Old Man Goriot Page 4

  The premises used for the business of the boarding house are owned by Madame Vauquer. The building stands at the foot of the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, just where the ground shelves into the Rue de l’Arbalète so sharply and inconveniently that horses rarely go up or down it. This circumstance contributes to the silence which prevails in these streets wedged between the domes of the Val-de-Grâce and the Panthéon,8 two monuments which modify the atmospheric conditions, giving the light a jaundiced tinge, while the harsh shadows cast by their cupolas make everything gloomy. The pavements are dry, the gutters are empty of either water or mud, grass grows out of the walls. Every passer-by – even the most carefree man in the world – feels dejected here, where the sound of a carriage is a momentous event, the houses are drab and the walls make you feel boxed in. A Parisian who strayed this way would see nothing but boarding houses and institutions, tedium and wretchedness, old age dying, blithe youth forced to toil. No district of Paris is less attractive, nor, it must be said, so little known. The Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève itself is like a bronze frame, the only one that fits this tale, for it prepares the mind only too well with its murky colours and sobering thoughts; just as, step by step, the daylight fades and the guide’s patter rings hollow, when the traveller descends into the Catacombs. A fitting comparison! Who is to say which sight is the more horrible: shrivelled hearts, or empty skulls?

  The front of the building overlooks a small patch of garden, while the boarding house as a whole stands at a right angle to the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, where you see its depth in cross-section. Between the house and the garden, a sunken gravel strip a fathom wide runs the length of the façade, fronted by a sandy path bordered with geraniums, oleanders and pomegranate trees planted in large blue and white porcelain vases. The entrance to this path is through a secondary door, above which is a sign declaring: MAISON VAUQUER, and underneath: Lodgings for persons of both sexes et cetera. During the day, at the end of the path, through an openwork gate with a strident bell, you might glimpse a green marble arcade painted by a local artist on the wall facing the street. A statue of Eros stands in the recess suggested by the painting. Those fond of symbols might see in its blistering coat of varnish a kind of love more Parisian than mythical, one which is cured a stone’s throw away.9 Beneath the pedestal, this half-eroded inscription, with its fashionable enthusiasm for Voltaire on his return to Paris in 1777,10 reveals the ornament’s age:

  Whoever you are, your master you see:

  For that’s what he is, was, or shall be.

  At nightfall, the openwork gate is covered with a solid one. The patch of garden, as wide as the façade is long, is boxed in by the street wall and the adjoining wall of the house next door, whose thick curtain of ivy is so unusually picturesque for Paris that passers-by find their eye drawn to it. The garden walls are covered in espaliers and vines, whose spindly and powdery attempts at fruit each year provide Madame Vauquer with a source of concern and conversation with her lodgers. Along each wall a narrow path leads to an area overshadowed by lime trees, which Madame Vauquer, albeit née de Conflans, obstinately calls ly-ums, despite her boarders’ remarks on her pronunciation. Two paths run either side of a bed of artichokes bordered with sorrel, lettuce and parsley, and flanked by tapering fruit trees.11 A round table, painted green and surrounded by seats, stands beneath the spreading lime branches. On sweltering summer days, those boarders who can afford to take coffee come and sip it here, in heat strong enough to hatch eggs. The front of the building, three storeys high and topped with garrets, is built of rough stone daubed in that shade of yellow which gives a dingy air to almost every house in Paris. Each floor has five small-paned windows, whose slatted blinds all hang aslant so that no two line up as they should. The building has two windows to its depth; those on the ground floor are furnished only by iron bars, covered with mesh. At the back is a yard about twenty feet across, where pigs, chickens and rabbits live together companionably, with a shed stacked with wood at one end. Hanging between the shed and the kitchen window is the pantry; the slops from the sink flow out beneath it. The yard has a narrow door leading to the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, through which the cook sweeps away the household’s waste, sluicing the cesspool that forms there with water to keep the stench at bay.

