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From “Father Goriot,” Scenes from a Parisian Life - Honore de Balzac

Mme. Vauquer (nee de Conflans) is an elderly person, who for the past forty years has kept a

lodging-house in the Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve, in the district that lies between the Latin

Quarter and the Faubourg Saint-Marcel. Her house (known in the neighborhood as the Maison

Vauquer) receives men and women, old and young, and no word has ever been breathed against

her respectable establishment; but, at the same time, it must be said that as a matter of fact no

young woman has been under her roof for thirty years, and that if a young man stays there for

any length of time it is a sure sign that his allowance must be of the slenderest. In 1819, however,

the time when this drama opens, there was an almost penniless young girl among Mme.

Vauquer’s boarders.

That word drama has been somewhat discredited of late; it has been overworked and twisted to

strange uses in these days of dolorous literature; but it must do service again here, not because

this story is dramatic in the restricted sense of the word, but because some tears may perhaps be

shed intra et extra muros before it is over.

Will any one without the walls of Paris understand it? It is open to doubt. The only audience who

could appreciate the results of close observation, the careful reproduction of minute detail and

local color, are dwellers between the heights of Montrouge and Montmartre, in a vale of

crumbling stucco watered by streams of black mud, a vale of sorrows which are real and joys too

often hollow; but this audience is so accustomed to terrible sensations, that only some

unimaginable and well-neigh impossible woe could produce any lasting impression there. Now

and again there are tragedies so awful and so grand by reason of the complication of virtues and

vices that bring them about, that egotism and selfishness are forced to pause and are moved to

pity; but the impression that they receive is like a luscious fruit, soon consumed. Civilization,

like the car of Juggernaut, is scarcely stayed perceptibly in its progress by a heart less easy to

break than the others that lie in its course; this also is broken, and Civilization continues on her

course triumphant. And you, too, will do the like; you who with this book in your white hand

will sink back among the cushions of your armchair, and say to yourself, “Perhaps this may

amuse me.” You will read the story of Father Goriot’s secret woes, and, dining thereafter with an

unspoiled appetite, will lay the blame of your insensibility upon the writer, and accuse him of

exaggeration, of writing romances. Ah! once for all, this drama is neither a fiction nor a

romance! All is true,—so true, that every one can discern the elements of the tragedy in his own

house, perhaps in his own heart.

The lodging-house is Mme. Vauquer’s own property. It is still standing in the lower end of the

Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve, just where the road slopes so sharply down to the Rue de

l’Arbalete, that wheeled traffic seldom passes that way, because it is so stony and steep. This

position is sufficient to account for the silence prevalent in the streets shut in between the dome

of the Pantheon and the dome of the Val-de-Grace, two conspicuous public buildings which give

a yellowish tone to the landscape and darken the whole district that lies beneath the shadow of

their leaden-hued cupolas.

In that district the pavements are clean and dry, there is neither mud nor water in the gutters,

grass grows in the chinks of the walls. The most heedless passer-by feels the depressing

influences of a place where the sound of wheels creates a sensation; there is a grim look about

the houses, a suggestion of a jail about those high garden walls. A Parisian straying into a suburb

apparently composed of lodging-houses and public institutions would see poverty and dullness,

old age lying down to die, and joyous youth condemned to drudgery. It is the ugliest quarter of

Paris, and, it may be added, the least known. But, before all things, the Rue Nueve-Sainte-

Genevieve is like a bronze frame for a picture for which the mind cannot be too well prepared by

the contemplation of sad hues and sober images. Even so, step by step the daylight decreases,

and the cicerone’s droning voice grows hollower as the traveler descends into the Catacombs.

The comparison holds good! Who shall say which is more ghastly, the sight of the bleached

skulls or of dried-up human hearts?

The front of the lodging-house is at right angles to the road, and looks out upon a little garden, so

that you see the side of the house in section, as it were, from the Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve.

