บทที่ บทที่ 54 · 第54章
Next day Bianchon and Rastignac were obliged to take the certificate
to the registrar themselves, and by twelve o’clock the formalities were
completed. Two hours went by, no word came from the Count nor from the
Baron; nobody appeared to act for them, and Rastignac had already been
obliged to pay the priest. Sylvie asked ten francs for sewing the old
man in his winding-sheet and making him ready for the grave, and Eugene
and Bianchon calculated that they had scarcely sufficient to pay for the
funeral, if nothing was forthcoming from the dead man’s family. So it
was the medical student who laid him in a pauper’s coffin, despatched
from Bianchon’s hospital, whence he obtained it at a cheaper rate.
“Let us play those wretches a trick,” said he. “Go to the cemetery, buy
a grave for five years at Pere-Lachaise, and arrange with the Church and
the undertaker to have a third-class funeral. If the daughters and
their husbands decline to repay you, you can carve this on the
headstone--‘_Here lies M. Goriot, father of the Comtesse de Restaud and
the Baronne de Nucingen, interred at the expense of two students_.’”
Eugene took part of his friend’s advice, but only after he had gone
in person first to M. and Mme. de Nucingen, and then to M. and Mme. de
Restaud--a fruitless errand. He went no further than the doorstep in
either house. The servants had received strict orders to admit no one.
“Monsieur and Madame can see no visitors. They have just lost their
father, and are in deep grief over their loss.”
Eugene’s Parisian experience told him that it was idle to press the
point. Something clutched strangely at his heart when he saw that it was
impossible to reach Delphine.
“Sell some of your ornaments,” he wrote hastily in the porter’s room,
“so that your father may be decently laid in his last resting-place.”
He sealed the note, and begged the porter to give it to Therese for her
mistress; but the man took it to the Baron de Nucingen, who flung the
note into the fire. Eugene, having finished his errands, returned to the
lodging-house about three o’clock. In spite of himself, the tears came
into his eyes. The coffin, in its scanty covering of black cloth,
was standing there on the pavement before the gate, on two chairs.
A withered sprig of hyssop was soaking in the holy water bowl of
silver-plated copper; there was not a soul in the street, not a
passer-by had stopped to sprinkle the coffin; there was not even an
attempt at a black drapery over the wicket. It was a pauper who lay
there; no one made a pretence of mourning for him; he had neither
friends nor kindred--there was no one to follow him to the grave.
Bianchon’s duties compelled him to be at the hospital, but he had left
a few lines for Eugene, telling his friend about the arrangements he
had made for the burial service. The house student’s note told Rastignac
that a mass was beyond their means, that the ordinary office for the
dead was cheaper, and must suffice, and that he had sent word to
the undertaker by Christophe. Eugene had scarcely finished reading
Bianchon’s scrawl, when he looked up and saw the little circular
gold locket that contained the hair of Goriot’s two daughters in Mme.
Vauquer’s hands.
“How dared you take it?” he asked.
“Good Lord! is that to be buried along with him?” retorted Sylvie. “It
is gold.”
“Of course it shall!” Eugene answered indignantly; “he shall at any
rate take one thing that may represent his daughters into the grave with
him.”
When the hearse came, Eugene had the coffin carried into the house
again, unscrewed the lid, and reverently laid on the old man’s breast
the token that recalled the days when Delphine and Anastasie were
innocent little maidens, before they began “to think for themselves,” as
he had moaned out in his agony.
Rastignac and Christophe and the two undertaker’s men were the only
followers of the funeral. The Church of Saint-Etienne du Mont was only a
little distance from the Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve. When the coffin
had been deposited in a low, dark, little chapel, the law student looked
round in vain for Goriot’s two daughters or their husbands. Christophe
was his only fellow-mourner; Christophe, who appeared to think it was
his duty to attend the funeral of the man who had put him in the way
of such handsome tips. As they waited there in the chapel for the two
priests, the chorister, and the beadle, Rastignac grasped Christophe’s
hand. He could not utter a word just then.
“Yes, Monsieur Eugene,” said Christophe, “he was a good and worthy man,
who never said one word louder than another; he never did any one any
harm, and gave nobody any trouble.”
The two priests, the chorister, and the beadle came, and said and did
as much as could be expected for seventy francs in an age when religion
cannot afford to say prayers for nothing.
The ecclesiatics chanted a psalm, the _Libera nos_ and the _De
profundis_. The whole service lasted about twenty minutes. There was but
one mourning coach, which the priest and chorister agreed to share with
Eugene and Christophe.
“There is no one else to follow us,” remarked the priest, “so we may as
well go quickly, and so save time; it is half-past five.”
