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 sublimeaffection. 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 devoutadmiration; 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 ridiculousnickname 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.

This was all the information which Rastignac gained from a M.
Muret who had purchased Goriot's business, information which

confirmed the Duchesse de Langeais' suppositions, and herewith
the preliminaryexplanation of this obscure but terrible Parisian

tragedy comes to an end.
Towards the end of the first week in December Rastignac received

two letters--one from his mother, and one from his eldest sister.
His heart beat fast, half with happiness, half with fear, at the

sight of the familiar writing" target="_blank" title="n.笔迹；书法">handwriting. Those two little scraps of
paper contained life or death for his hopes. But while he felt a

shiver of dread as he remembered their dire poverty at home, he
knew their love for him so well that he could not help fearing

that he was draining their very life-blood. His mother's letter
ran as follows:--

"My Dear Child,--I am sending you the money that you asked for.
Make a good use of it. Even to save your life I could not raise

so large a sum a second time without your father's knowledge, and
there would be trouble about it. We should be obliged to mortgage

the land. It is impossible to judge of the merits of schemes of
which I am ignorant; but what sort of schemes can they be, that

you should fear to tell me about them? Volumes of explanation
would not have been needed; we mothers can understand at a word,

and that word would have spared me the anguish of uncertainty. I
do not know how to hide the painfulimpression that your letter

has made upon me, my dear son. What can you have felt when you
were moved to send this chill of dread through my heart? It must

have been very painful to you to write the letter that gave me so
much pain as I read it. To what courses are you committed? You

are going to appear to be something that you are not, and your
whole life and success depends upon this? You are about to see a

society into which you cannot enter without rushing into expense
that you cannot afford, without losing precious time that is