Beneath the wall of the house front there lies a channel, a fathom wide, paved with cobble-

stones, and beside it runs a graveled walk bordered by geraniums and oleanders and

pomegranates set in great blue and white glazed earthenware pots. Access into the graveled walk

is afforded by a door, above which the words MAISON VAUQUER may be read, and beneath,

in rather smaller letters, “Lodgings for both sexes, etc.”

During the day a glimpse into the garden is easily obtained through a wicket to which a bell is

attached. On the opposite wall, at the further end of the graveled walk, a green marble arch was

painted once upon a time by a local artist, and in this semblance of a shrine a statue representing

Cupid is installed; a Parisian Cupid, so blistered and disfigured that he looks like a candidate for

one of the adjacent hospitals, and might suggest an allegory to lovers of symbolism. The half-

obliterated inscription on the pedestal beneath determines the date of this work of art, for it bears

witness to the widespread enthusiasm felt for Voltaire on his return to Paris in 1777:

“Whoe’er thou art, thy master see;

He is, or was, or ought to be.”

At night the wicket gate is replaced by a solid door. The little garden is no wider than the front of

the house; it is shut in between the wall of the street and the partition wall of the neighboring

house. A mantle of ivy conceals the bricks and attracts the eyes of passers-by to an effect which

is picturesque in Paris, for each of the walls is covered with trellised vines that yield a scanty

dusty crop of fruit, and furnish besides a subject of conversation for Mme. Vauquer and her

lodgers; every year the widow trembles for her vintage.

A straight path beneath the walls on either side of the garden leads to a clump of lime-trees at the

further end of it; line-trees, as Mme. Vauquer persists in calling them, in spite of the fact that she

was a de Conflans, and regardless of repeated corrections from her lodgers.

The central space between the walls is filled with artichokes and rows of pyramid fruit-trees, and

surrounded by a border of lettuce, pot-herbs, and parsley. Under the lime-trees there are a few

green-painted garden seats and a wooden table, and hither, during the dog-days, such of the

lodgers as are rich enough to indulge in a cup of coffee come to take their pleasure, though it is

hot enough to roast eggs even in the shade.

The house itself is three stories high, without counting the attics under the roof. It is built of

rough stone, and covered with the yellowish stucco that gives a mean appearance to almost every

house in Paris. There are five windows in each story in the front of the house; all the blinds

visible through the small square panes are drawn up awry, so that the lines are all at cross

purposes. At the side of the house there are but two windows on each floor, and the lowest of all

are adorned with a heavy iron grating.

Behind the house a yard extends for some twenty feet, a space inhabited by a happy family of

pigs, poultry, and rabbits; the wood-shed is situated on the further side, and on the wall between

the wood-shed and the kitchen window hangs the meat-safe, just above the place where the sink

discharges its greasy streams. The cook sweeps all the refuse out through a little door into the

Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve, and frequently cleanses the yard with copious supplies of water,

under pain of pestilence.

The house might have been built on purpose for its present uses. Access is given by a French

window to the first room on the ground floor, a sitting-room which looks out upon the street

through the two barred windows already mentioned. Another door opens out of it into the dining-

room, which is separated from the kitchen by the well of the staircase, the steps being

constructed partly of wood, partly of tiles, which are colored and beeswaxed. Nothing can be

more depressing than the sight of that sitting-room. The furniture is covered with horse hair

woven in alternate dull and glossy stripes. There is a round table in the middle, with a purplish-

red marble top, on which there stands, by way of ornament, the inevitable white china tea-

service, covered with a half-effaced gilt network. The floor is sufficiently uneven, the wainscot

rises to elbow height, and the rest of the wall space is decorated with a varnished paper, on which

the principal scenes from Telemaque are depicted, the various classical personages being

colored. The subject between the two windows is the banquet given by Calypso to the son of

Ulysses, displayed thereon for the admiration of the boarders, and has furnished jokes these forty

years to the young men who show themselves superior to their position by making fun of the

dinners to which poverty condemns them. The hearth is always so clean and neat that it is

evident that a fire is only kindled there on great occasions; the stone chimney-piece is adorned by

a couple of vases filled with faded artificial flowers imprisoned under glass shades, on either side

of a bluish marble clock in the very worst taste.

