Father Goriot

by Honore de Balzac
Translated by Ellen Marriage

To the great and illustrious Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, a token
of admiration for his works and genius.

DE BALZAC.
Mme. Vauquer (nee de Conflans) is an elderly person, who for the

past forty years has kept a lodging-house in the Rue Nueve-
Sainte-Genevieve, in the district that lies between the Latin

Quarter and the Faubourg Saint-Marcel. Her house (known in the
neighborhood as the Maison Vauquer) receives men and women, old

and young, and no word has ever been breathed against her
respectable establishment; but, at the same time, it must be said

that as a matter of fact no young woman has been under her roof
for thirty years, and that if a young man stays there for any

length of time it is a sure sign that his allowance must be of
the slenderest. In 1819, however, the time when this drama opens,

there was an almost penniless young girl among Mme. Vauquer's
boarders.

That word drama has been somewhat discredited of late; it has
been overworked and twisted to strange uses in these days of

dolorous literature; but it must do service again here, not
because this story is dramatic in the restricted sense of the

word, but because some tears may perhaps be shed intra et extra
muros before it is over.

Will any one without the walls of Paris understand it? It is open
to doubt. The only audience who could appreciate the results of

close observation, the careful reproduction of minute detail and
local color, are dwellers between the heights of Montrouge and

Montmartre, in a vale of crumbling stucco watered by streams of
black mud, a vale of sorrows which are real and joys too often

hollow; but this audience is so accustomed to terrible
sensations, that only some unimaginable and well-neigh impossible

woe could produce any lastingimpression there. Now and again
there are tragedies so awful and so grand by reason of the

complication of virtues and vices that bring them about, that
egotism and selfishness are forced to pause and are moved to

pity; but the impression that they receive is like a luscious
fruit, soon consumed. Civilization, like the car of Juggernaut,

is scarcely stayed perceptibly in its progress by a heart less
easy to break than the others that lie in its course; this also

is broken, and Civilization continues on her course triumphant.
And you, too, will do the like; you who with this book in your

white hand will sink back among the cushions of your armchair,
and say to yourself, "Perhaps this may amuse me." You will read

the story of Father Goriot's secret woes, and, dining thereafter
with an unspoiled appetite, will lay the blame of your

insensibility upon the writer, and accuse him of exaggeration, of
writing romances. Ah! once for all, this drama is neither a

fiction nor a romance! ALL IS TRUE,--so true, that every one can
discern the elements of the tragedy in his own house, perhaps in

his own heart.
The lodging-house is Mme. Vauquer's own property. It is still

standing in the lower end of the Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve, just
where the road slopes so sharply down to the Rue de l'Arbalete,

that wheeled traffic seldom passes that way, because it is so
stony and steep. This position is sufficient to account for the

silence prevalent in the streets shut in between the dome of the
Pantheon and the dome of the Val-de-Grace, two conspicuous public

buildings which give a yellowish tone to the landscape and darken
the whole district that lies beneath the shadow of their leaden-

hued cupolas.
In that district the pavements are clean and dry, there is

neither mud nor water in the gutters, grass grows in the chinks
of the walls. The most heedless passer-by feels the depressing

influences of a place where the sound of wheels creates a
sensation; there is a grim look about the houses, a suggestion of

a jail about those high garden walls. A Parisian straying into a
suburb apparentlycomposed of lodging-houses and public

institutions would see poverty and dullness, old age lying down
to die, and joyous youth condemned to drudgery. It is the ugliest

quarter of Paris, and, it may be added, the least known. But,
before all things, the Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve is like a

bronze frame for a picture for which the mind cannot be too well
prepared by the contemplation of sad hues and sober images. Even

so, step by step the daylight decreases, and the cicerone's
droning voice grows hollower as the traveler descends into the

Catacombs. The comparison holds good! Who shall say which is more
ghastly, the sight of the bleached skulls or of dried-up human

hearts?
The front of the lodging-house is at right angles to the road,

and looks out upon a little garden, so that you see the side of
the house in section, as it were, from the Rue Nueve-Sainte-

Genevieve. Beneath the wall of the house front there lies a
channel, a fathom wide, paved with cobble-stones, and beside it

runs a graveled walk bordered by geraniums and oleanders and
pomegranates set in great blue and white glazed earthenware pots.

Access into the graveled walk is afforded by a door, above which
the words MAISON VAUQUER may be read, and beneath, in rather

smaller letters, "Lodgings for both sexes, etc."
During the day a glimpse into the garden is easily obtained

through a wicket to which a bell is attached. On the opposite
wall, at the further end of the graveled walk, a green marble

arch was painted once upon a time by a local artist, and in this
semblance of a shrine a statue representing Cupid is installed; a

Parisian Cupid, so blistered and disfigured that he looks like a
candidate for one of the adjacent hospitals, and might suggest an

allegory to lovers of symbolism. The half-obliterated inscription
on the pedestal beneath determines the date of this work of art,

for it bears witness to the widespreadenthusiasm felt for
Voltaire on his return to Paris in 1777:

"Whoe'er thou art, thy master see;
He is, or was, or ought to be."

At night the wicket gate is replaced by a solid door. The little
garden is no wider than the front of the house; it is shut in

between the wall of the street and the partition wall of the
neighboring house. A mantle of ivy conceals the bricks and

attracts the eyes of passers-by to an effect which is picturesque
in Paris, for each of the walls is covered with trellised vines

that yield a scanty dusty crop of fruit, and furnish besides a
subject of conversation for Mme. Vauquer and her lodgers; every

year the widow trembles for her vintage.
A straight path beneath the walls on either side of the garden

leads to a clump of lime-trees at the further end of it; LINE-
trees, as Mme. Vauquer persists in calling them, in spite of the

fact that she was a de Conflans, and regardless of repeated
corrections from her lodgers.

The central space between the walls is filled with artichokes and
rows of pyramid fruit-trees, and surrounded by a border of

lettuce, pot-herbs, and parsley. Under the lime-trees there are a
few green-painted garden seats and a wooden table, and hither,

during the dog-days, such of the lodgers as are rich enough to
indulge in a cup of coffee come to take their pleasure, though it

is hot enough to roast eggs even in the shade.
The house itself is three stories high, without counting the

attics under the roof. It is built of rough stone, and covered
with the yellowish stucco that gives a mean appearance to almost

every house in Paris. There are five windows in each story in the
front of the house; all the blinds visible through the small