The french masters, p.56
The French Masters, page 56
“Oh papa! papa!” cried Mme. de Nucingen, springing to her father, who took her on his knee. She covered him with kisses, her fair hair brushed his cheek, her tears fell on the withered face that had grown so bright and radiant.
“Dear father, what a father you are! No, there is not another father like you under the sun. If Eugene loved you before, what must he feel for you now?”
“Why, children, why Delphinette!” cried Goriot, who had not felt his daughter’s heart beat against his breast for ten years, “do you want me to die of joy? My poor heart will break! Come, Monsieur Eugene, we are quits already.” And the old man strained her to his breast with such fierce and passionate force that she cried out.
“Oh! you are hurting me!” she said.
“I am hurting you!” He grew pale at the words. The pain expressed in his face seemed greater than it is given to humanity to know. The agony of this Christ of paternity can only be compared with the masterpieces of those princes of the palette who have left for us the record of their visions of an agony suffered for a whole world by the Saviour of men. Father Goriot pressed his lips very gently against the waist than his fingers had grasped too roughly.
“Oh! no, no,” he cried. “I have not hurt you, have I?” and his smile seemed to repeat the question. “YOU have hurt me with that cry just now. — The things cost rather more than that,” he said in her ear, with another gentle kiss, “but I had to deceive him about it, or he would have been angry.”
Eugene sat dumb with amazement in the presence of this inexhaustible love; he gazed at Goriot, and his face betrayed the artless admiration which shapes the beliefs of youth.
“I will be worthy of all this,” he cried.
“Oh! my Eugene, that is nobly said,” and Mme. de Nucingen kissed the law student on the forehead.
“He gave up Mlle. Taillefer and her millions for you,” said Father Goriot. “Yes, the little thing was in love with you, and now that her brother is dead she is as rich as Croesus.”
“Oh! why did you tell her?” cried Rastignac.
“Eugene,” Delphine said in his ear, “I have one regret now this evening. Ah! how I will love you! and for ever!”
“This is the happiest day I have had since you two were married!” cried Goriot. “God may send me any suffering, so long as I do not suffer through you, and I can still say, ‘In this short month of February I had more happiness than other men have in their whole lives.’ — Look at me, Fifine!” he said to his daughter. “She is very beautiful, is she not? Tell me, now, have you seen many women with that pretty soft color — that little dimple of hers? No, I thought not. Ah, well, and but for me this lovely woman would never have been. And very soon happiness will make her a thousand times lovelier, happiness through you. I could give up my place in heaven to you, neighbor, if needs be, and go down to hell instead. Come, let us have dinner,” he added, scarcely knowing what he said, “everything is ours.”
“Poor dear father!”
He rose and went over to her, and took her face in his hands, and set a kiss on the plaits of hair. “If you only knew, little one, how happy you can make me — how little it takes to make me happy! Will you come and see me sometimes? I shall be just above, so it is only a step. Promise me, say that you will!”
“Yes, dear father.”
“Say it again.”
“Yes, I will, my kind father.”
“Hush! hush! I should make you say it a hundred times over if I followed my own wishes. Let us have dinner.”
The three behaved like children that evening, and Father Goriot’s spirits were certainly not the least wild. He lay at his daughter’s feet, kissed them, gazed into her eyes, rubbed his head against her dress; in short, no young lover could have been more extravagant or more tender.
“You see!” Delphine said with a look at Eugene, “so long as my father is with us, he monopolizes me. He will be rather in the way sometimes.”
Eugene had himself already felt certain twinges of jealousy, and could not blame this speech that contained the germ of all ingratitude.
“And when will the rooms be ready?” asked Eugene, looking round. “We must all leave them this evening, I suppose.”
“Yes, but to-morrow you must come and dine with me,” she answered, with an eloquent glance. “It is our night at the Italiens.”
“I shall go to the pit,” said her father.
