Kabanata Kabanata 1 · 第1章

Chapter 1. Father Goriot

Mme. Vauquer (_nee_ de Conflans) is an elderly person, who for the past

forty years has kept a lodging-house in the Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve,

in the district that lies between the Latin Quarter and the Faubourg

Saint-Marcel. Her house (known in the neighborhood as the _Maison

Vauquer_) receives men and women, old and young, and no word has ever

been breathed against her respectable establishment; but, at the same

time, it must be said that as a matter of fact no young woman has been

under her roof for thirty years, and that if a young man stays there for

any length of time it is a sure sign that his allowance must be of the

slenderest. In 1819, however, the time when this drama opens, there was

an almost penniless young girl among Mme. Vauquer’s boarders.

That word drama has been somewhat discredited of late; it has been

overworked and twisted to strange uses in these days of dolorous

literature; but it must do service again here, not because this story is

dramatic in the restricted sense of the word, but because some tears may

perhaps be shed _intra et extra muros_ before it is over.

Will any one without the walls of Paris understand it? It is open to

doubt. The only audience who could appreciate the results of close

observation, the careful reproduction of minute detail and local color,

are dwellers between the heights of Montrouge and Montmartre, in a vale

of crumbling stucco watered by streams of black mud, a vale of sorrows

which are real and joys too often hollow; but this audience is so

accustomed to terrible sensations, that only some unimaginable and

well-neigh impossible woe could produce any lasting impression there.

Now and again there are tragedies so awful and so grand by reason of the

complication of virtues and vices that bring them about, that egotism

and selfishness are forced to pause and are moved to pity; but the

impression that they receive is like a luscious fruit, soon consumed.

Civilization, like the car of Juggernaut, is scarcely stayed perceptibly

in its progress by a heart less easy to break than the others that lie

in its course; this also is broken, and Civilization continues on her

course triumphant. And you, too, will do the like; you who with this

book in your white hand will sink back among the cushions of your

armchair, and say to yourself, “Perhaps this may amuse me.” You will

read the story of Father Goriot’s secret woes, and, dining thereafter

with an unspoiled appetite, will lay the blame of your insensibility

upon the writer, and accuse him of exaggeration, of writing romances.

Ah! once for all, this drama is neither a fiction nor a romance! _All is

true_,--so true, that every one can discern the elements of the tragedy

in his own house, perhaps in his own heart.

The lodging-house is Mme. Vauquer’s own property. It is still standing

in the lower end of the Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve, just where the road

slopes so sharply down to the Rue de l’Arbalete, that wheeled traffic

seldom passes that way, because it is so stony and steep. This position

is sufficient to account for the silence prevalent in the streets shut

in between the dome of the Pantheon and the dome of the Val-de-Grace,

two conspicuous public buildings which give a yellowish tone to the

landscape and darken the whole district that lies beneath the shadow of

their leaden-hued cupolas.

In that district the pavements are clean and dry, there is neither mud

nor water in the gutters, grass grows in the chinks of the walls. The

most heedless passer-by feels the depressing influences of a place where

the sound of wheels creates a sensation; there is a grim look about the

houses, a suggestion of a jail about those high garden walls. A Parisian

straying into a suburb apparently composed of lodging-houses and public

institutions would see poverty and dullness, old age lying down to die,

and joyous youth condemned to drudgery. It is the ugliest quarter of

Paris, and, it may be added, the least known. But, before all things,

the Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve is like a bronze frame for a picture for

which the mind cannot be too well prepared by the contemplation of sad

hues and sober images. Even so, step by step the daylight decreases,

and the cicerone’s droning voice grows hollower as the traveler descends

into the Catacombs. The comparison holds good! Who shall say which is

more ghastly, the sight of the bleached skulls or of dried-up human

hearts?

The front of the lodging-house is at right angles to the road, and

looks out upon a little garden, so that you see the side of the house

in section, as it were, from the Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve. Beneath the

wall of the house front there lies a channel, a fathom wide, paved with

cobble-stones, and beside it runs a graveled walk bordered by geraniums

and oleanders and pomegranates set in great blue and white glazed

earthenware pots. Access into the graveled walk is afforded by a door,

above which the words MAISON VAUQUER may be read, and beneath, in rather

smaller letters, “_Lodgings for both sexes, etc._”

During the day a glimpse into the garden is easily obtained through a

wicket to which a bell is attached. On the opposite wall, at the further

end of the graveled walk, a green marble arch was painted once upon

a time by a local artist, and in this semblance of a shrine a statue

representing Cupid is installed; a Parisian Cupid, so blistered and

disfigured that he looks like a candidate for one of the adjacent

hospitals, and might suggest an allegory to lovers of symbolism. The

half-obliterated inscription on the pedestal beneath determines the date

of this work of art, for it bears witness to the widespread enthusiasm

felt for Voltaire on his return to Paris in 1777:

“Whoe’er thou art, thy master see;

He is, or was, or ought to be.”

