Father Goriot | Page 5

between the
wood-shed and the kitchen window hangs the meat-safe, just above the
place where the sink discharges its greasy streams. The cook sweeps all
the refuse out through a little door into the Rue Nueve-Sainte-
Genevieve, and frequently cleanses the yard with copious supplies of
water, under pain of pestilence.
The house might have been built on purpose for its present uses.

Access is given by a French window to the first room on the ground
floor, a sitting-room which looks out upon the street through the two
barred windows already mentioned. Another door opens out of it into
the dining-room, which is separated from the kitchen by the well of the
staircase, the steps being constructed partly of wood, partly of tiles,
which are colored and beeswaxed. Nothing can be more depressing
than the sight of that sitting-room. The furniture is covered with horse
hair woven in alternate dull and glossy stripes. There is a round table in
the middle, with a purplish-red marble top, on which there stands, by
way of ornament, the inevitable white china tea- service, covered with a
half-effaced gilt network. The floor is sufficiently uneven, the wainscot
rises to elbow height, and the rest of the wall space is decorated with a
varnished paper, on which the principal scenes from /Telemaque/ are
depicted, the various classical personages being colored. The subject
between the two windows is the banquet given by Calypso to the son of
Ulysses, displayed thereon for the admiration of the boarders, and has
furnished jokes these forty years to the young men who show
themselves superior to their position by making fun of the dinners to
which poverty condemns them. The hearth is always so clean and neat
that it is evident that a fire is only kindled there on great occasions; the
stone chimney-piece is adorned by a couple of vases filled with faded
artificial flowers imprisoned under glass shades, on either side of a
bluish marble clock in the very worst taste.
The first room exhales an odor for which there is no name in the
language, and which should be called the odeur de pension. The damp
atmosphere sends a chill through you as you breathe it; it has a stuffy,
musty, and rancid quality; it permeates your clothing; after- dinner
scents seem to be mingled in it with smells from the kitchen and
scullery and the reek of a hospital. It might be possible to describe it if
some one should discover a process by which to distil from the
atmosphere all the nauseating elements with which it is charged by the
catarrhal exhalations of every individual lodger, young or old. Yet, in
spite of these stale horrors, the sitting-room is as charming and as
delicately perfumed as a boudoir, when compared with the adjoining
dining-room.

The paneled walls of that apartment were once painted some color, now
a matter of conjecture, for the surface is incrusted with accumulated
layers of grimy deposit, which cover it with fantastic outlines. A
collection of dim-ribbed glass decanters, metal discs with a satin sheen
on them, and piles of blue-edged earthenware plates of Touraine ware
cover the sticky surfaces of the sideboards that line the room. In a
corner stands a box containing a set of numbered pigeon-holes, in
which the lodgers' table napkins, more or less soiled and stained with
wine, are kept. Here you see that indestructible furniture never met with
elsewhere, which finds its way into lodging-houses much as the wrecks
of our civilization drift into hospitals for incurables. You expect in such
places as these to find the weather-house whence a Capuchin issues on
wet days; you look to find the execrable engravings which spoil your
appetite, framed every one in a black varnished frame, with a gilt
beading round it; you know the sort of tortoise- shell clock-case, inlaid
with brass; the green stove, the Argand lamps, covered with oil and
dust, have met your eyes before. The oilcloth which covers the long
table is so greasy that a waggish externe will write his name on the
surface, using his thumb-nail as a style. The chairs are broken-down
invalids; the wretched little hempen mats slip away from under your
feet without slipping away for good; and finally, the foot-warmers are
miserable wrecks, hingeless, charred, broken away about the holes. It
would be impossible to give an idea of the old, rotten, shaky, cranky,
worm-eaten, halt, maimed, one-eyed, rickety, and ramshackle condition
of the furniture without an exhaustive description, which would delay
the progress of the story to an extent that impatient people would not
pardon. The red tiles of the floor are full of depressions brought about
by scouring and periodical renewings of color. In short, there is no
illusory grace left to the poverty that