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Updated: August 12, 2024
He recalled the intoxicating sweetness of her eyes, her fair hair, the delicate silken tissue of the skin, beneath which it almost seemed to him that he could see the blood coursing; the tones of her voice still exerted a spell over him; he had forgotten nothing; his walk perhaps heated his imagination by sending a glow of warmth through his veins. He knocked unceremoniously at Goriot's door.
For three months from that day Mme. Veuve Vauquer availed herself of the services of M. Goriot's coiffeur, and went to some expense over her toilette, expense justifiable on the ground that she owed it to herself and her establishment to pay some attention to appearances when such highly-respectable persons honored her house with their presence.
He remembered Father Goriot's confidences of the evening before; he recollected the rooms taken for him in the Rue d'Artois, so that he might be near Delphine; and then he thought of his letter, and read it again and kissed it. "Such a love is my anchor of safety," he said to himself. "How the old man's heart must have been wrung!
"Peste! what a man!" said Rastignac, as he watched Goriot's muscular arms; there was not a sound in the room while the old man, with the aid of the rope, was kneading the silver like dough. "Was he then, indeed, a thief, or a receiver of stolen goods, who affected imbecility and decrepitude, and lived like a beggar that he might carry on his pursuits the more securely?"
He would have made the twelve thousand francs in the same way that he wins and loses heaps of gold." A groan from the next room brought them back to Goriot's bedside; to all appearances he was asleep, but the two lovers caught the words, "They are not happy!" Whether he was awake or sleeping, the tone in which they were spoken went to his daughter's heart.
Eugene had scarcely finished reading Bianchon's scrawl, when he looked up and saw the little circular gold locket that contained the hair of Goriot's two daughters in Mme. Vauquer's hands. "How dared you take it?" he asked. "Good Lord! is that to be buried along with him?" retorted Sylvie. "It is gold." "Of course it shall!"
I am not a woman you can refuse me. You shall give me a receipt on a scrap of paper, and you can return it some time or other." Delphine and Eugene looked at each other in amazement, tears sprang to their eyes. Rastignac held out his hand and grasped Goriot's warmly. "Well, what is all this about? Are you not my children?" "Oh! my poor father," said Mme. de Nucingen, "how did you do it?"
"Corn on your foot, old man!" said Vautrin, and he drove Father Goriot's cap down over his eyes by a blow on the crown. The poor old man thus suddenly attacked was for a moment too bewildered to do anything. Christophe carried off his plate, thinking that he had finished his soup, so that when Goriot had pushed back his cap from his eyes his spoon encountered the table.
Suppose that for the moment Balzac is evoking the figure and fortunes of Lucien de Rubempré, and that a woman who appears incidentally in his story turns out to be our well-remembered Delphine, Goriot's daughter. We know a great deal about the past of Delphine, as it happens; but at this present juncture, in Lucien's story, her past is entirely irrelevant.
As for the rest, the current of life in Paris daily awaited them, and swept them away with it; so soon as they left the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve, they forgot the existence of the old man, their butt at dinner. For those narrow souls, or for careless youth, the misery in Father Goriot's withered face and its dull apathy were quite incompatible with wealth or any sort of intelligence.
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