บทที่ บทที่ 17 · 第17章

“What is the matter, sir?” he asked from the threshold.

“Ah! my good neighbor, I am as much a son and brother as you are a

father. You do well to fear for the Comtesse Anastasie; there is one M.

Maxime de Trailles, who will be her ruin.”

Father Goriot withdrew, stammering some words, but Eugene failed to

catch their meaning.

The next morning Rastignac went out to post his letters. Up to the last

moment he wavered and doubted, but he ended by flinging them into the

box. “I shall succeed!” he said to himself. So says the gambler; so says

the great captain; but the three words that have been the salvation of

some few, have been the ruin of many more.

A few days after this Eugene called at Mme. de Restaud’s house; she was

not at home. Three times he tried the experiment, and three times he

found her doors closed against him, though he was careful to choose an

hour when M. de Trailles was not there. The Vicomtesse was right.

The student studied no longer. He put in an appearance at lectures

simply to answer to his name, and after thus attesting his presence,

departed forthwith. He had been through a reasoning process familiar to

most students. He had seen the advisability of deferring his studies

to the last moment before going up for his examinations; he made up his

mind to cram his second and third years’ work into the third year, when

he meant to begin to work in earnest, and to complete his studies in law

with one great effort. In the meantime he had fifteen months in which to

navigate the ocean of Paris, to spread the nets and set the lines that

would bring him a protectress and a fortune. Twice during that week he

saw Mme. de Beauseant; he did not go to her house until he had seen the

Marquis d’Ajuda drive away.

Victory for yet a few more days was with the great lady, the most poetic

figure in the Faubourg Saint-Germain; and the marriage of the Marquis

d’Ajuda-Pinto with Mlle. de Rochefide was postponed. The dread of losing

her happiness filled those days with a fever of joy unknown before,

but the end was only so much the nearer. The Marquis d’Ajuda and the

Rochefides agreed that this quarrel and reconciliation was a very

fortunate thing; Mme. de Beauseant (so they hoped) would gradually

become reconciled to the idea of the marriage, and in the end would be

brought to sacrifice d’Ajuda’s morning visits to the exigencies of a

man’s career, exigencies which she must have foreseen. In spite of the

most solemn promises, daily renewed, M. d’Ajuda was playing a part,

and the Vicomtesse was eager to be deceived. “Instead of taking a leap

heroically from the window, she is falling headlong down the staircase,”

said her most intimate friend, the Duchesse de Langeais. Yet this

after-glow of happiness lasted long enough for the Vicomtesse to be of

service to her young cousin. She had a half-superstitious affection for

him. Eugene had shown her sympathy and devotion at a crisis when a woman

sees no pity, no real comfort in any eyes; when if a man is ready with

soothing flatteries, it is because he has an interested motive.

Rastignac made up his mind that he must learn the whole of Goriot’s

previous history; he would come to his bearings before attempting to

board the Maison de Nucingen. The results of his inquiries may be given

briefly as follows:--

In the days before the Revolution, Jean-Joachim Goriot was simply a

workman in the employ of a vermicelli maker. He was a skilful, thrifty

workman, sufficiently enterprising to buy his master’s business when

the latter fell a chance victim to the disturbances of 1789. Goriot

established himself in the Rue de la Jussienne, close to the Corn

Exchange. His plain good sense led him to accept the position of

President of the Section, so as to secure for his business the

protection of those in power at that dangerous epoch. This prudent step

had led to success; the foundations of his fortune were laid in the time

of the Scarcity (real or artificial), when the price of grain of all

kinds rose enormously in Paris. People used to fight for bread at the

bakers’ doors; while other persons went to the grocers’ shops and bought

Italian paste foods without brawling over it. It was during this year

that Goriot made the money, which, at a later time, was to give him

all the advantage of the great capitalist over the small buyer; he had,

moreover, the usual luck of average ability; his mediocrity was the

salvation of him. He excited no one’s envy, it was not even suspected

that he was rich till the peril of being rich was over, and all his

intelligence was concentrated, not on political, but on commercial

speculations. Goriot was an authority second to none on all questions

relating to corn, flour, and “middlings”; and the production, storage,

and quality of grain. He could estimate the yield of the harvest, and

foresee market prices; he bought his cereals in Sicily, and imported

Ukrainian wheat. Any one who had heard him hold forth on the regulations

that control the importation and exportation of grain, who had seen his

grasp of the subject, his clear insight into the principles involved,

his appreciation of weak points in the way that the system worked,

would have thought that here was the stuff of which a minister is made.

Patient, active, and persevering, energetic and prompt in action, he

surveyed his business horizon with an eagle eye. Nothing there took him

by surprise; he foresaw all things, knew all that was happening, and

kept his own counsel; he was a diplomatist in his quick comprehension

of a situation; and in the routine of business he was as patient and

plodding as a soldier on the march. But beyond this business horizon 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.