"But do I know even that? I am distantly
related to you, and this
obscure and
remoterelationship 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."
"Would you kill a man for me?"
"Two," said Eugene.
"You, child. Yes, you are a child," she said, keeping back the
tears that came to her eyes; "you would love sincerely."
"Oh!" he cried, flinging up his head.
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
Beauseant'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.
"Ah! that is what I meant to say!" said Eugene. "I met Mme. de
Restaud at your ball, and this morning I went to see her.
"You must have been very much in the way," said Mme. de
Beauseant, smiling as she spoke.
"Yes, indeed. I am a
novice, and my
blunders will set every one
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
blunderI made this morning. I mentioned an old man----"
"Madame la Duchess de Langeais," Jacques cut the student short;
Eugene gave expression to his
intenseannoyance by a gesture.
"If you mean to succeed," said the Vicomtesse in a low voice, "in
the first place you must not be so demonstrative."
"Ah! good morning, dear," she continued, and rising and crossing
the room, she grasped the Duchess' hands 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."
"To what happy
inspiration do I owe this piece of good fortune,
dear Antoinette?" asked Mme. de Beauseant.
"Well, I saw M. d'Ajuda-Pinto at M. de Rochefide's door, so I
thought that if I came I should find you alone."
Mme. de Beauseant'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.
"If I had known that you were engaged----" the
speaker added,
glancing at Eugene.
"This gentleman is M. Eugene de Rastignac, one of my cousins,"
said the Vicomtesse. "Have you any news of General de
Montriveau?" she continued. "Serizy 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:
"He was at the Elysee
yesterday."
"In attendance?"
"Claire," returned the Duchess, and
hatred overflowed in the
glances she threw at Mme. de Beauseant; "of course you know that
M. d'Ajuda-Pinto is going to marry Mlle. de Rochefide; the bans
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."
"But Bertha will have two hundred thousand livres a year, they
say."
"M. d'Ajuda is too
wealthy to marry for money."
"But, my dear, Mlle. de Rochefide is a
charming girl."
"Indeed?"
"And, as a matter of fact, he is dining with them to-day; the
thing is settled. It is very
surprising to me that you should
know so little about it."
Mme. de Beauseant 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."
The Duchess gave Eugene one of those
insolent glances that
measure a man from head to foot, and leave him crushed and
annihilated.
"Madame, I have unwittingly plunged a
dagger into Mme. de
Restaud's heart; unwittingly--therein lies my offence," 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
clumsyblunderer 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 every one
despise him."
Mme. de Beauseant gave the student a glance, one of those glances
in which a great soul can
mingledignity and
gratitude. It was
like balm to the law student, who was still smarting under the
Duchess'
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----"
"You should not tell us that, M. de Rastignac. We women never
care about anything that no one else will take."
"Bah!" said Eugene. "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' expression grew colder, she did not like the
flippant tone of these remarks, and showed that she considered
them to be in bad taste by turning to the Vicomtesse with--"This
gentleman has only just come----"
Mme. de Beauseant began to laugh outright at her cousin and at
the Duchess both.
"He has only just come to Paris, dear, and is in search of some
one who will give him lessons in good taste."
"Mme. la Duchesse," said Eugene, "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.")
"But Mme. de Restaud is herself, I believe, M. de Trailles'
pupil," said the Duchess.
"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 some one 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."
"Who was it?" both women asked together.
"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
all call him 'Father Goriot.' "
"Why, child that you are," cried the Vicomtesse, "Mme. de Restaud
was a Mlle. 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----"
"Ejusdem farinae," said Eugene.
"Yes, that was it," said the Duchess.
"Oh! is that her father?" the law student continued, aghast.
"Yes, certainly; the old man had two daughters; he dotes on them,
so to speak, though they will scarcely
acknowledge him."
"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 Opera? She comes sometimes
to the Bouffons, and laughs loudly to attract attention."
The Duchess smiled and said:
"I wonder at you, dear. Why 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."
"And they do not
acknowledge their father!" Eugene repeated.
"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 had turned him
out of their houses as if he were one of the lowest outcasts."
Tears came into Eugene's eyes. He was still under the spell of
youthful beliefs, he had just left home, pure and
sacred feelings
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 axe 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----"