  The ground floor is naturally appointed to the activity of a boarding house. A French window opens into the front room, whose two street-facing windows let in some light. The drawing room communicates with the dining room, which is separated from the kitchen by a flight of wooden stairs laid with scrubbed and re-stained tiles. There is no more dispiriting sight than that drawing room furnished with easy and hard-backed chairs upholstered in haircloth12 with matt and shiny stripes. In the middle is a round table with a grey-and-white marble top bearing the obligatory white porcelain coffee service with worn gilt trim found everywhere these days. This room, whose floor is rather crooked, is wainscoted to elbow height. The remaining wall space is covered with glazed wallpaper showing scenes from Telemachus,13 whose classical characters appear in colour. In the panel between the barred windows, the boarders may contemplate the scene of the banquet given by Calypso for Ulysses’ son. For forty years this picture has provided material for endless quips by the younger boarders, who make believe they’re superior to their circumstances by mocking the dinner to which poverty condemns them. The stone fireplace, whose permanently spotless hearth attests to the fact that no fire is ever kindled there except on special occasions, is adorned with two vases crammed with decrepit artificial flowers, set on either side of a bluish marble clock in the worst taste. Our language has no name for the odour given off by this first room, which ought to be called ‘essence of boarding house’. It smells of all that is stale, mildewy, rancid; it chills you, makes your nose run, clings to your clothes; it repeats like last night’s dinner; it reeks of the scullery, the pantry, the poorhouse. If a method were invented for measuring the foul and fundamental particles contributed by the catarrhal conditions specific to each boarder, young and old, perhaps it really could be described. And yet, despite these dreary horrors, if you compare it with the dining room next door, you will find the drawing room as elegant and fragrant as any self-respecting boudoir. This room, panelled throughout, was once painted a colour which can no longer be discerned, providing a backdrop for the grime which has printed over it in layers, forming intriguing patterns. It is crammed with an assortment of sticky sideboards upon which you see nicked, stained carafes, round moiré14 stands and stacks of thick china plates with blue edging, made in Tournai. In one corner is a rack of numbered pigeon holes housing each boarder’s food- or wine-stained serviette. In this room you find those indestructible pieces of furniture that nobody else will have, stranded here like the debris of civilization in a Hospital of Incurables. You might see a weather house with a Capuchin monk that comes out when it rains, tasteless prints that spoil your appetite, all framed in varnished black wood with gilt-piping; a tortoiseshell wall-clock with copper detail; a green stove, Argand lamps15 coated in a blend of dust and oil, a long table covered with oilcloth greasy enough for a facetious diner to write his name on using his finger as a pen, warped chairs, shabby rush placemats, forever uncoiling but just about holding together; and finally, pitiful plate-warmers with broken grates, slack hinges and charred wood. A full explanation of how old, cracked, rotten, shaky, worm-eaten, armless, seedy, creaking and generally on its last legs the furniture is would require a description so lengthy it would delay the main interest of this story, something that those of you in a hurry would find unforgivable. The floor, laid with red tiles, is pitted with craters caused by repeated scrubbing and staining. In all, an unpoetic wretchedness reigns throughout; a mean, reduced, threadbare wretchedness. Although there is not yet filth, there are stains; although there are neither holes nor rags, everything is sliding into decay.