At night the wicket gate is replaced by a solid door. The little garden

is no wider than the front of the house; it is shut in between the wall

of the street and the partition wall of the neighboring house. A mantle

of ivy conceals the bricks and attracts the eyes of passers-by to an

effect which is picturesque in Paris, for each of the walls is covered

with trellised vines that yield a scanty dusty crop of fruit, and

furnish besides a subject of conversation for Mme. Vauquer and her

lodgers; every year the widow trembles for her vintage.

A straight path beneath the walls on either side of the garden leads to

a clump of lime-trees at the further end of it; _line_-trees, as Mme.

Vauquer persists in calling them, in spite of the fact that she was a de

Conflans, and regardless of repeated corrections from her lodgers.

The central space between the walls is filled with artichokes and

rows of pyramid fruit-trees, and surrounded by a border of lettuce,

pot-herbs, and parsley. Under the lime-trees there are a few

green-painted garden seats and a wooden table, and hither, during the

dog-days, such of the lodgers as are rich enough to indulge in a cup

of coffee come to take their pleasure, though it is hot enough to roast

eggs even in the shade.

The house itself is three stories high, without counting the attics

under the roof. It is built of rough stone, and covered with the

yellowish stucco that gives a mean appearance to almost every house in

Paris. There are five windows in each story in the front of the house;

all the blinds visible through the small square panes are drawn up awry,

so that the lines are all at cross purposes. At the side of the house

there are but two windows on each floor, and the lowest of all are

adorned with a heavy iron grating.

Behind the house a yard extends for some twenty feet, a space inhabited

by a happy family of pigs, poultry, and rabbits; the wood-shed is

situated on the further side, and on the wall between the wood-shed and

the kitchen window hangs the meat-safe, just above the place where the

sink discharges its greasy streams. The cook sweeps all the refuse

out through a little door into the Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve, and

frequently cleanses the yard with copious supplies of water, under pain

of pestilence.

The house might have been built on purpose for its present uses. Access

is given by a French window to the first room on the ground floor, a

sitting-room which looks out upon the street through the two barred

windows already mentioned. Another door opens out of it into the

dining-room, which is separated from the kitchen by the well of the

staircase, the steps being constructed partly of wood, partly of tiles,

which are colored and beeswaxed. Nothing can be more depressing than

the sight of that sitting-room. The furniture is covered with horse hair

woven in alternate dull and glossy stripes. There is a round table in

the middle, with a purplish-red marble top, on which there stands, by

way of ornament, the inevitable white china tea-service, covered with

a half-effaced gilt network. The floor is sufficiently uneven, the

wainscot rises to elbow height, and the rest of the wall space is

decorated with a varnished paper, on which the principal scenes from

_Telemaque_ are depicted, the various classical personages being

colored. The subject between the two windows is the banquet given by

Calypso to the son of Ulysses, displayed thereon for the admiration of

the boarders, and has furnished jokes these forty years to the young

men who show themselves superior to their position by making fun of the

dinners to which poverty condemns them. The hearth is always so clean

and neat that it is evident that a fire is only kindled there on great

occasions; the stone chimney-piece is adorned by a couple of vases

filled with faded artificial flowers imprisoned under glass shades, on

either side of a bluish marble clock in the very worst taste.

The first room exhales an odor for which there is no name in the

language, and which should be called the _odeur de pension_. The damp

atmosphere sends a chill through you as you breathe it; it has a stuffy,

musty, and rancid quality; it permeates your clothing; after-dinner

scents seem to be mingled in it with smells from the kitchen and

scullery and the reek of a hospital. It might be possible to describe

it if some one should discover a process by which to distil from the

atmosphere all the nauseating elements with which it is charged by the

catarrhal exhalations of every individual lodger, young or old. Yet,

in spite of these stale horrors, the sitting-room is as charming and

as delicately perfumed as a boudoir, when compared with the adjoining

dining-room.