章节正文
"Here, madame" he said in disgust, "let us square accounts. M.
Goriot will not stay much longer in your house, nor shall I----"
"Yes, he will go out feet foremost, poor old gentleman," she
said, counting the francs with a half-facetious, half-lugubrious
expression.
"Let us get this over," said Rastignac.
"Sylvie, look out some sheets, and go upstairs to help the
gentlemen."
"You won't forget Sylvie," said Mme. Vauquer in Eugene's ear;
"she has been sitting up these two nights."
As soon as Eugene's back was turned, the old woman hurried after
her handmaid.
"Take the sheets that have had the sides turned into the middle,
number 7. Lord! they are plenty good enough for a corpse," she
said in Sylvie's ear.
Eugene, by this time, was part of the way upstairs, and did not
overhear the elderly economist.
"Quick," said Bianchon, "let us change his shirt. Hold him
upright."
Eugene went to the head of the bed and supported the dying man,
while Bianchon drew off his shirt; and then Goriot made a
movement as if he tried to clutch something to his breast,
uttering a low inarticulate moaning the while, like some dumb
animal in mortal pain.
"Ah! yes!" cried Bianchon. "It is the little locket and the chain
made of hair that he wants; we took it off a while ago when we
put the blisters on him. Poor fellow! he must have it again.
There it lies on the chimney-piece."
Eugene went to the chimney-piece and found the little plait of
faded golden hair--Mme. Goriot's hair, no doubt. He read the name
on the little round locket, ANASTASIE on the one side, DELPHINE
on the other. It was the symbol of his own heart that the father
always wore on his breast. The curls of hair inside the locket
were so fine and soft that is was plain they had been taken from
two childish heads. When the old man felt the locket once more,
his chest heaved with a long deep sigh of satisfaction, like a
groan. It was something terrible to see, for it seemed as if the
last quiver of the nerves were laid bare to their eyes, the last
communication of sense to the mysterious point within whence our
sympathies come and whither they go. A delirious joy lighted up
the distorted face. The terrific and vivid force of the feeling
that had survived the power of thought made such an impression on
the students, that the dying man felt their hot tears falling on
him, and gave a shrill cry of delight.
"Nasie! Fifine!"
"There is life in him yet," said Bianchon.
"What does he go on living for?" said Sylvie.
"To suffer," answered Rastignac.
Bianchon made a sign to his friend to follow his example, knelt
down and pressed his arms under the sick man, and Rastignac on
the other side did the same, so that Sylvie, standing in
readiness, might draw the sheet from beneath and replace it with
the one that she had brought. Those tears, no doubt, had misled
Goriot; for he gathered up all his remaining strength in a last
effort, stretched out his hands, groped for the students' heads,
and as his fingers caught convulsively at their hair, they heard
a faint whisper:
"Ah! my angels!"
Two words, two inarticulate murmurs, shaped into words by the
soul which fled forth with them as they left his lips.
"Poor dear!" cried Sylvie, melted by that exclamation; the
expression of the great love raised for the last time to a
sublime height by that most ghastly and involuntary of lies.
The father's last breath must have been a sigh of joy, and in
that sigh his whole life was summed up; he was cheated even at
the last. They laid Father Goriot upon his wretched bed with
reverent hands. Thenceforward there was no expression on his
face, only the painful traces of the struggle between life and
death that was going on in the machine; for that kind of cerebral
consciousness that distinguishes between pleasure and pain in a
human being was extinguished; it was only a question of time--and
the mechanism itself would be destroyed.
"He will lie like this for several hours, and die so quietly at
last, that we shall not know when he goes; there will be no
rattle in the throat. The brain must be completely suffused."
As he spoke there was a footstep on the staircase, and a young
woman hastened up, panting for breath.
"She has come too late," said Rastignac.
But it was not Delphine; it was Therese, her waiting-woman, who
stood in the doorway.
