Mme. de Beauséant smiled, but there was sadness in her smile; even now she felt forebodings of the coming pain, the air she breathed was heavy with the storm that was about to burst.
“If you knew how my family are situated,” he went on, “you would love to play the part of a beneficent fairy godmother who graciously clears the obstacles from the path of her protégé.”
“But do I know even that? I am distantly related to you, and this obscure and remote relationship is even now a perfect godsend to me. You have confused my ideas; I cannot remember the things that I meant to say to you. I know no one else here in Paris.… Ah! if I could only ask you to counsel me, ask you to look upon me as a poor child who would fain cling to the hem of your dress, who would lay down his life for you.”
The audacity of the student’s answer interested the Vicomtesse in him. The southern brain was beginning to scheme for the first time. Between Mme. de Restaud’s blue boudoir and Mme. de Beauséant’s rose-colored drawing-room he had made a three years’ advance in a kind of law which is not a recognized study in Paris, although it is a sort of higher jurisprudence, and, when well understood, is a highroad to success of every kind.
“Yes, indeed. I am a novice, and my blunders will set everyone against me, if you do not give me your counsel. I believe that in Paris it is very difficult to meet with a young, beautiful, and wealthy woman of fashion who would be willing to teach me, what you women can explain so well-life. I shall find a M. de Trailles everywhere. So I have come to you to ask you to give me a key to a puzzle, to entreat you to tell me what sort of blunder I made this morning. I mentioned an old man——”
“Ah! good-morning, dear,” she continued, and rising and crossing the room, she grasped the Duchess’s hand as affectionately as if they had been sisters; the Duchess responded in the prettiest and most gracious way.
“Two intimate friends!” said Rastignac to himself. “Henceforward I shall have two protectresses; those two women are great friends, no doubt, and this newcomer will doubtless interest herself in her friend’s cousin.”
Mme. de Beauséant’s mouth did not tighten, her color did not rise, her expression did not alter, or rather, her brow seemed to clear as the Duchess uttered those deadly words—
“This gentleman is M. Eugène de Rastignac, one of my cousins,” said the Vicomtesse. “Have you any news of General de Montriveau?” she continued. “Sérizy told me yesterday that he never goes anywhere now; has he been to see you to-day?”
It was believed that the Duchess was desperately in love with M. de Montriveau, and that he was a faithless lover; she felt the question in her very heart, and her face flushed as she answered—
“Claire,” returned the Duchess, and hatred overflowed in the glance she threw at Mme. de Beauséant; “of course you know that M. d’Ajuda-Pinto is going to marry Mlle. de Rochefide; the banns will be published to-morrow.”
This thrust was too cruel; the Vicomtesse’s face grew white, but she answered, laughing, “One of those rumors that fools amuse themselves with. What should induce M. d’Ajuda to take one of the noblest names in Portugal to the Rochefides? The Rochefides were only ennobled yesterday.”
Mme. de Beauséant turned to Rastignac. “What was the blunder that you made, Monsieur?” she asked. “The poor boy is only just launched into the world, Antoinette, so that he understands nothing of all this that we are speaking of. Be merciful to him, and let us finish our talk to-morrow. Everything will be announced to-morrow, you know, and your kind informal communication can be accompanied by official confirmation.”
“Madame, I have unwittingly plunged a dagger into Mme. de Restaud’s heart; unwittingly—therein lies my offense,” said the student of law, whose keen brain had served him sufficiently well, for he had detected the biting epigrams that lurked beneath this friendly talk. “You continue to receive, possibly you fear, those who know the amount of pain that they deliberately inflict; but a clumsy blunderer who has no idea how deeply he wounds is looked upon as a fool who does not know how to make use of his opportunities, and everyone despises him.”
Mme. de Beauséant gave the student a glance, one of those glances in which a great soul can mingle dignity and gratitude. It was like balm to the law student, who was still smarting under the Duchess’s insolent scrutiny; she had looked at him as an auctioneer might look at some article to appraise its value.