It was midnight. Mme. de Nucingen’s carriage was waiting for her, and Father Goriot and the student walked back to the Maison Vauquer, talking of Delphine, and warming over their talk till there grew up a curious rivalry between the two violent passions. Eugene could not help seeing that the father’s self-less love was deeper and more steadfast than his own. For this worshiper Delphine was always pure and fair, and her father’s adoration drew its fervor from a whole past as well as a future of love.
They found Mme. Vauquer by the stove, with Sylvie and Christophe to keep her company; the old landlady, sitting like Marius among the ruins of Carthage, was waiting for the two lodgers that yet remained to her, and bemoaning her lot with the sympathetic Sylvie. Tasso’s lamentations as recorded in Byron’s poem are undoubtedly eloquent, but for sheer force of truth they fall far short of the widow’s cry from the depths.
“Only three cups of coffee in the morning, Sylvie! Oh dear! to have your house emptied in this way is enough to break your heart. What is life, now my lodgers are gone? Nothing at all. Just think of it! It is just as if all the furniture had been taken out of the house, and your furniture is your life. How have I offended heaven to draw down all this trouble upon me? And haricot beans and potatoes laid in for twenty people! The police in my house too! We shall have to live on potatoes now, and Christophe will have to go!”
The Savoyard, who was fast asleep, suddenly woke up at this, and said, “Madame,” questioningly.
“Poor fellow!” said Sylvie, “he is like a dog.”
“In the dead season, too! Nobody is moving now. I would like to know where the lodgers are to drop down from. It drives me distracted. And that old witch of a Michonneau goes and takes Poiret with her! What can she have done to make him so fond of her? He runs about after her like a little dog.”
“Lord!” said Sylvie, flinging up her head, “those old maids are up to all sorts of tricks.”
“There’s that poor M. Vautrin that they made out to be a convict,” the widow went on. “Well, you know that is too much for me, Sylvie; I can’t bring myself to believe it. Such a lively man as he was, and paid fifteen francs a month for his coffee of an evening, paid you very penny on the nail too.”
“And open-handed he was!” said Christophe.
“There is some mistake,” said Sylvie.
“Why, no there isn’t! he said so himself!” said Mme. Vauquer. “And to think that all these things have happened in my house, and in a quarter where you never see a cat go by. On my word as an honest woman, it’s like a dream. For, look here, we saw Louis XVI. meet with his mishap; we saw the fall of the Emperor; and we saw him come back and fall again; there was nothing out of the way in all that, but lodging-houses are not liable to revolutions. You can do without a king, but you must eat all the same; and so long as a decent woman, a de Conflans born and bred, will give you all sorts of good things for dinner, nothing short of the end of the world ought to — but there, it is the end of the world, that is just what it is!”
“And to think that Mlle. Michonneau who made all this mischief is to have a thousand crowns a year for it, so I hear,” cried Sylvie.
“Don’t speak of her, she is a wicked woman!” said Mme. Vauquer. “She is going to the Buneaud, who charges less than cost. But the Buneaud is capable of anything; she must have done frightful things, robbed and murdered people in her time. She ought to be put in jail for life instead of that poor dear — —”
Eugene and Goriot rang the door-bell at that moment.
“Ah! here are my two faithful lodgers,” said the widow, sighing.
But the two faithful lodgers, who retained but shadowy recollections of the misfortunes of their lodging-house, announced to their hostess without more ado that they were about to remove to the Chaussee d’Antin.
“Sylvie!” cried the widow, “this is the last straw. — Gentlemen, this will be the death of me! It has quite upset me! There’s a weight on my chest! I am ten years older for this day! Upon my word, I shall go out of my senses! And what is to be done with the haricots! — Oh, well, if I am to be left here all by myself, you shall go to-morrow, Christophe. — Good-night, gentlemen,” and she went.
“What is the matter now?” Eugene inquired of Sylvie.
“Lord! everybody is going about his business, and that has addled her wits. There! she is crying upstairs. It will do her good to snivel a bit. It’s the first time she has cried since I’ve been with her.”
