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Like all first-class art, his gives us the seeming-true for our better instruction. He said in the Preface to "Pere Goriot" that the novelist should not only depict the world as it is, but "a possibly better world." He has done so. The most untrue thing in a novel may be the fact lifted over unchanged from life? Truth is not only stranger than fiction, but great fiction is truer than truth.
Father Goriot found himself without an audience, for Mme. de Nucingen had led Rastignac into the study; he heard a kiss given and taken, low though the sound was. The study was furnished as elegantly as the other rooms, and nothing was wanting there. "Have we guessed your wishes rightly?" she asked, as they returned to the drawing-room for dinner. "Yes," he said, "only too well, alas!
Thenceforward, his predilection for theories of the occult went hand in hand with his equally strong taste for the analytic observation of visible phenomena; and not infrequently he indulged in their simultaneous literary expression. The composing of Seraphita was carried on at the same time as his Search for the Absolute and Pere Goriot.
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.
Balzac was always too prosaic for the creation of virtue; his innocent people unless they may be grotesque as well as innocent, like Pons or Goriot live in a world that is not worth the trouble of investigation.
They buy old spoons and forks and gold lace there, and Goriot sold a piece of silver plate for a good round sum. It had been twisted out of shape very neatly for a man that's not used to the trade." "Really? You don't say so?" "Yes. One of my friends is expatriating himself; I had been to see him off on board the Royal Mail steamer, and was coming back here.
She expended no small amount of ingenuity in a sort of weeding process of her lodgers, announcing her intention of receiving henceforward none but people who were in every way select. If a stranger presented himself, she let him know that M. Goriot, one of the best known and most highly-respected merchants in Paris, had singled out her boarding-house for a residence.
Vauquer's ideas as to Goriot were cordially approved by Mme. de l'Ambermesnil; it was a capital notion, which for that matter she had guessed from the very first; in her opinion the vermicelli maker was an excellent man. "Ah! my dear lady, such a well-preserved man of his age, as sound as my eyesight a man who might make a woman happy!" said the widow.
Father Goriot raised his head at the words, and gave the two speakers a glance so full of intelligence and uneasiness that the lodgers beheld him with astonishment. "Then Christophe was too late, and she must have gone to him!" cried Goriot, with anguish in his voice. "It is just as I guessed," said Vautrin, leaning over to whisper in Mme. Vauquer's ear.
She ought to be put in jail for life instead of that poor dear " Eugene and Goriot rang the door-bell at that moment. "Ah! here are my two faithful lodgers," said the widow, sighing. But the two faithful lodgers, who retained but shadowy recollections of the misfortunes of their lodging-house, announced to their hostess without more ado that they were about to remove to the Chaussee d'Antin.
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