"Monsieur Eugene," she said, "monsieur and madame have had a
terrible scene about some money that Madame (poor thing!) wanted
for her father. She fainted, and the doctor came, and she had to
be bled, calling out all the while, 'My father is dying; I want
to see papa!' It was heartbreaking to hear her----"
"That will do, Therese. If she came now, it would be trouble
thrown away. M. Goriot cannot recognize any one now."
"Poor, dear gentleman, is he as bad at that?" said Therese.
"You don't want me now, I must go and look after my dinner; it is
half-past four," remarked Sylvie. The next instant she all but
collided with Mme. de Restaud on the landing outside.
There was something awful and appalling in the sudden apparition
of the Countess. She saw the bed of death by the dim light of the
single candle, and her tears flowed at the sight of her father's
passive features, from which the life had almost ebbed. Bianchon
with thoughtful tact left the room.
"I could not escape soon enough," she said to Rastignac.
The student bowed sadly in reply. Mme. de Restaud took her
father's hand and kissed it.
"Forgive me, father! You used to say that my voice would call you
back from the grave; ah! come back for one moment to bless your
penitent daughter. Do you hear me? Oh! this is fearful! No one on
earth will ever bless me henceforth; every one hates me; no one
loves me but you in all the world. My own children will hate me.
Take me with you, father; I will love you, I will take care of
you. He does not hear me . . . I am mad . . ."
She fell on her knees, and gazed wildly at the human wreck before
her.
"My cup of misery is full," she said, turning her eyes upon
Eugene. "M. de Trailles has fled, leaving enormous debts behind
him, and I have found out that he was deceiving me. My husband
will never forgive me, and I have left my fortune in his hands. I
have lost all my illusions. Alas! I have forsaken the one heart
that loved me (she pointed to her father as she spoke), and for
whom? I have held his kindness cheap, and slighted his affection;
many and many a time I have given him pain, ungrateful wretch
that I am!"
"He knew it," said Rastignac.
Just then Goriot's eyelids unclosed; it was only a muscular
contraction, but the Countess' sudden start of reviving hope was
no less dreadful than the dying eyes.
"Is it possible that he can hear me?" cried the Countess. "No,"
she answered herself, and sat down beside the bed. As Mme. de
Restaud seemed to wish to sit by her father, Eugene went down to
take a little food. The boarders were already assembled.
"Well," remarked the painter, as he joined them, "it seems that
there is to be a death-orama upstairs."
"Charles, I think you might find something less painful to joke
about," said Eugene.
"So we may not laugh here?" returned the painter. "What harm does
it do? Bianchon said that the old man was quite insensible."
"Well, then," said the employe from the Museum, "he will die as
he has lived."
"My father is dead!" shrieked the Countess.
The terrible cry brought Sylvie, Rastignac, and Bianchon; Mme. de
Restaud had fainted away. When she recovered they carried her
downstairs, and put her into the cab that stood waiting at the
door. Eugene sent Therese with her, and bade the maid take the
Countess to Mme. de Nucingen.
Bianchon came down to them.
"Yes, he is dead," he said.
"Come, sit down to dinner, gentlemen," said Mme. Vauquer, "or the
soup will be cold."
The two students sat down together.
"What is the next thing to be done?" Eugene asked of Bianchon.
"I have closed his eyes and composed his limbs," said Bianchon.
"When the certificate has been officially registered at the
Mayor's office, we will sew him in his winding sheet and bury him
somewhere. What do you think we ought to do?"
"He will not smell at his bread like this any more," said the
painter, mimicking the old man's little trick.
"Oh, hang it all!" cried the tutor, "let Father Goriot drop, and
let us have something else for a change. He is a standing dish,
and we have had him with every sauce this hour or more. It is one
of the privileges of the good city of Paris that anybody may be
born, or live, or die there without attracting any attention
whatsoever. Let us profit by the advantages of civilization.
There are fifty or sixty deaths every day; if you have a mind to
do it, you can sit down at any time and wail over whole hecatombs
of dead in Paris. Father Goriot has gone off the hooks, has he?
