บทที่ บทที่ 16 · 第16章

“And if you should ever need some one who would gladly set a match to a

train for you----”

“Well?” she asked.

He tapped his heart, smiled in answer to his cousin’s smile, and went.

It was five o’clock, and Eugene was hungry; he was afraid lest he should

not be in time for dinner, a misgiving which made him feel that it was

pleasant to be borne so quickly across Paris. This sensation of physical

comfort left his mind free to grapple with the thoughts that assailed

him. A mortification usually sends a young man of his age into a furious

rage; he shakes his fist at society, and vows vengeance when his belief

in himself is shaken. Just then Rastignac was overwhelmed by the words,

“You have shut the Countess’ door against you.”

“I shall call!” he said to himself, “and if Mme. de Beauseant is right,

if I never find her at home--I... well, Mme. de Restaud shall meet me

in every salon in Paris. I will learn to fence and have some pistol

practice, and kill that Maxime of hers!”

“And money?” cried an inward monitor. “How about money, where is that

to come from?” And all at once the wealth displayed in the Countess de

Restaud’s drawing-room rose before his eyes. That was the luxury which

Goriot’s daughter had loved too well, the gilding, the ostentatious

splendor, the unintelligent luxury of the parvenu, the riotous

extravagance of a courtesan. Then the attractive vision suddenly went

under an eclipse as he remembered the stately grandeur of the Hotel de

Beauseant. As his fancy wandered among these lofty regions in the great

world of Paris, innumerable dark thoughts gathered in his heart; his

ideas widened, and his conscience grew more elastic. He saw the world as

it is; saw how the rich lived beyond the jurisdiction of law and public

opinion, and found in success the _ultima ratio mundi_.

“Vautrin is right, success is virtue!” he said to himself.

Arrived in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve, he rushed up to his room for

ten francs wherewith to satisfy the demands of the cabman, and went

in to dinner. He glanced round the squalid room, saw the eighteen

poverty-stricken creatures about to feed like cattle in their stalls,

and the sight filled him with loathing. The transition was too sudden,

and the contrast was so violent that it could not but act as a powerful

stimulant; his ambition developed and grew beyond all social bounds. On

the one hand, he beheld a vision of social life in its most charming

and refined forms, of quick-pulsed youth, of fair, impassioned faces

invested with all the charm of poetry, framed in a marvelous setting of

luxury or art; and, on the other hand, he saw a sombre picture, the miry

verge beyond these faces, in which passion was extinct and nothing was

left of the drama but the cords and pulleys and bare mechanism. Mme. de

Beauseant’s counsels, the words uttered in anger by the forsaken lady,

her petulant offer, came to his mind, and poverty was a ready expositor.

Rastignac determined to open two parallel trenches so as to insure

success; he would be a learned doctor of law and a man of fashion.

Clearly he was still a child! Those two lines are asymptotes, and will

never meet.

“You are very dull, my lord Marquis,” said Vautrin, with one of the

shrewd glances that seem to read the innermost secrets of another mind.

“I am not in the humor to stand jokes from people who call me ‘my lord

Marquis,’” answered Eugene. “A marquis here in Paris, if he is not the

veriest sham, ought to have a hundred thousand livres a year at least;

and a lodger in the Maison Vauquer is not exactly Fortune’s favorite.”

Vautrin’s glance at Rastignac was half-paternal, half-contemptuous.

“Puppy!” it seemed to say; “I should make one mouthful of him!” Then he

answered:

“You are in a bad humor; perhaps your visit to the beautiful Comtesse de

Restaud was not a success.”

“She has shut her door against me because I told her that her father

dined at our table,” cried Rastignac.

Glances were exchanged all round the room; Father Goriot looked down.

“You have sent some snuff into my eye,” he said to his neighbor, turning

a little aside to rub his hand over his face.

“Any one who molests Father Goriot will have henceforward to reckon with

me,” said Eugene, looking at the old man’s neighbor; “he is worth all

the rest of us put together.--I am not speaking of the ladies,” he

added, turning in the direction of Mlle. Taillefer.

Eugene’s remarks produced a sensation, and his tone silenced the

dinner-table. Vautrin alone spoke. “If you are going to champion Father

Goriot, and set up for his responsible editor into the bargain, you

had need be a crack shot and know how to handle the foils,” he said,

banteringly.

“So I intend,” said Eugene.

“Then you are taking the field to-day?”

“Perhaps,” Rastignac answered. “But I owe no account of myself to any

one, especially as I do not try to find out what other people do of a

night.”

Vautrin looked askance at Rastignac.