But just as the coffin was put in the hearse, two empty carriages, with
the armorial bearings of the Comte de Restaud and the Baron de Nucingen,
arrived and followed in the procession to Pere-Lachaise. At six o’clock
Goriot’s coffin was lowered into the grave, his daughters’ servants
standing round the while. The ecclesiastic recited the short prayer that
the students could afford to pay for, and then both priest and lackeys
disappeared at once. The two grave diggers flung in several spadefuls of
earth, and then stopped and asked Rastignac for their fee. Eugene
felt in vain in his pocket, and was obliged to borrow five francs of
Christophe. This thing, so trifling in itself, gave Rastignac a terrible
pang of distress. It was growing dusk, the damp twilight fretted his
nerves; he gazed down into the grave and the tears he shed were drawn
from him by the sacred emotion, a single-hearted sorrow. When such tears
fall on earth, their radiance reaches heaven. And with that tear that
fell on Father Goriot’s grave, Eugene Rastignac’s youth ended. He folded
his arms and gazed at the clouded sky; and Christophe, after a glance at
him, turned and went--Rastignac was left alone.
He went a few paces further, to the highest point of the cemetery, and
looked out over Paris and the windings of the Seine; the lamps were
beginning to shine on either side of the river. His eyes turned almost
eagerly to the space between the column of the Place Vendome and the
cupola of the Invalides; there lay the shining world that he had wished
to reach. He glanced over that humming hive, seeming to draw a foretaste
of its honey, and said magniloquently:
“Henceforth there is war between us.”
And by way of throwing down the glove to Society, Rastignac went to dine
with Mme. de Nucingen.
ADDENDUM
The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
Ajuda-Pinto, Marquis Miguel d’
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
The Secrets of a Princess
Beatrix
Beauseant, Marquis
An Episode under the Terror
Beauseant, Vicomte de
The Deserted Woman
Beauseant, Vicomtesse de
The Deserted Woman
Albert Savarus
Bianchon, Horace
The Atheist’s Mass
Cesar Birotteau
The Commission in Lunacy
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
A Bachelor’s Establishment
The Secrets of a Princess
The Government Clerks
Pierrette
A Study of Woman
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Honorine
The Seamy Side of History
The Magic Skin
A Second Home
A Prince of Bohemia
Letters of Two Brides
The Muse of the Department
The Imaginary Mistress
The Middle Classes
Cousin Betty
The Country Parson
In addition, M. Bianchon narrated the following:
Another Study of Woman
La Grande Breteche
Bibi-Lupin (chief of secret police, called himself Gondureau)
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Carigliano, Marechal, Duc de
Sarrasine
Collin, Jacques
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
The Member for Arcis
Derville
Gobseck
A Start in Life
The Gondreville Mystery
Colonel Chabert
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Franchessini, Colonel
The Member for Arcis
Galathionne, Princess
A Daughter of Eve
Gobseck, Jean-Esther Van
Gobseck
Cesar Birotteau
The Government Clerks
The Unconscious Humorists
Jacques (M. de Beauseant’s butler)
The Deserted Woman
Langeais, Duchesse Antoinette de
The Thirteen
Marsay, Henri de
The Thirteen
The Unconscious Humorists
Another Study of Woman
The Lily of the Valley
Jealousies of a Country Town
Ursule Mirouet
A Marriage Settlement
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Letters of Two Brides
The Ball at Sceaux
Modest Mignon
The Secrets of a Princess
The Gondreville Mystery
A Daughter of Eve
Maurice (de Restaud’s valet)
Gobseck
Montriveau, General Marquis Armand de
The Thirteen
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Another Study of Woman
Pierrette
The Member for Arcis
Nucingen, Baron Frederic de
The Firm of Nucingen
Pierrette
Cesar Birotteau
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Another Study of Woman
The Secrets of a Princess
A Man of Business
Cousin Betty
The Muse of the Department
The Unconscious Humorists
Nucingen, Baronne Delphine de
The Thirteen
Eugenie Grandet
Cesar Birotteau
Melmoth Reconciled
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
The Commission in Lunacy
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Modeste Mignon
The Firm of Nucingen
Another Study of Woman
A Daughter of Eve
The Member for Arcis
Poiret
The Government Clerks
A Start in Life
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
The Middle Classes
Poiret, Madame (nee Christine-Michelle Michonneau)
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
The Middle Classes
Rastignac, Baron and Baronne de (Eugene’s parents)
Lost Illusions
Rastignac, Eugene de
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
The Ball at Sceaux
The Interdiction
A Study of Woman
Another Study of Woman
The Magic Skin
The Secrets of a Princess
A Daughter of Eve
The Gondreville Mystery
The Firm of Nucingen
Cousin Betty
The Member for Arcis
The Unconscious Humorists
Rastignac, Laure-Rose and Agathe de
Lost Illusions
The Member for Arcis
Rastignac, Monseigneur Gabriel de
The Country Parson
A Daughter of Eve
Restaud, Comte de
Gobseck
Restaud, Comtesse Anastasie de
Gobseck
Selerier
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Taillefer, Jean-Frederic
The Firm of Nucingen
The Magic Skin
The Red Inn
Taillefer, Victorine
The Red Inn
Therese
A Daughter of Eve
Tissot, Pierre-Francois
A Prince of Bohemia
Trailles, Comte Maxime de
Cesar Birotteau
Gobseck
Ursule Mirouet
A Man of Business
The Member for Arcis
The Secrets of a Princess
Cousin Betty
The Member for Arcis
Beatrix
The Unconscious Humorists