“Imagine, too, that I had just made some progress with the Comte de Restaud; for I should tell you, Madame,” he went on turning to the Duchess with a mixture of humility and malice in his manner, “that as yet I am only a poor devil of a student, very much alone in the world, and very poor——”
“Bah!” said Eugène. “I am only two-and-twenty, and I must make up my mind to the drawbacks of my time of life. Besides, I am confessing my sins, and it would be impossible to kneel in a more charming confessional; you commit your sins in one drawing-room, and receive absolution for them in another.”
The Duchess’s expression grew colder; she did not like the flippant tone of these remarks, and showed that she considered them to be in bad turning to the Vicomtesse with—“This gentleman has only just come——”
“Mme. la Duchesse,” said Eugène, “is it not natural to wish to be initiated into the mysteries which charm us?” (“Come, now,” he said to himself, “my language is superfinely elegant, I’m sure.”)
“Of that I had no idea, Madame,” answered the law student, “so I rashly came between them. In fact, I got on very well with the lady’s husband, and his wife tolerated me for a time until I took it into my head to tell them that I knew someone of whom I had just caught a glimpse as he went out by a back staircase, a man who had given the Countess a kiss at the end of a passage.”
“An old man who lives at the rate of two louis a month in the Faubourg Saint-Marceau, where I, a poor student, lodge likewise. He is a truly unfortunate creature, everybody laughs at him—we call him ‘Father Goriot.’”
“The daughter of a vermicelli manufacturer,” the Duchess added; “and when the little creature went to Court, the daughter of a pastry-cook was presented on the same day. Do you remember, Claire? The King began to laugh, and made some joke in Latin about flour. People—what was it?—people——”
“Didn’t the second daughter marry a banker with a German name?” the Vicomtesse asked, turning to Mme. de Langeais, “a Baron de Nucingen? And her name is Delphine, is it not? Isn’t she a fair-haired woman who has a side-box at the Opéra? She comes sometimes to the Bouffons, and laughs loudly to attract attention.”
“I wonder at you, dear. What do you take so much interest in people of that kind? One must have been as madly in love as Restaud was, to be infatuated with Mlle. Anastasie and her flour sacks. Oh! he will not find her a good bargain! She is in M. de Trailles’ hands, and he will ruin her.”
“Oh! well, yes, their father, the father, a father,” replied the Vicomtesse, “a kind father who gave them each five or six hundred thousand francs, it is said, to secure their happiness by marrying them well; while he only kept eight or ten thousand livres a year for himself, thinking that his daughters would always be his daughters, thinking that in them he would live his life twice over again, that in their houses he should find two homes, where he would be loved and looked up to, and made much of. And in two years’ time both his sons-in-law have turned him out of their houses as if he were one of the lowest outcasts.”
Tears came into Eugène’s eyes. He was still under the spell of youthful beliefs, he had but just left home, pure and sacred feeling had been stirred within him, and this was his first day on the battlefield of civilization in Paris. Genuine feeling is so infectious that for a moment the three looked at each other in silence.