The first room exhales an odor for which there is no name in the language, and which should be

called the odeur de pension. The damp atmosphere sends a chill through you as you breathe it; it

has a stuffy, musty, and rancid quality; it permeates your clothing; after-dinner scents seem to be

mingled in it with smells from the kitchen and scullery and the reek of a hospital. It might be

possible to describe it if some one should discover a process by which to distil from the

atmosphere all the nauseating elements with which it is charged by the catarrhal exhalations of

every individual lodger, young or old. Yet, in spite of these stale horrors, the sitting-room is as

charming and as delicately perfumed as a boudoir, when compared with the adjoining dining-

room.

The paneled walls of that apartment were once painted some color, now a matter of conjecture,

for the surface is incrusted with accumulated layers of grimy deposit, which cover it with

fantastic outlines. A collection of dim-ribbed glass decanters, metal discs with a satin sheen on

them, and piles of blue-edged earthenware plates of Touraine ware cover the sticky surfaces of

the sideboards that line the room. In a corner stands a box containing a set of numbered pigeon-

holes, in which the lodgers’ table napkins, more or less soiled and stained with wine, are kept.

Here you see that indestructible furniture never met with elsewhere, which finds its way into

lodging-houses much as the wrecks of our civilization drift into hospitals for incurables. You

expect in such places as these to find the weather-house whence a Capuchin issues on wet days;

you look to find the execrable engravings which spoil your appetite, framed every one in a black

varnished frame, with a gilt beading round it; you know the sort of tortoise-shell clock-case,

inlaid with brass; the green stove, the Argand lamps, covered with oil and dust, have met your

eyes before. The oilcloth which covers the long table is so greasy that a waggish externe will

write his name on the surface, using his thumb-nail as a style. The chairs are broken-down

invalids; the wretched little hempen mats slip away from under your feet without slipping away

for good; and finally, the foot-warmers are miserable wrecks, hingeless, charred, broken away

about the holes. It would be impossible to give an idea of the old, rotten, shaky, cranky, worm-

eaten, halt, maimed, one-eyed, rickety, and ramshackle condition of the furniture without an

exhaustive description, which would delay the progress of the story to an extent that impatient

people would not pardon. The red tiles of the floor are full of depressions brought about by

scouring and periodical renewings of color. In short, there is no illusory grace left to the poverty

that 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. Vauquer had little desire for

lodgers of this sort; they ate too much bread, and she only took them in default of better.

At that time one of the rooms was tenanted by a law student, a young man from the

neighborhood of Angouleme, one of a large family who pinched and starved themselves to spare

twelve hundred francs a year for him. Misfortune had accustomed Eugene de Rastignac, for that

was his name, to work. He belonged to the number of young men who know as children that

their parents’ hopes are centered on them, and deliberately prepare themselves for a great career,

subordinating their studies from the first to this end, carefully watching the indications of the

course of events, calculating the probable turn that affairs will take, that they may be the first to

profit by them. But for his observant curiosity, and the skill with which he managed to introduce

himself into the salons of Paris, this story would not have been colored by the tones of truth

which it certainly owes to him, for they are entirely due to his penetrating sagacity and desire to

fathom the mysteries of an appalling condition of things, which was concealed as carefully by

the victim as by those who had brought it to pass.

Above the third story there was a garret where the linen was hung to dry, and a couple of attics.

Christophe, the man-of-all-work, slept in one, and Sylvie, the stout cook, in the other. Beside the

seven inmates thus enumerated, taking one year with another, some eight law or medical students

dined in the house, as well as two or three regular comers who lived in the neighborhood. There

were usually eighteen people at dinner, and there was room, if need be, for twenty at Mme.