By the morning, Mme. Vauquer, to use her own expression, had “made up her mind to it.” True, she still wore a doleful countenance, as might be expected of a woman who had lost all her lodgers, and whose manner of life had been suddenly revolutionized, but she had all her wits about her. Her grief was genuine and profound; it was real pain of mind, for her purse had suffered, the routine of her existence had been broken. A lover’s farewell glance at his lady-love’s window is not more mournful than Mme. Vauquer’s survey of the empty places round her table. Eugene administered comfort, telling the widow that Bianchon, whose term of residence at the hospital was about to expire, would doubtless take his (Rastignac’s) place; that the official from the Museum had often expressed a desire to have Mme. Couture’s rooms; and that in a very few days her household would be on the old footing.
“God send it may, my dear sir! but bad luck has come to lodge here. There’ll be a death in the house before ten days are out, you’ll see,” and she gave a lugubrious look round the dining-room. “Whose turn will it be, I wonder?”
“It is just as well that we are moving out,” said Eugene to Father Goriot in a low voice.
“Madame,” said Sylvie, running in with a scared face, “I have not seen Mistigris these three days.”
“Ah! well, if my cat is dead, if he has gone and left us, I — —”
The poor woman could not finish her sentence; she clasped her hands and hid her face on the back of her armchair, quite overcome by this dreadful portent.
By twelve o’clock, when the postman reaches that quarter, Eugene received a letter. The dainty envelope bore the Beauseant arms on the seal, and contained an invitation to the Vicomtesse’s great ball, which had been talked of in Paris for a month. A little note for Eugene was slipped in with the card.
“I think, monsieur, that you will undertake with pleasure to
interpret my sentiments to Mme. de Nucingen, so I am sending the
card for which you asked me to you. I shall be delighted to make
the acquaintance of Mme. de Restaud’s sister. Pray introduce that
charming lady to me, and do not let her monopolize all your
affection, for you owe me not a little in return for mine.
“VICOMTESSE DE BEAUSEANT.”
“Well,” said Eugene to himself, as he read the note a second time, “Mme. de Beauseant says pretty plainly that she does not want the Baron de Nucingen.”
He went to Delphine at once in his joy. He had procured this pleasure for her, and doubtless he would receive the price of it. Mme. de Nucingen was dressing. Rastignac waited in her boudoir, enduring as best he might the natural impatience of an eager temperament for the reward desired and withheld for a year. Such sensations are only known once in a life. The first woman to whom a man is drawn, if she is really a woman — that is to say, if she appears to him amid the splendid accessories that form a necessary background to life in the world of Paris — will never have a rival.
Love in Paris is a thing distinct and apart; for in Paris neither men nor women are the dupes of the commonplaces by which people seek to throw a veil over their motives, or to parade a fine affectation of disinterestedness in their sentiments. In this country within a country, it is not merely required of a woman that she should satisfy the senses and the soul; she knows perfectly well that she has still greater obligations to discharge, that she must fulfil the countless demands of a vanity that enters into every fibre of that living organism called society. Love, for her, is above all things, and by its very nature, a vainglorious, brazen-fronted, ostentatious, thriftless charlatan. If at the Court of Louis XIV. there was not a woman but envied Mlle. de la Valliere the reckless devotion of passion that led the grand monarch to tear the priceless ruffles at his wrists in order to assist the entry of a Duc de Vermandois into the world — what can you expect of the rest of society? You must have youth and wealth and rank; nay, you must, if possible, have more than these, for the more incense you bring with you to burn at the shrine of the god, the more favorably will he regard the worshiper. Love is a religion, and his cult must in the nature of things be more costly than those of all other deities; Love the Spoiler stays for a moment, and then passes on; like the urchin of the streets, his course may be traced by the ravages that he has made. The wealth of feeling and imagination is the poetry of the garret; how should love exist there without that wealth?
If there are exceptions who do not subscribe to these Draconian laws of the Parisian code, they are solitary examples. Such souls live so far out of the main current that they are not borne away by the doctrines of society; they dwell beside some clear spring of everflowing water, without seeking to leave the green shade; happy to listen to the echoes of the infinite in everything around them and in their own souls, waiting in patience to take their flight for heaven, while they look with pity upon those of earth.