So much the better for him. If you venerate his memory, keep it
to yourselves, and let the rest of us feed in peace."
"Oh, to be sure," said the widow, "it is all the better for him
that he is dead. It looks as though he had had trouble enough,
poor soul, while he was alive."
And this was all the funeraloration delivered over him who had
been for Eugene the type and embodiment of Fatherhood.
The fifteen lodgers began to talk as usual. When Bianchon and
Eugene had satisfied their hunger, the rattle of spoons and
forks, the boisterous conversation, the expressions on the faces
that bespoke various degrees of want of feeling, gluttony, or
indifference, everything about them made them shiver with
loathing. They went out to find a priest to watch that night with
the dead. It was necessary to measure their last pious cares by
the scanty sum of money that remained. Before nine o'clock that
evening the body was laid out on the bare sacking of the bedstead
in the desolate room; a lighted candle stood on either side, and
the priest watched at the foot. Rastignac made inquiries of this
latter as to the expenses of the funeral, and wrote to the Baron
de Nucingen and the Comte de Restaud, entreating both gentlemen
to authorize their man of business to defray the charges of
laying their father-in-law in the grave. He sent Christophe with
the letters; then he went to bed, tired out, and slept.
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,
Goriot will not stay much longer in your house, nor shall I----"
"Yes, he will go out feet foremost, poor old gentleman," she
said, counting the francs with a half-facetious, half-lugubrious
expression.
"Let us get this over," said Rastignac.
"Sylvie, look out some sheets, and go upstairs to help the
gentlemen."
"You won't forget Sylvie," said Mme. Vauquer in Eugene's ear;
"she has been sitting up these two nights."
As soon as Eugene's back was turned, the old woman hurried after
her handmaid.
"Take the sheets that have had the sides turned into the middle,
number 7. Lord! they are plenty good enough for a corpse," she
said in Sylvie's ear.
Eugene, by this time, was part of the way upstairs, and did not
overhear the elderly economist.
"Quick," said Bianchon, "let us change his shirt. Hold him
upright."
Eugene went to the head of the bed and supported the dying man,
while Bianchon drew off his shirt; and then Goriot made a
movement as if he tried to clutch something to his breast,
uttering a low inarticulate moaning the while, like some dumb
animal in mortal pain.
"Ah! yes!" cried Bianchon. "It is the little locket and the chain
made of hair that he wants; we took it off a while ago when we
put the blisters on him. Poor fellow! he must have it again.
There it lies on the chimney-piece."
Eugene went to the chimney-piece and found the little plait of
faded golden hair--Mme. Goriot's hair, no doubt. He read the name
on the little round locket, ANASTASIE on the one side, DELPHINE
on the other. It was the symbol of his own heart that the father
always wore on his breast. The curls of hair inside the locket
were so fine and soft that is was plain they had been taken from
two childish heads. When the old man felt the locket once more,
his chest heaved with a long deep sigh of satisfaction, like a
groan. It was something terrible to see, for it seemed as if the
last quiver of the nerves were laid bare to their eyes, the last
communication of sense to the mysterious point within whence our
sympathies come and whither they go. A delirious joy lighted up
the distorted face. The terrific and vivid force of the feeling
that had survived the power of thought made such an impression on
the students, that the dying man felt their hot tears falling on
him, and gave a shrill cry of delight.
"Nasie! Fifine!"
"There is life in him yet," said Bianchon.
"What does he go on living for?" said Sylvie.
"To suffer," answered Rastignac.
Bianchon made a sign to his friend to follow his example, knelt
down and pressed his arms under the sick man, and Rastignac on
the other side did the same, so that Sylvie, standing in
readiness, might draw the sheet from beneath and replace it with
the one that she had brought. Those tears, no doubt, had misled
Goriot; for he gathered up all his remaining strength in a last
effort, stretched out his hands, groped for the students' heads,
and as his fingers caught convulsively at their hair, they heard
a faint whisper:
"Ah! my angels!"