Vauquer’s table; at breakfast, however, only the seven lodgers appeared. It was almost like a

family party. Every one came down in dressing-gown and slippers, and the conversation usually

turned on anything that had happened the evening before; comments on the dress or appearance

of the dinner contingent were exchanged in friendly confidence.

These seven lodgers were Mme. Vauquer’s spoiled children. Among them she distributed, with

astronomical precision, the exact proportion of respect and attention due to the varying amounts

they paid for their board. One single consideration influenced all these human beings thrown

together by chance. The two second-floor lodgers only paid seventy-two francs a month. Such

prices as these are confined to the Faubourg Saint-Marcel and the district between La Bourbe

and the Salpetriere; and, as might be expected, poverty, more or less apparent, weighed upon

them all, Mme. Couture being the sole exception to the rule.

The dreary surroundings were reflected in the costumes of the inmates of the house; all were

alike threadbare. The color of the men’s coats were problematical; such shoes, in more

fashionable quarters, are only to be seen lying in the gutter; the cuffs and collars were worn and

frayed at the edges; every limp article of clothing looked like the ghost of its former self. The

women’s dresses were faded, old-fashioned, dyed and re-dyed; they wore gloves that were

glazed with hard wear, much-mended lace, dingy ruffles, crumpled muslin fichus. So much for

their clothing; but, for the most part, their frames were solid enough; their constitutions had

weathered the storms of life; their cold, hard faces were worn like coins that have been

withdrawn from circulation, but there were greedy teeth behind the withered lips. Dramas

brought to a close or still in progress are foreshadowed by the sight of such actors as these, not

the dramas that are played before the footlights and against a background of painted canvas, but

dumb dramas of life, frost-bound dramas that sere hearts like fire, dramas that do not end with

the actors’ lives.

Mlle. Michonneau, that elderly young lady, screened her weak eyes from the daylight by a soiled

green silk shade with a rim of brass, an object fit to scare away the Angel of Pity himself. Her

shawl, with its scanty, draggled fringe, might have covered a skeleton, so meagre and angular

was the form beneath it. Yet she must have been pretty and shapely once. What corrosive had

destroyed the feminine outlines? Was it trouble, or vice, or greed? Had she loved too well? Had

she been a second-hand clothes dealer, a frequenter of the backstairs of great houses, or had she

been merely a courtesan? Was she expiating the flaunting triumphs of a youth overcrowded with

pleasures by an old age in which she was shunned by every passer-by? Her vacant gaze sent a

chill through you; her shriveled face seemed like a menace. Her voice was like the shrill, thin

note of the grasshopper sounding from the thicket when winter is at hand. She said that she had

nursed an old gentleman, ill of catarrh of the bladder, and left to die by his children, who thought

that he had nothing left. His bequest to her, a life annuity of a thousand francs, was periodically

disputed by his heirs, who mingled slander with their persecutions. In spite of the ravages of

conflicting passions, her face retained some traces of its former fairness and fineness of tissue,

some vestiges of the physical charms of her youth still survived.

M. Poiret was a sort of automaton. He might be seen any day sailing like a gray shadow along

the walks of the Jardin des Plantes, on his head a shabby cap, a cane with an old yellow ivory

handle in the tips of his thin fingers; the outspread skirts of his threadbare overcoat failed to

conceal his meagre figure; his breeches hung loosely on his shrunken limbs; the thin, blue-

stockinged legs trembled like those of a drunken man; there was a notable breach of continuity

between the dingy white waistcoat and crumpled shirt frills and the cravat twisted about a throat

like a turkey gobbler’s; altogether, his appearance set people wondering whether this outlandish

ghost belonged to the audacious race of the sons of Japhet who flutter about on the Boulevard