  The room may be seen in all its splendour at around seven in the morning, at which time Madame Vauquer’s cat, running ahead of it
s mistress, jumps up onto the sideboards, sniffs at the milk kept in various jugs covered with plates and makes its morning prrruing sound. Now the widow herself appears, shuffling along in her puckered slippers, a crooked hair-piece poking out beneath the tulle bonnet perched on her head. Her flabby, sagging face, her protruding parrot’s beak of a nose, her stubby, pudgy hands, her plump tick of a body, her overstuffed, wobbling bodice, are all entirely in keeping with this room, where the walls sweat misfortune, where enterprise kicks its heels and whose fetid fug Madame Vauquer breathes in without gagging. Her face is as cold as the first autumn frost, the expression in her crow-footed eyes shifts between the fixed smile of a dancer and the baleful glower of a discounter;16 in all, everything about her points to the boarding house, just as the boarding house leads to her. There can be no prison without a warder, the one is unimaginable without the other. The pallor and portliness of this small woman are the products of the life she leads, just as typhus emanates from the vapours of a hospital. Her knitted woollen petticoat, drooping below an overskirt made from an old dress and poking out through the slits where the cloth has worn away, epitomizes the drawing room, the dining room, the garden, anticipates the cooking and prefigures the boarders. Once she’s here, the scene is set, the show can begin. Madame Vauquer, who must be about fifty years of age, resembles all women who have seen better days. She has the unflinching stare, the self-righteous manner of a Madam who will lay down the law to raise her fee, but is otherwise prepared to stop at nothing to improve her lot, to inform on Georges or Pichegru17 (if Georges and Pichegru hadn’t already been shopped). Nonetheless, the boarders would say that she was a good woman at heart, believing her to be as down on her luck as they were, hearing her groan and cough as they did. What kind of a man was Monsieur Vauquer? She tended to be uncommunicative on the subject of the deceased. How did he lose his fortune? In the troubles, she would reply. He had treated her shabbily, leaving her with only her eyes to weep with, this house as her livelihood and the right not to sympathize with anyone else in a tight spot, because, as she would say, she had suffered all that a body can suffer. Recognizing her mistress’s shuffling step, big Sylvie, the cook, would hurry out to serve déjeuner to the lodgers.

  The boarders, who lived out, usually only came for dinner, which cost thirty francs a month payable in advance. At the time when this story begins, there were seven lodgers. The best apartments in the house were on the first floor. Madame Vauquer lived in the smaller of the two and the other was occupied by Madame Couture, the widow of a Commissary-General18 of the French Republic. She had in her charge a young lady of a tender age, called Victorine Taillefer, whom she cared for as a mother. These two ladies paid eighteen hundred francs for their board and lodging. The first of the two apartments on the second floor was occupied by an elderly man called Poiret; the other by a man of around forty years of age, known as Monsieur Vautrin, who wore a black wig, dyed his side-whiskers, and was by his own account a former merchant. The third floor was divided into four rooms, two of which were rented, one by an elderly spinster called Mademoiselle Michonneau; the other by a retired dealer in vermicelli, Italian pasta and starch, who had come to be known as old man Goriot. The other two rooms were intended for birds of passage, for students down on their luck who, like Goriot and Mademoiselle Michonneau, could only afford forty-five francs a month for food and lodging, but Madame Vauquer had little desire for their custom and only took them in for want of anyone better: they ate too much bread. At the time, one of these two rooms was occupied by a young man who had come to Paris from the Angoulême area to study law and whose large family were tightening their belts and making endless sacrifices in order to send him twelve hundred francs a year. Eugène de Rastignac, as he was called, was one of those young men whose lack of fortune requires them to develop an aptitude for work, who, from an early age, fully understand what their parents expect of them and prepare for greatness by calculating how far their learning will take them and adapting it in advance of shifts in society, thus ensuring they will be the first to benefit. Without his inquisitiveness and the skill with which he engineered his entry into the most exclusive Parisian society, the present account would not have been painted in such true colours, and for this we must undoubtedly thank his shrewdness and his desire to fathom the mysteries of an appalling situation, as carefully concealed by those who had created it as by the man who endured it.

  Up from the third floor was an attic where the laundry was hung out, and two garrets, where Christophe the errand boy and big Sylvie the cook slept. Besides the seven lodgers, year in, year out, Madame Vauquer took eight students of law or medicine and two or three regulars who lived nearby, all of whom paid for board alone. In the evening, eighteen people sat down to eat in the dining room, which could hold up to twenty, but in the morning, only the seven residents were to be found there, so that déjeuner almost felt like a family meal. They would come downstairs in slippers and venture to make confidential remarks about the dress or appearance of the non-residents, discussing the events of the previous evening, their privacy encouraging them to speak freely. These seven lodgers were Madame Vauquer’s spoilt children and she measured out the level of care and respect due to each, depending on how much they paid, with the precision of an astronomer. The residents may have ended up under the same roof by chance, but they were all motivated by the same consideration. The two second-floor lodgers paid only seventy-two francs per month. Rates as cheap as these are only to be found in the Faubourg Saint-Marcel between the hospitals of La Bourbe and La Salpêtrière.19 Indeed, with the exception of Madame Couture, who paid more, all of the lodgers were more or less obviously down at heel. And so the dingy-looking interior of this establishment