Two words, two inarticulate murmurs, shaped into words by the
soul which fled forth with them as they left his lips.
"Poor dear!" cried Sylvie, melted by that exclamation; the
expression of the great love raised for the last time to a
sublime height by that most ghastly and involuntary of lies.
The father's last breath must have been a sigh of joy, and in
that sigh his whole life was summed up; he was cheated even at
the last. They laid Father Goriot upon his wretched bed with
reverent hands. Thenceforward there was no expression on his
face, only the painful traces of the struggle between life and
death that was going on in the machine; for that kind of cerebral
consciousness that distinguishes between pleasure and pain in a
human being was extinguished; it was only a question of time--and
the mechanism itself would be destroyed.
"He will lie like this for several hours, and die so quietly at
last, that we shall not know when he goes; there will be no
rattle in the throat. The brain must be completely suffused."
As he spoke there was a footstep on the staircase, and a young
woman hastened up, panting for breath.
"She has come too late," said Rastignac.
But it was not Delphine; it was Therese, her waiting-woman, who
stood in the doorway.
"Monsieur Eugene," she said, "monsieur and madame have had a
terrible scene about some money that Madame (poor thing!) wanted
for her father. She fainted, and the doctor came, and she had to
be bled, calling out all the while, 'My father is dying; I want
to see papa!' It was heartbreaking to hear her----"
"That will do, Therese. If she came now, it would be trouble
thrown away. M. Goriot cannot recognize any one now."
"Poor, dear gentleman, is he as bad at that?" said Therese.
"You don't want me now, I must go and look after my dinner; it is
half-past four," remarked Sylvie. The next instant she all but
collided with Mme. de Restaud on the landing outside.
There was something awful and appalling in the sudden apparition
of the Countess. She saw the bed of death by the dim light of the
single candle, and her tears flowed at the sight of her father's
passive features, from which the life had almost ebbed. Bianchon
with thoughtful tact left the room.
"I could not escape soon enough," she said to Rastignac.
The student bowed sadly in reply. Mme. de Restaud took her
father's hand and kissed it.
"Forgive me, father! You used to say that my voice would call you
back from the grave; ah! come back for one moment to bless your
penitent daughter. Do you hear me? Oh! this is fearful! No one on
earth will ever bless me henceforth; every one hates me; no one
loves me but you in all the world. My own children will hate me.
Take me with you, father; I will love you, I will take care of
you. He does not hear me . . . I am mad . . ."
She fell on her knees, and gazed wildly at the human wreck before
her.
"My cup of misery is full," she said, turning her eyes upon
Eugene. "M. de Trailles has fled, leaving enormous debts behind
him, and I have found out that he was deceiving me. My husband
will never forgive me, and I have left my fortune in his hands. I
have lost all my illusions. Alas! I have forsaken the one heart
that loved me (she pointed to her father as she spoke), and for
whom? I have held his kindness cheap, and slighted his affection;
many and many a time I have given him pain, ungrateful wretch
that I am!"
"He knew it," said Rastignac.
Just then Goriot's eyelids unclosed; it was only a muscular
contraction, but the Countess' sudden start of reviving hope was
no less dreadful than the dying eyes.
"Is it possible that he can hear me?" cried the Countess. "No,"
she answered herself, and sat down beside the bed. As Mme. de
Restaud seemed to wish to sit by her father, Eugene went down to
take a little food. The boarders were already assembled.
"Well," remarked the painter, as he joined them, "it seems that
there is to be a death-orama upstairs."
"Charles, I think you might find something less painful to joke
about," said Eugene.
"So we may not laugh here?" returned the painter. "What harm does
it do? Bianchon said that the old man was quite insensible."
"Well, then," said the employe from the Museum, "he will die as
he has lived."
"My father is dead!" shrieked the Countess.