“Eh, mon Dieu!” said Mme. de Langeais; “yes, it seems very horrible, and yet we see such things every day. Is there not a reason for it? Tell me, dear, have you ever really thought what a son-in-law is? A son-in-law is the man for whom we bring up, you and I, a dear little one, bound to us very closely in innumerable ways; for seventeen years she will be the joy of her family, its ‘white soul,’ as Lamartine says, and suddenly she will become its scourge. When he comes and takes her from us, his love from the very beginning is like an ax laid to the root of all the old affection in our darling’s heart, and all the ties that bound her to her family are severed. But yesterday our little daughter thought of no one but her mother and father, as we had no thought that was not for her; by to-morrow she will have become a hostile stranger. The tragedy is always going on under our eyes. On the one hand, you see a father who has sacrificed himself to his son, and his daughter-in-law shows him the last degree of insolence. On the other hand, it is the son-in-law who turns his wife’s mother out of the house. I sometimes hear it said that there is nothing dramatic about society in these days; but the Drama of the Son-in-law is appalling, to say nothing of our marriages, which have come to be very poor farces. I can explain how it all came about in the old vermicelli maker’s case. I think I recollect that Foriot——”
“Yes, that Moriot was once President of his Section during the Revolution. He was in the secret of the famous scarcity of grain, and laid the foundation of his fortune in those days by selling flour for ten times its cost. He had as much flour s he wanted. My grandmother’s steward sold him immense quantities. No doubt Noriot shared the plunder with the Committee of Public Salvation, as that sort of person always did. I recollect the steward telling my grandmother that she might live at Grandvilliers in complete security, because her corn was as good as a certificate of civism. Well, then, this Loriot, who sold corn to those butchers, has never had but one passion, they say—he idolizes his daughters. He settled one of them under Restaud’s roof, and grafted the other into the Nucingen family tree, the Baron de Nucingen being a rich banker who had turned Royalist. You can quite understand so long as Bonaparte was Emperor, the two sons-in-law could manage to put up with the old Ninety-three; but after the restoration of the Bourbons, M. de Restaud felt bored by the old man’s society, and the banker was still more tired of it. His daughters were still fond of him; they wanted ‘to keep the goat and the cabbage,’ so they used to see the Joriot whenever there was no one there, under pretense of affection. ‘Come to-day, papa, we shall have you all to ourselves, and that will be much nicer!’ and all that sort of thing. As for me, dear, I believe that love has second sight: poor Ninety-three, his heart must have bled! He saw that his daughters were ashamed of him, that if they loved their husbands his visits must make mischief. So he immolated himself. He made the sacrifice because he was a father; he went into voluntary exile. His daughters were satisfied, so he thought that he had done the best thing he could; but it was a family crime, and father and daughters were accomplices. You see this sort of thing everywhere. What could this old Doriot have been but a splash of mud in his daughters’ drawing-rooms? He would only have been in the way, and bored other people, besides being bored himself. And this that happened between father and daughters may happen to the prettiest woman in Paris and the man she loves the best; if her love grows tiresome, he will go; he will descend to the basest trickery to leave her. It is the same with all love and friendship. Our heart is a treasury; if you pour out all its wealth at once, you are bankrupt. We show no more mercy to the affection that reveals it utmost extent than we do to another kind of prodigal who has not a penny left. Their father had given them all he had. For twenty years he had given his whole heart to them; then, one day, he gave them all his fortune too. The lemon was squeezed; the girls left the rest in the gutter.”
“The world is very base,” said the Vicomtesse, plucking at the threads of her shawl. She did not raise her eyes as she spoke; the words that Mme. de Langeais had meant for her in the course of the story had cut her to the quick.
“Base? Oh, no,” answered the Duchess; “the world goes its own way, that is all. If I speak in this way, it is only to show that I am not duped by it. I think as you do,” she said, pressing the Vicomtesse’s hand. “The world is a slough; let us try to live on the heights above it.”
She rose to her feet and kissed Mme. de Beauséant on the forehead as she said: “You look very charming to-day, dear. I have never seen such a lovely color in your cheeks before.”
“Old Goriot is sublime!” said Eugène to himself, as he remembered how he had watched his neighbor work the silver vessel into a shapeless mass that night.
Mme. de Beauséant did not hear him; she was absorbed in her own thoughts. For several minutes the silence remained unbroken till the law student became almost paralyzed with embarrassment, and was equally afraid to go or stay or speak a word.
“The world is basely ungrateful and ill-natured,” said the Vicomtesse at last. “No sooner does a trouble befall you than a friend is ready to bring the tidings and to probe your heart with the point of a dagger while calling on you to admire the handle. Epigrams and sarcasms already! Ah! I will defend myself!”
