitterness to spoil our offering. I am
only talking like a mother whose trust in you is as great as her
foresight for you. You know the steps that you must take, and I,
for my part, know the purity of heart, and how good your
intentions are; so I can say to you without a doubt, 'Go forward,
beloved!' If I tremble, it is because I am a mother, but my
prayers and blessings will be with you at every step. Be very
careful, dear boy. You must have a man's prudence, for it lies
with you to shape the destinies of five others who are dear to
you, and must look to you. Yes, our fortunes depend upon you, and
your success is ours. We all pray to God to be with you in all
that you do. Your aunt Marcillac has been most generous beyond
words in this matter; she saw at once how it was, even down to
your gloves. 'But I have a weakness for the eldest!' she said
gaily. You must love your aunt very much, dear Eugene. I shall
wait till you have succeeded before telling you all that she has
done for you, or her money would burn your fingers. You, who are
young, do not know what it is to part with something that is a
piece of your past! But what would we not sacrifice for your
sakes? Your aunt says that I am to send you a kiss on the forehead
from her, and that kiss is to bring you luck again and again, she
says. She would have written you herself, the dear kind-hearted
woman, but she is troubled with the gout in her fingers just now.
Your father is very well. The vintage of 1819 has turned out
better than we expected. Good-bye, dear boy; I will say nothing
about your sisters, because Laure is writing to you, and I must
let her have the pleasure of giving you all the home news. Heaven
send that you may succeed! Oh! yes, dear Eugene, you must succeed.
I have come, through you, to a knowledge of a pain so sharp that I
do not think I could endure it a second time. I have come to know
what it is to be poor, and to long for money for my children's
sake. There, good-bye! Do not leave us for long without news of
you; and here, at the last, take a kiss from your mother."

By the time Eugene had finished the letter he was in tears. He thought of Father Goriot crushing his silver keepsake into a shapeless mass before he sold it to meet his daughter's bill of exchange.

"Your mother has broken up her jewels for you," he said to himself; "your aunt shed tears over those relics of hers before she sold them for your sake. What right have you to heap execrations on Anastasie? You have followed her example; you have selfishly sacrificed others to your own future, and she sacrifices her