The terrible cry brought Sylvie, Rastignac, and Bianchon; Mme. de
Restaud had fainted away. When she recovered they carried her
downstairs, and put her into the cab that stood waiting at the
door. Eugene sent Therese with her, and bade the maid take the
Countess to Mme. de Nucingen.
Bianchon came down to them.
"Yes, he is dead," he said.
"Come, sit down to dinner, gentlemen," said Mme. Vauquer, "or the
soup will be cold."
The two students sat down together.
"What is the next thing to be done?" Eugene asked of Bianchon.
"I have closed his eyes and composed his limbs," said Bianchon.
"When the certificate has been officially registered at the
Mayor's office, we will sew him in his winding sheet and bury him
somewhere. What do you think we ought to do?"
"He will not smell at his bread like this any more," said the
painter, mimicking the old man's little trick.
"Oh, hang it all!" cried the tutor, "let Father Goriot drop, and
let us have something else for a change. He is a standing dish,
and we have had him with every sauce this hour or more. It is one
of the privileges of the good city of Paris that anybody may be
born, or live, or die there without attracting any attention
whatsoever. Let us profit by the advantages of civilization.
There are fifty or sixty deaths every day; if you have a mind to
do it, you can sit down at any time and wail over whole hecatombs
of dead in Paris. Father Goriot has gone off the hooks, has he?
So much the better for him. If you venerate his memory, keep it
to yourselves, and let the rest of us feed in peace."
"Oh, to be sure," said the widow, "it is all the better for him
that he is dead. It looks as though he had had trouble enough,
poor soul, while he was alive."
And this was all the funeraloration delivered over him who had
been for Eugene the type and embodiment of Fatherhood.
The fifteen lodgers began to talk as usual. When Bianchon and
Eugene had satisfied their hunger, the rattle of spoons and
forks, the boisterous conversation, the expressions on the faces
that bespoke various degrees of want of feeling, gluttony, or
indifference, everything about them made them shiver with
loathing. They went out to find a priest to watch that night with
the dead. It was necessary to measure their last pious cares by
the scanty sum of money that remained. Before nine o'clock that
evening the body was laid out on the bare sacking of the bedstead
in the desolate room; a lighted candle stood on either side, and
the priest watched at the foot. Rastignac made inquiries of this
latter as to the expenses of the funeral, and wrote to the Baron
de Nucingen and the Comte de Restaud, entreating both gentlemen
to authorize their man of business to defray the charges of
laying their father-in-law in the grave. He sent Christophe with