“If you do not mean to be deceived by the puppets, my boy, you must

go behind and see the whole show, and not peep through holes in the

curtain. That is enough,” he added, seeing that Eugene was about to fly

into a passion. “We can have a little talk whenever you like.”

There was a general feeling of gloom and constraint. Father Goriot was

so deeply dejected by the student’s remark that he did not notice the

change in the disposition of his fellow-lodgers, nor know that he had

met with a champion capable of putting an end to the persecution.

“Then, M. Goriot sitting there is the father of a countess,” said Mme.

Vauquer in a low voice.

“And of a baroness,” answered Rastignac.

“That is about all he is capable of,” said Bianchon to Rastignac; “I

have taken a look at his head; there is only one bump--the bump of

Paternity; he must be an _eternal father_.”

Eugene was too intent on his thoughts to laugh at Bianchon’s joke. He

determined to profit by Mme. de Beauseant’s counsels, and was asking

himself how he could obtain the necessary money. He grew grave. The wide

savannas of the world stretched before his eyes; all things lay before

him, nothing was his. Dinner came to an end, the others went, and he was

left in the dining-room.

“So you have seen my daughter?” Goriot spoke tremulously, and the sound

of his voice broke in upon Eugene’s dreams. The young man took the

elder’s hand, and looked at him with something like kindness in his

eyes.

“You are a good and noble man,” he said. “We will have some talk about

your daughters by and by.”

He rose without waiting for Goriot’s answer, and went to his room. There

he wrote the following letter to his mother:--

“My Dear Mother,--Can you nourish your child from your breast

again? I am in a position to make a rapid fortune, but I want

twelve hundred francs--I must have them at all costs. Say nothing

about this to my father; perhaps he might make objections, and

unless I have the money, I may be led to put an end to myself, and

so escape the clutches of despair. I will tell you everything when

I see you. I will not begin to try to describe my present

situation; it would take volumes to put the whole story clearly

and fully. I have not been gambling, my kind mother, I owe no one

a penny; but if you would preserve the life that you gave me, you

must send me the sum I mention. As a matter of fact, I go to see

the Vicomtesse de Beauseant; she is using her influence for me; I

am obliged to go into society, and I have not a penny to lay out

on clean gloves. I can manage to exist on bread and water, or go

without food, if need be, but I cannot do without the tools with

which they cultivate the vineyards in this country. I must

resolutely make up my mind at once to make my way, or stick in the

mire for the rest of my days. I know that all your hopes are set

on me, and I want to realize them quickly. Sell some of your old

jewelry, my kind mother; I will give you other jewels very soon. I

know enough of our affairs at home to know all that such a

sacrifice means, and you must not think that I would lightly ask

you to make it; I should be a monster if I could. You must think

of my entreaty as a cry forced from me by imperative necessity.

Our whole future lies in the subsidy with which I must begin my

first campaign, for life in Paris is one continual battle. If you

cannot otherwise procure the whole of the money, and are forced to

sell our aunt’s lace, tell her that I will send her some still

handsomer,” and so forth.

He wrote to ask each of his sisters for their savings--would they

despoil themselves for him, and keep the sacrifice a secret from the

family? To his request he knew that they would not fail to respond

gladly, and he added to it an appeal to their delicacy by touching the

chord of honor that vibrates so loudly in young and high-strung natures.

Yet when he had written the letters, he could not help feeling

misgivings in spite of his youthful ambition; his heart beat fast, and

he trembled. He knew the spotless nobleness of the lives buried away in

the lonely manor house; he knew what trouble and what joy his request

would cause his sisters, and how happy they would be as they talked

at the bottom of the orchard of that dear brother of theirs in Paris.

Visions rose before his eyes; a sudden strong light revealed his

sisters secretly counting over their little store, devising some girlish

stratagem by which the money could be sent to him _incognito_, essaying,

for the first time in their lives, a piece of deceit that reached the

sublime in its unselfishness.

“A sister’s heart is a diamond for purity, a deep sea of tenderness!” he

said to himself. He felt ashamed of those letters.

What power there must be in the petitions put up by such hearts;

how pure the fervor that bears their souls to Heaven in prayer! What

exquisite joy they would find in self-sacrifice! What a pang for his

mother’s heart if she could not send him all that he asked for! And this

noble affection, these sacrifices made at such terrible cost, were to

serve as the ladder by which he meant to climb to Delphine de Nucingen.

A few tears, like the last grains of incense flung upon the sacred

alter fire of the hearth, fell from his eyes. He walked up and down,

and despair mingled with his emotion. Father Goriot saw him through the

half-open door.