retrenchment--various luxuries which had found their way to the
table appeared there no more.
"No more gherkins, no more anchovies; they have made a fool of
me!" she said to Sylvie one morning, and they returned to the old
bill of fare.
The
thrifty frugality necessary to those who mean to make their
way in the world had become an inveterate habit of life with M.
Goriot. Soup, boiled beef, and a dish of vegetables had been, and
always would be, the dinner he liked best, so Mme. Vauquer found
it very difficult to annoy a
boarder whose tastes were so simple.
He was proof against her
malice, and in
desperation she spoke to
him and of him slightingly before the other lodgers, who began to
amuse themselves at his expense, and so gratified her desire for
revenge.
Towards the end of the first year the widow's suspicions had
reached such a pitch that she began to wonder how it was that a
retired merchant with a secure
income of seven or eight thousand
livres, the owner of such
magnificent plate and
jewelry handsome
enough for a kept
mistress, should be living in her house. Why
should he devote so small a
proportion of his money to his
expenses? Until the first year was nearly at an end, Goriot had
dined out once or twice every week, but these occasions came less
frequently, and at last he was scarcely
absent from the dinner-
table twice a month. It was hardly expected that Mme. Vauquer
should regard the increased regularity of her
boarder's habits
with complacency, when those little excursions of his had been so
much to her interest. She attributed the change not so much to a
gradual diminution of fortune as to a spiteful wish to annoy his
hostess. It is one of the most detestable habits of a Liliputian
mind to credit other people with its own
malignant pettiness.
Unluckily, towards the end of the second year, M. Goriot's
conduct gave some color to the idle talk about him. He asked Mme.
Vauquer to give him a room on the second floor, and to make a
corresponding
reduction in her charges. Apparently, such strict
economy was called for, that he did without a fire all through
the winter. Mme. Vauquer asked to be paid in advance, an
arrangement to which M. Goriot consented, and thenceforward she
spoke of him as "Father Goriot."
What had brought about this decline and fall? Conjecture was
keen, but
investigation was difficult. Father Goriot was not
communicative; in the sham
countess'
phrase he was "a
curmudgeon." Empty-headed people who
babble about their own
affairs because they have nothing else to occupy them, naturally
conclude that if people say nothing of their
doings it is because
their
doings will not bear being talked about; so the highly
respectable merchant became a
scoundrel, and the late beau was an
old rogue. Opinion fluctuated. Sometimes, according to Vautrin,
who came about this time to live in the Maison Vauquer, Father
Goriot was a man who went on 'Change and DABBLED (to use the
sufficiently
expressive language of the Stock Exchange) in stocks
and shares after he had ruined himself by heavy speculation.
Sometimes it was held that he was one of those petty gamblers who
nightly play for small stakes until they win a few francs. A
theory that he was a
detective in the employ of the Home Office
found favor at one time, but Vautrin urged that "Goriot was not
sharp enough for one of that sort." There were yet other
solutions; Father Goriot was a skinflint, a shark of a money-
lender, a man who lived by selling
lottery tickets. He was by
turns all the most
mysterious brood of vice and shame and misery;
yet, however vile his life might be, the feeling of repulsion
which he aroused in others was not so strong that he must be
banished from their society--he paid his way. Besides, Goriot had
his uses, every one vented his spleen or sharpened his wit on
him; he was pelted with jokes and belabored with hard words. The
general consensus of opinion was in favor of a theory which
seemed the most likely; this was Mme. Vauquer's view. According
to her, the man so well preserved at his time of life, as sound
as her eyesight, with whom a woman might be very happy, was a
libertine who had strange tastes. These are the facts upon which
Mme. Vauquer's slanders were based.
Early one morning, some few months after the
departure of the
unlucky Countess who had managed to live for six months at the
widow's expense, Mme. Vauquer (not yet dressed) heard the rustle
of a silk dress and a young woman's light
footstep on the stair;
some one was going to Goriot's room. He seemed to expect the
visit, for his door stood ajar. The portly Sylvie
presently came
up to tell her
mistress that a girl too pretty to be honest,
"dressed like a goddess," and not a speck of mud on her laced
cashmere boots, had glided in from the street like a snake, had
found the kitchen, and asked for M. Goriot's room. Mme. Vauquer
and the cook, listening, overheard several words affectionately
spoken during the visit, which lasted for some time. When M.
Goriot went
downstairs with the lady, the stout Sylvie forthwith
took her basket and followed the lover-like couple, under pretext
of going to do her marketing.
"M. Goriot must be
awfully rich, all the same, madame," she
reported on her return, "to keep her in such style. Just imagine
it! There was a splendid
carriagewaiting at the corner of the
Place de l'Estrapade, and SHE got into it."
While they were at dinner that evening, Mme. Vauquer went to the
window and drew the curtain, as the sun was shining into Goriot's
eyes.
"You are
beloved of fair ladies, M. Goriot--the sun seeks you
out," she said, alluding to his
visitor. "Peste! you have good
taste; she was very pretty."
"That was my daughter," he said, with a kind of pride in his
voice, and the rest chose to consider this as the fatuity of an
old man who wishes to save appearances.
A month after this visit M. Goriot received another. The same
daughter who had come to see him that morning came again after
dinner, this time in evening dress. The
boarders, in deep
discussion in the dining-room, caught a
glimpse of a lovely,
fair-haired woman,
slender,
graceful, and much too distinguished-
looking to be a daughter of Father Goriot's.
"Two of them!" cried the portly Sylvie, who did not recognize the
lady of the first visit.
A few days later, and another young lady--a tall, well-moulded
brunette, with dark hair and bright eyes--came to ask for M.
Goriot.
"Three of them!" said Sylvie.
Then the second daughter, who had first come in the morning to
see her father, came
shortly afterwards in the evening. She wore
a ball dress, and came in a
carriage.
"Four of them!" commented Mme. Vauquer and her plump handmaid.
Sylvie saw not a trace of
resemblance between this great lady and
the girl in her simple morning dress who had entered her kitchen
on the occasion of her first visit.
At that time Goriot was paying twelve hundred francs a year to
his
landlady, and Mme. Vauquer saw nothing out of the common in
the fact that a rich man had four or five
mistresses; nay, she
thought it very
knowing of him to pass them off as his daughters.
She was not at all inclined to draw a hard-and-fast line, or to
take umbrage at his sending for them to the Maison Vauquer; yet,
inasmuch as these visits explained her
boarder's
indifference to
her, she went so far (at the end of the second year) as to speak
of him as an "ugly old wretch." When at length her
boarderdeclined to nine hundred francs a year, she asked him very
insolently what he took her house to be, after meeting one of
these ladies on he stairs. Father Goriot answered that the lady