the letters; then he went to bed, tired out, and slept.
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,
- disgust [dis´gʌst]
n.厌恶 vt.令(人)作呕 (初中英语单词) - clutch [klʌtʃ] v.抓住 n.爪子；控制 (初中英语单词)
- childish [´tʃaildiʃ] a.孩子的；幼稚的 (初中英语单词)
- satisfaction [,sætis´fækʃən] n.满意；满足 (初中英语单词)
- quiver [´kwivə] v.抖动 n.颤动(声) (初中英语单词)
- mysterious [mi´stiəriəs] a.神秘的；难以理解的 (初中英语单词)
- impression [im´preʃən] n.印刷；印象；效果 (初中英语单词)
- standing [´stændiŋ] n.持续 a.直立的 (初中英语单词)
- replace [ri´pleis] vt.放回；复置；取代 (初中英语单词)
- height [hait] n.高度；顶点；卓越 (初中英语单词)
- breath [breθ] n.呼吸；气息 (初中英语单词)
- wretched [´retʃid] a.可怜的；倒霉的 (初中英语单词)
- throat [θrəut] n.咽喉；嗓子；出入口 (初中英语单词)
- instant [´instənt] a.立即的 n.紧迫；瞬间 (初中英语单词)
- henceforth [´hens´fɔ:θ] ad.今后；从今以后 (初中英语单词)
- misery [´mizəri] n.痛苦；悲惨；穷困 (初中英语单词)
- enormous [i´nɔ:məs] a.巨大地，很，极 (初中英语单词)
- forgive [fə´giv] vt.原谅，谅解，宽恕 (初中英语单词)
- pointed [´pɔintid] a.尖(锐)的；中肯的 (初中英语单词)
- dreadful [´dredful] a.可怕的；讨厌的 (初中英语单词)
- painter [´peintə] n.画家；(油)漆工 (初中英语单词)
- employe [,emplɔi´i:] n.雇员，雇工，店员 (初中英语单词)
- waiting [´weitiŋ] n.等候；伺候 (初中英语单词)
- funeral [´fju:nərəl] n.葬礼，丧葬；困难 (初中英语单词)
- hunger [´hʌŋgə] n.饥饿；渴望 (初中英语单词)
- rattle [´rætl] n.嘎吱声 (初中英语单词)
- shiver [´ʃivə] v.&n.(使)颤抖；碎片 (初中英语单词)
- priest [pri:st] n.教士；牧师；神父 (初中英语单词)
- measure [´meʒə] n.量度；范围 vt.测量 (初中英语单词)
- medical [´medikəl] a.医学的；医疗的 (初中英语单词)
- foremost [´fɔ:məust] a.最重要的；最先的 (高中英语单词)
- hurried [´hʌrid] a.仓促的，慌忙的 (高中英语单词)
- mortal [´mɔ:tl] a.致命的 n.凡人 (高中英语单词)
- symbol [´simbəl] n.符号；象征 (高中英语单词)
- terrific [tə´rifik] a.可怕的；极大的 (高中英语单词)
- shrill [ʃril] a.(声音)尖锐的 (高中英语单词)
- ghastly [´gɑ:stli] a.苍白的；可怕的 (高中英语单词)
- painful [´peinfəl] a.痛(苦)的；费力的 (高中英语单词)
- footstep [´futstep] n.足迹，脚步声 (高中英语单词)
- thoughtful [´θɔ:tfəl] a.深思的；体贴的 (高中英语单词)
- certificate [sə´tifikət] n.执照；文凭 vt.批准 (高中英语单词)
- scanty [´skænti] a.贫乏的；节省的 (高中英语单词)
- desolate [´desəleit] a.荒凉的；孤独的 (高中英语单词)
- authorize [´ɔ:θəraiz] vt.授权；核准，审定 (高中英语单词)
- sewing [´səuiŋ] n.缝纫；(书的)装订 (高中英语单词)
- upstairs [,ʌp´steəz] ad.在楼上 a.楼上的 (英语四级单词)
- elderly [´eldəli] a. 较老的，年长的 (英语四级单词)
- whence [wens] ad.从何处；从那里 (英语四级单词)
- exclamation [,eksklə´meiʃən] n.喊(惊)叫；感叹词 (英语四级单词)
- mechanism [´mekənizəm] n.机械装置；机制 (英语四级单词)
- staircase [´steəkeis] n.楼梯 =stairway (英语四级单词)
- appalling [ə´pɔ:liŋ] a.令人震惊的 (英语四级单词)
- composed [kəm´pəuzd] a.镇静自若的 (英语四级单词)
- officially [ə´fiʃəli] ad.以职员身份；正式 (英语四级单词)
- involuntary [in´vɔləntəri] a.无意识的；非自愿的 (英语六级单词)
- calling [´kɔ:liŋ] n.点名；职业；欲望 (英语六级单词)
- landing [´lændiŋ] n.登陆；降落；楼梯平台 (英语六级单词)
- countess [´kauntis] n.伯爵夫人；女伯爵 (英语六级单词)
- forsaken [fə´seik] forsake的过去分词 (英语六级单词)
- oration [ə´reiʃən] n.演说；引语 (英语六级单词)
- boisterous [´bɔistərəs] a.狂暴的；吵闹的 (英语六级单词)
- forthcoming [,fɔ:θ´kʌmiŋ] a.即将到来的 (英语六级单词)
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