Father Goriot | Page 6

reigns here; it is dire,
parsimonious, concentrated, threadbare poverty; as yet it has not sunk
into the mire, it is only splashed by it, and though not in rags as yet, its
clothing is ready to drop to pieces.
This apartment is in all its glory at seven o'clock in the morning, when
Mme. Vauquer's cat appears, announcing the near approach of his
mistress, and jumps upon the sideboards to sniff at the milk in the
bowls, each protected by a plate, while he purrs his morning greeting to

the world. A moment later the widow shows her face; she is tricked out
in a net cap attached to a false front set on awry, and shuffles into the
room in her slipshod fashion. She is an oldish woman, with a bloated
countenance, and a nose like a parrot's beak set in the middle of it; her
fat little hands (she is as sleek as a church rat) and her shapeless,
slouching figure are in keeping with the room that reeks of misfortune,
where hope is reduced to speculate for the meanest stakes. Mme.
Vauquer alone can breathe that tainted air without being disheartened
by it. Her face is as fresh as a frosty morning in autumn; there are
wrinkles about the eyes that vary in their expression from the set smile
of a ballet-dancer to the dark, suspicious scowl of a discounter of bills;
in short, she is at once the embodiment and interpretation of her
lodging-house, as surely as her lodging-house implies the existence of
its mistress. You can no more imagine the one without the other, than
you can think of a jail without a turnkey. The unwholesome corpulence
of the little woman is produced by the life she leads, just as typhus
fever is bred in the tainted air of a hospital. The very knitted woolen
petticoat that she wears beneath a skirt made of an old gown, with the
wadding protruding through the rents in the material, is a sort of
epitome of the sitting-room, the dining-room, and the little garden; it
discovers the cook, it foreshadows the lodgers--the picture of the house
is completed by the portrait of its mistress.
Mme. Vauquer at the age of fifty is like all women who "have seen a
deal of trouble." She has the glassy eyes and innocent air of a trafficker
in flesh and blood, who will wax virtuously indignant to obtain a higher
price for her services, but who is quite ready to betray a Georges or a
Pichegru, if a Georges or a Pichegru were in hiding and still to be
betrayed, or for any other expedient that may alleviate her lot. Still,
"she is a good woman at bottom," said the lodgers who believed that
the widow was wholly dependent upon the money that they paid her,
and sympathized when they heard her cough and groan like one of
themselves.
What had M. Vauquer been? The lady was never very explicit on this
head. How had she lost her money? "Through trouble," was her answer.
He had treated her badly, had left her nothing but her eyes to cry over

his cruelty, the house she lived in, and the privilege of pitying nobody,
because, so she was wont to say, she herself had been through every
possible misfortune.
Sylvie, the stout cook, hearing her mistress' shuffling footsteps,
hastened to serve the lodgers' breakfasts. Beside those who lived in the
house, Mme. Vauquer took boarders who came for their meals; but
these /externes/ usually only came to dinner, for which they paid thirty
francs a month.
At the time when this story begins, the lodging-house contained seven
inmates. The best rooms in the house were on the first story, Mme.
Vauquer herself occupying the least important, while the rest were let
to a Mme. Couture, the widow of a commissary-general in the service
of the Republic. With her lived Victorine Taillefer, a schoolgirl, to
whom she filled the place of mother. These two ladies paid eighteen
hundred francs a year.
The two sets of rooms on the second floor were respectively occupied
by an old man named Poiret and a man of forty or thereabouts, the
wearer of a black wig and dyed whiskers, who gave out that he was a
retired merchant, and was addressed as M. Vautrin. Two of the four
rooms on the third floor were also let--one to an elderly spinster, a Mlle.
Michonneau, and the other to a retired manufacturer of vermicelli,
Italian paste and starch, who allowed the others to address him as
"Father Goriot." The remaining rooms were allotted to various birds of
passage, to impecunious students, who like "Father Goriot" and Mlle.
Michonneau, could only muster forty-five francs a month to pay for
their board and lodging. Mme.