Bab Bab 4 · 第4章

Mlle. Taillefer felt attracted, perhaps unconsciously, by the strength

of the one man, and the good looks of the other; her stolen glances and

secret thoughts were divided between them; but neither of them seemed

to take any notice of her, although some day a chance might alter her

position, and she would be a wealthy heiress. For that matter, there was

not a soul in the house who took any trouble to investigate the various

chronicles of misfortunes, real or imaginary, related by the rest. Each

one regarded the others with indifference, tempered by suspicion; it was

a natural result of their relative positions. Practical assistance not

one could give, this they all knew, and they had long since exhausted

their stock of condolence over previous discussions of their grievances.

They were in something the same position as an elderly couple who have

nothing left to say to each other. The routine of existence kept them in

contact, but they were parts of a mechanism which wanted oil. There was

not one of them but would have passed a blind man begging in the street,

not one that felt moved to pity by a tale of misfortune, not one who

did not see in death the solution of the all-absorbing problem of misery

which left them cold to the most terrible anguish in others.

The happiest of these hapless beings was certainly Mme. Vauquer, who

reigned supreme over this hospital supported by voluntary contributions.

For her, the little garden, which silence, and cold, and rain, and

drought combined to make as dreary as an Asian _steppe_, was a pleasant

shaded nook; the gaunt yellow house, the musty odors of a back shop had

charms for her, and for her alone. Those cells belonged to her. She fed

those convicts condemned to penal servitude for life, and her authority

was recognized among them. Where else in Paris would they have found

wholesome food in sufficient quantity at the prices she charged them,

and rooms which they were at liberty to make, if not exactly elegant or

comfortable, at any rate clean and healthy? If she had committed some

flagrant act of injustice, the victim would have borne it in silence.

Such a gathering contained, as might have been expected, the elements

out of which a complete society might be constructed. And, as in a

school, as in the world itself, there was among the eighteen men and

women who met round the dinner table a poor creature, despised by

all the others, condemned to be the butt of all their jokes. At the

beginning of Eugene de Rastignac’s second twelvemonth, this figure

suddenly started out into bold relief against the background of human

forms and faces among which the law student was yet to live for

another two years to come. This laughing-stock was the retired

vermicelli-merchant, Father Goriot, upon whose face a painter, like the

historian, would have concentrated all the light in his picture.

How had it come about that the boarders regarded him with a

half-malignant contempt? Why did they subject the oldest among their

number to a kind of persecution, in which there was mingled some pity,

but no respect for his misfortunes? Had he brought it on himself by some

eccentricity or absurdity, which is less easily forgiven or forgotten

than more serious defects? The question strikes at the root of many a

social injustice. Perhaps it is only human nature to inflict suffering

on anything that will endure suffering, whether by reason of its genuine

humility, or indifference, or sheer helplessness. Do we not, one and

all, like to feel our strength even at the expense of some one or of

something? The poorest sample of humanity, the street arab, will pull

the bell handle at every street door in bitter weather, and scramble up

to write his name on the unsullied marble of a monument.

In the year 1813, at the age of sixty-nine or thereabouts, “Father

Goriot” had sold his business and retired--to Mme. Vauquer’s boarding

house. When he first came there he had taken the rooms now occupied by

Mme. Couture; he had paid twelve hundred francs a year like a man to

whom five louis more or less was a mere trifle. For him Mme. Vauquer had

made various improvements in the three rooms destined for his use, in

consideration of a certain sum paid in advance, so it was said, for the

miserable furniture, that is to say, for some yellow cotton curtains, a

few chairs of stained wood covered with Utrecht velvet, several wretched

colored prints in frames, and wall papers that a little suburban tavern

would have disdained. Possibly it was the careless generosity with which

Father Goriot allowed himself to be overreached at this period of his

life (they called him Monsieur Goriot very respectfully then) that gave

Mme. Vauquer the meanest opinion of his business abilities; she looked

on him as an imbecile where money was concerned.

Goriot had brought with him a considerable wardrobe, the gorgeous

outfit of a retired tradesman who denies himself nothing. Mme. Vauquer’s

astonished eyes beheld no less than eighteen cambric-fronted shirts, the

splendor of their fineness being enhanced by a pair of pins each bearing

a large diamond, and connected by a short chain, an ornament which

adorned the vermicelli-maker’s shirt front. He usually wore a coat of

corn-flower blue; his rotund and portly person was still further set

off by a clean white waistcoat, and a gold chain and seals which dangled

over that broad expanse. When his hostess accused him of being “a bit

of a beau,” he smiled with the vanity of a citizen whose foible is

gratified. His cupboards (_ormoires_, as he called them in the popular

dialect) were filled with a quantity of plate that he brought with him.