“Well, then, M. de Rastignac, deal with the world as it deserves. You are determined to succeed? I will help you. You shall sound the depths of corruption in woman; you shall measure the extent of man’s pitful vanity. Deeply as I am versed in such learning, there were pages in the book of life that I had not read. Now I know all. The more cold-blooded your calculations, the further you will go. Strike ruthlessly; you will be feared. Men and women for you must be nothing more than post-horses; take a fresh relay, and leave the last to drop by the roadside; in this way you will reach the goal of your ambition. You will be nothing here, you see, unless a woman interests herself in you; and she must be young and wealthy, and a woman of the world. Yet, if you have a heart, lock it carefully away like a treasure; do not let anyone suspect it, or you will be lost; you would cease to be the executioner, you would take the victim’s place. And if ever you should love, never let your secret escape you! trust no one until you are very sure of the heart to which you open your heart. Learn to mistrust everyone; take every precaution for the sake of the love which does not exist as yet. Listen, Miguel”—the name slipped from her so naturally that she did not notice her mistake—“there is something still more appalling than the ingratitude of daughters who have cast off their old father and wish he were dead, and that is a rivalry between two sisters. Restaud comes of a good family; his wife has been received into their circle; she has been presented at court; and her sister, her wealthy sister, Mme. Delphine de Nucingen, the wife of a great capitalist, is consumed with envy, and ready to die of spleen. There is a gulf set between the sisters—indeed, they are sisters no longer—the two women who refuse to acknowledge their father do not acknowledge each other. So Mme. de Nucingen would lap all the mud that lies between the Rue Saint-Lazare and the Rue de Grenelle to gain admittance to my salon. She fancied that she should gain her end through de Marsay; she has made herself de Marsay’s slave, and she bores him. De Marsay cares very little about her. If you will introduce her to me, you will be her darling, her Benjamin; she will idolize you. If, after that, you can love her, do so; if not, make her useful. I will ask her to come once or twice to one of my great crushes, but I will never receive her here in the morning. I will bow to her when I see her, and that will be quite sufficient. You have shut the Comtesse de Restaud’s door against you by mentioning old Goriot’s name. Yes, my good friend, you may call at her house twenty times, and every time out of the twenty you will find that she is not at home. The servants have their orders, and will not admit you. Very well, then, now let old Goriot gain the right of entry into her sister’s house for you. The beautiful Mme. de Nucingen will give the signal for a battle. As soon as she singles you out, other women will begin to lose their heads about you, and her enemies and rivals and intimate friends will all try to take you from her. There are women who will fall in love with a man because another woman has chosen him; like the city madams, poor things, who copy our millinery, and hope thereby to acquire our manners. You will have a success, and in Paris success is everything; it is the key of power. If the women credit you with wit and talent, the men will follow suit so long as you do not undeceive them yourself. There will be nothing you may not aspire to; you will go everywhere, and you will find out what the world is—an assemblage of fools and knaves. But you must be neither the one nor the other. I am giving you my name like Ariadne’s clew of thread to take with you into this labyrinth; make no unworthy use of it,” she said, with a queenly glance and curve of her throat; “give it back to me unsullied. And now, go; leave me. We women also have our battles to fight.”
It was five o’clock, and Eugène 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 fists 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’s door against you.”
“I shall call!” he said to himself, “and if Mme. de Beauséant 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 Comtesse 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 Hôtel de Beauséant. 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.
Arrived in the Rue Neuve Sainte-Geneviève, 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 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 somber 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 Beauséant’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.
“I am not in the humor to stand jokes from people who call me ‘my lord Marquis,’” answered Eugène. “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.”
“Anyone who molests Father Goriot will have henceforward to reckon with me,” said Eugène, 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.
Eugène’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 have need be a crack shot and know how to handle the foils.” he said, banteringly.
“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 Eugène 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. Old 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.
“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.”
Eugène was too intent on his thoughts to laugh at Bianchon’s joke. He determined to profit by Mme. de Beauséant’s counsels, and was asking himself how he could obtain the necessary money. He grew grave. The wide savannahs 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 Eugène’s dreams. The young man took the elder’s hands, and looked at him with something like kindness in his eyes.