Rastignac, like most young men who have been early impressed by the circumstances of power and grandeur, meant to enter the lists fully armed; the burning ambition of conquest possessed him already; perhaps he was conscious of his powers, but as yet he knew neither the end to which his ambition was to be directed, nor the means of attaining it. In default of the pure and sacred love that fills a life, ambition may become something very noble, subduing to itself every thought of personal interest, and setting as the end — the greatness, not of one man, but of a whole nation.
But the student had not yet reached the time of life when a man surveys the whole course of existence and judges it soberly. Hitherto he had scarcely so much as shaken off the spell of the fresh and gracious influences that envelop a childhood in the country, like green leaves and grass. He had hesitated on the brink of the Parisian Rubicon, and in spite of the prickings of ambition, he still clung to a lingering tradition of an old ideal — the peaceful life of the noble in his chateau. But yesterday evening, at the sight of his rooms, those scruples had vanished. He had learned what it was to enjoy the material advantages of fortune, as he had already enjoyed the social advantages of birth; he ceased to be a provincial from that moment, and slipped naturally and easily into a position which opened up a prospect of a brilliant future.
So, as he waited for Delphine, in the pretty boudoir, where he felt that he had a certain right to be, he felt himself so far away from the Rastignac who came back to Paris a year ago, that, turning some power of inner vision upon this latter, he asked himself whether that past self bore any resemblance to the Rastignac of that moment.
“Madame is in her room,” Therese came to tell him. The woman’s voice made him start.
He found Delphine lying back in her low chair by the fireside, looking fresh and bright. The sight of her among the flowing draperies of muslin suggested some beautiful tropical flower, where the fruit is set amid the blossom.
“Well,” she said, with a tremor in her voice, “here you are.”
“Guess what I bring for you,” said Eugene, sitting down beside her. He took possession of her arm to kiss her hand.
Mme. de Nucingen gave a joyful start as she saw the card. She turned to Eugene; there were tears in her eyes as she flung her arms about his neck, and drew him towards her in a frenzy of gratified vanity.
“And I owe this happiness to you — to thee” (she whispered the more intimate word in his ear); “but Therese is in my dressing-room, let us be prudent. — This happiness — yes, for I may call it so, when it comes to me through you — is surely more than a triumph for self-love? No one has been willing to introduce me into that set. Perhaps just now I may seem to you to be frivolous, petty, shallow, like a Parisienne, but remember, my friend, that I am ready to give up all for you; and that if I long more than ever for an entrance into the Faubourg Saint-Germain, it is because I shall meet you there.”
“Mme. de Beauseant’s note seems to say very plainly that she does not expect to see the Baron de Nucingen at her ball; don’t you think so?” said Eugene.
“Why, yes,” said the Baroness as she returned the letter. “Those women have a talent for insolence. But it is of no consequence, I shall go. My sister is sure to be there, and sure to be very beautifully dressed. — Eugene,” she went on, lowering her voice, “she will go to dispel ugly suspicions. You do not know the things that people are saying about her. Only this morning Nucingen came to tell me that they had been discussing her at the club. Great heavens! on what does a woman’s character and the honor of a whole family depend! I feel that I am nearly touched and wounded in my poor sister. According to some people, M. de Trailles must have put his name to bills for a hundred thousand francs, nearly all of them are overdue, and proceedings are threatened. In this predicament, it seems that my sister sold her diamonds to a Jew — the beautiful diamonds that belonged to her husband’s mother, Mme. de Restaud the elder, — you have seen her wearing them. In fact, nothing else has been talked about for the last two days. So I can see that Anastasie is sure to come to Mme. de Beauseant’s ball in tissue of gold, and ablaze with diamonds, to draw all eyes upon her; and I will not be outshone. She has tried to eclipse me all her life, she has never been kind to me, and I have helped her so often, and always had money for her when she had none. — But never mind other people now, to-day I mean to be perfectly happy.”