  was matched by the equally shabby clothing of those who occupied it. The men wore frock-coats whose colour you’d be hard pressed to define, shoes of the kind found discarded in the road in fashionable districts, linen hanging by a thread, clothes stripped of all but their soul. The women wore faded, re-dyed, washed-out dresses, old darned lace, gloves shiny with wear, collarettes that always looked soiled and frayed fichus.20 Yet despite these clothes, almost without exception, they had solid physiques, constitutions which had survived life’s storms, and cold, hard faces, as worn as écu coins withdrawn from circulation. Their thin lips concealed greedy teeth. Each lodger’s appearance hinted at a tragedy, either fully played-out, or in progress; not a tragedy performed in the glare of the footlights against a backdrop of painted scenery, but a silent, real-life tragedy, so chilling it stirs and warms the heart, a tragedy with no final curtain.

  The elderly, weary-eyed Mademoiselle Michonneau was never seen without a grubby green taffeta eye-shade edged with wire, which would have scared off the Angel of Mercy. Her shawl, with its balding, drooping fringe, appeared to be draped over a skeleton, so angular were the shapes it clung to. What acid had eaten away this woman’s feminine curves? She must have been pretty once, and shapely too: was it vice, grief, cupidity? Had she loved too much? Perhaps she had been a dealer in second-hand finery,21 or simply a whore? Was she atoning for a shameless youth spent in pursuit of profit and pleasure, with an old age which made passers-by turn away? Her blank expression chilled, her scraggy face threatened. Her voice was as shrill as a solitary cicada scraping in the undergrowth at the approach of winter. She said that she had cared for an old gentleman suffering from an inflammation of the bladder and abandoned by his children who believed him to be destitute. This old man had bequeathed to her a life annuity of one thousand francs, which was periodically disputed by his heirs, who called her every kind of name. Although her face had been ravaged by the passions that had distorted it, the texture of her skin was still delicate and white in places, perhaps indicating that her body also retained some vestigial beauty.

  Monsieur Poiret was a kind of blundering automaton. To see him – looming like a grey shadow along a path in the Jardin des Plantes, a drooping old cap on his head, barely able to grip the yellowing
ivory handle of his stick, the crumpled skirts of his frock-coat flapping, miserably failing to hide his empty, sagging breeches and blue-stockinged legs that gave way like a drunkard’s, and revealing his dirty white waistcoat and the concertinaed coarse muslin shirt frill which had worked loose from the tie twisted round his scrawny turkey’s neck – you wouldn’t be alone in asking yourself whether this pantomime figure could possibly belong to the audacious tribe of the sons of Japet22 who flit about on the Boulevard des Italiens. What kind of employment had knocked the stuffing out of him? What passion had left such a stamp of bewilderment on his bulbous face, which would have seemed overdone drawn as a caricature. What kind of a man had he been? Perhaps he’d been employed by the Ministry of Justice, in the office to which executioners addressed their memoranda of expenses, accounts of supplies of black veils for parricides, of sawdust for baskets, of rope for the guillotine. He might have once been a receiver at the entrance to an abattoir or an assistant health inspector. In all, he appeared to have been one of the mill-horses that keep the great wheel of society turning, one of those Parisian cats that never know for which monkeys they are pulling chestnuts out of the fire,23 one of many pivots on which some public tragedy or controversy has revolved, one of those men that we look at and say: After all, someone has to do it. The fine folk of Paris are oblivious to faces such as his, drained by mental or physical suffering. But then Paris is an ocean. Heave in the lead as often as you like, you’ll never sound its depths. Explore it, describe it: however exhaustive your exploration or description, however numerous and inquisitive the explorers of that sea, there will always be virgin territory, an unknown cave, flowers, pearls, monsters, something unheard of, forgotten by literary divers. The Maison Vauquer is one of these curious monstrosities.