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Updated: May 24, 2025
"A marquis here in Paris, if he is not the veriest sham, ought to have a hundred thousand livres a year at least; and a lodger in the Maison Vauquer is not exactly Fortune's favorite." Vautrin's glance at Rastignac was half-paternal, half-contemptuous. "Puppy!" it seemed to say; "I should make one mouthful of him!"
The rogues have laid their heads together to set a trap for me." Mme. Vauquer felt sick and faint at these words. "Good Lord!" she cried, "this does give one a turn; and me at the Gaite with him only last night!" she said to Sylvie. "Summon your philosophy, mamma," Collin resumed. "Is it a misfortune to have sat in my box at the Gaite yesterday evening? After all, are you better than we are?
"M. Goriot?" the student cried. "What is it?" asked the old man. "So she was very beautiful, was she, yesterday night?" "Who?" "Mme. de Restaud." "Look at the old wretch," said Mme. Vauquer, speaking to Vautrin; "how his eyes light up!" "Then does he really keep her?" said Mlle. Michonneau, in a whisper to the student. "Oh! yes, she was tremendously pretty," Eugene answered.
Such a lively man as he was, and paid fifteen francs a month for his coffee of an evening, paid you very penny on the nail too." "And open-handed he was!" said Christophe. "There is some mistake," said Sylvie. "Why, no there isn't! he said so himself!" said Mme. Vauquer. "And to think that all these things have happened in my house, and in a quarter where you never see a cat go by.
Vauquer by the stove, with Sylvie and Christophe to keep her company; the old landlady, sitting like Marius among the ruins of Carthage, was waiting for the two lodgers that yet remained to her, and bemoaning her lot with the sympathetic Sylvie.
She loved and she was loved; at any rate, she believed that she was loved; and what woman would not likewise have believed after seeing Rastignac's face and listening to the tones of his voice during that hour snatched under the Argus eyes of the Maison Vauquer?
But the catastrophes of this great day were to cast all previous events into the shade, and supply an inexhaustible topic of conversation for Mme. Vauquer and her boarders so long as she lived. In the first place, Goriot and Eugene de Rastignac both slept till close upon eleven o'clock. Mme. Vauquer, who came home about midnight from the Gaite, lay a-bed till half-past ten.
You have learned a good many things, then, since we lived in the Maison Vauquer?" "Yes, since then, my boy, I have seen puppets, both dolls and manikins. I know something of the ways of the fine ladies whose bodies we attend to, saving that which is dearest to them, their child if they love it or their pretty faces, which they always worship.
Around this tragic central figure are grouped the commensals of the Vauquer pension, Rastignac, the young law-student, with shallow purse and aristocratic connections; Bianchon, the future great-gun in medicine, at present walking the hospitals and attending lectures and practising dissections; Victorine Taillefer, the rejected daughter of a guilty millionaire; Mademoiselle Michonneau, the soured spinster, who ferrets out the identity of her fellow-boarder Vautrin, and betrays to justice this cynical outlaw installed so quietly, and, to all appearance, safely, in the pension, where Madame Vauquer, the traipsing widow, lords it serenely, attentive only to her profits.
Poverty would clamor so loudly that more than once he was on the point of yielding to the cunning temptations of the terrible sphinx, whose glance had so often exerted a strange spell over him. Poiret and Mlle. Michonneau went up to their rooms; and Rastignac, thinking that he was alone with the women in the dining-room, sat between Mme. Vauquer and Mme.
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