The widow’s eyes gleamed as she obligingly helped him to unpack the

soup ladles, table-spoons, forks, cruet-stands, tureens, dishes,

and breakfast services--all of silver, which were duly arranged upon

shelves, besides a few more or less handsome pieces of plate, all

weighing no inconsiderable number of ounces; he could not bring himself

to part with these gifts that reminded him of past domestic festivals.

“This was my wife’s present to me on the first anniversary of our

wedding day,” he said to Mme. Vauquer, as he put away a little silver

posset dish, with two turtle-doves billing on the cover. “Poor dear! she

spent on it all the money she had saved before we were married. Do

you know, I would sooner scratch the earth with my nails for a living,

madame, than part with that. But I shall be able to take my coffee out

of it every morning for the rest of my days, thank the Lord! I am not to

be pitied. There’s not much fear of my starving for some time to come.”

Finally, Mme. Vauquer’s magpie’s eye had discovered and read certain

entries in the list of shareholders in the funds, and, after a rough

calculation, was disposed to credit Goriot (worthy man) with something

like ten thousand francs a year. From that day forward Mme. Vauquer

(_nee_ de Conflans), who, as a matter of fact, had seen forty-eight

summers, though she would only own to thirty-nine of them--Mme. Vauquer

had her own ideas. Though Goriot’s eyes seemed to have shrunk in their

sockets, though they were weak and watery, owing to some glandular

affection which compelled him to wipe them continually, she considered

him to be a very gentlemanly and pleasant-looking man. Moreover, the

widow saw favorable indications of character in the well-developed

calves of his legs and in his square-shaped nose, indications still

further borne out by the worthy man’s full-moon countenance and look

of stupid good-nature. This, in all probability, was a strongly-build

animal, whose brains mostly consisted in a capacity for affection. His

hair, worn in _ailes de pigeon_, and duly powdered every morning by the

barber from the Ecole Polytechnique, described five points on his low

forehead, and made an elegant setting to his face. Though his manners

were somewhat boorish, he was always as neat as a new pin and he took

his snuff in a lordly way, like a man who knows that his snuff-box is

always likely to be filled with maccaboy, so that when Mme. Vauquer lay

down to rest on the day of M. Goriot’s installation, her heart, like a

larded partridge, sweltered before the fire of a burning desire to shake

off the shroud of Vauquer and rise again as Goriot. She would marry

again, sell her boarding-house, give her hand to this fine flower of

citizenship, become a lady of consequence in the quarter, and ask for

subscriptions for charitable purposes; she would make little Sunday

excursions to Choisy, Soissy, Gentilly; she would have a box at the

theatre when she liked, instead of waiting for the author’s tickets that

one of her boarders sometimes gave her, in July; the whole Eldorado of

a little Parisian household rose up before Mme. Vauquer in her

dreams. Nobody knew that she herself possessed forty thousand francs,

accumulated _sou by sou_, that was her secret; surely as far as money

was concerned she was a very tolerable match. “And in other respects,

I am quite his equal,” she said to herself, turning as if to assure

herself of the charms of a form that the portly Sylvie found moulded in

down feathers every morning.

For three months from that day Mme. Veuve Vauquer availed herself of

the services of M. Goriot’s coiffeur, and went to some expense over her

toilette, expense justifiable on the ground that she owed it to herself

and her establishment to pay some attention to appearances when such

highly-respectable persons honored her house with their presence. She

expended no small amount of ingenuity in a sort of weeding process of

her lodgers, announcing her intention of receiving henceforward none but

people who were in every way select. If a stranger presented himself,

she let him know that M. Goriot, one of the best known and most

highly-respected merchants in Paris, had singled out her boarding-house

for a residence. She drew up a prospectus headed MAISON VAUQUER, in

which it was asserted that hers was “_one of the oldest and most highly

recommended boarding-houses in the Latin Quarter_.” “From the windows

of the house,” thus ran the prospectus, “there is a charming view of

the Vallee des Gobelins (so there is--from the third floor), and a

_beautiful_ garden, _extending_ down to _an avenue of lindens_ at the

further end.” Mention was made of the bracing air of the place and its

quiet situation.