Italien. What devouring kind of toil could have so shriveled him? What devouring passions had

darkened that bulbous countenance, which would have seemed outrageous as a caricature? What

had he been? Well, perhaps he had been part of the machinery of justice, a clerk in the office to

which the executioner sends in his accounts,—so much for providing black veils for parricides,

so much for sawdust, so much for pulleys and cord for the knife. Or he might have been a

receiver at the door of a public slaughter-house, or a sub-inspector of nuisances. Indeed, the man

appeared to have been one of the beasts of burden in our great social mill; one of those Parisian

Ratons whom their Bertrands do not even know by sight; a pivot in the obscure machinery that

disposes of misery and things unclean; one of those men, in short, at sight of whom we are

prompted to remark that, “After all, we cannot do without them.”

Stately Paris ignores the existence of these faces bleached by moral or physical suffering; but,

then, Paris is in truth an ocean that no line can plumb. You may survey its surface and describe

it; but no matter how numerous and painstaking the toilers in this sea, there will always be lonely

and unexplored regions in its depths, caverns unknown, flowers and pearls and monsters of the

deep overlooked or forgotten by the divers of literature. The Maison Vauquer is one of these

curious monstrosities.

Two, however, of Mme. Vauquer’s boarders formed a striking contrast to the rest. There was a

sickly pallor, such as is often seen in anaemic girls, in Mlle. Victorine Taillefer’s face; and her

unvarying expression of sadness, like her embarrassed manner and pinched look, was in keeping

with the general wretchedness of the establishment in the Rue Nueve-Saint-Genevieve, which

forms a background to this picture; but her face was young, there was youthfulness in her voice

and elasticity in her movements. This young misfortune was not unlike a shrub, newly planted in

an uncongenial soil, where its leaves have already begun to wither. The outlines of her figure,

revealed by her dress of the simplest and cheapest materials, were also youthful. There was the

same kind of charm about her too slender form, her faintly colored face and light-brown hair,

that modern poets find in mediaeval statuettes; and a sweet expression, a look of Christian

resignation in the dark gray eyes. She was pretty by force of contrast; if she had been happy, she

would have been charming. Happiness is the poetry of woman, as the toilette is her tinsel. If the

delightful excitement of a ball had made the pale face glow with color; if the delights of a

luxurious life had brought the color to the wan cheeks that were slightly hollowed already; if

love had put light into the sad eyes, then Victorine might have ranked among the fairest; but she

lacked the two things which create woman a second time—pretty dresses and love-letters.

A book might have been made of her story. Her father was persuaded that he had sufficient

reason for declining to acknowledge her, and allowed her a bare six hundred francs a year; he

had further taken measures to disinherit his daughter, and had converted all his real estate into

personalty, that he might leave it undivided to his son. Victorine’s mother had died broken-

hearted in Mme. Couture’s house; and the latter, who was a near relation, had taken charge of the

little orphan. Unluckily, the widow of the commissary-general to the armies of the Republic had

nothing in the world but her jointure and her widow’s pension, and some day she might be

obliged to leave the helpless, inexperienced girl to the mercy of the world. The good soul,

therefore, took Victorine to mass every Sunday, and to confession once a fortnight, thinking that,

in any case, she would bring up her ward to be devout. She was right; religion offered a solution

of the problem of the young girl’s future. The poor child loved the father who refused to

acknowledge her. Once every year she tried to see him to deliver her mother’s message of

forgiveness, but every year hitherto she had knocked at that door in vain; her father was

inexorable. Her brother, her only means of communication, had not come to see her for four

years, and had sent her no assistance; yet she prayed to God to unseal her father’s eyes and to

soften her brother’s heart, and no accusations mingled with her prayers. Mme. Couture and

Mme. Vauquer exhausted the vocabulary of abuse, and failed to find words that did justice to the

banker’s iniquitous conduct; but while they heaped execrations on the millionaire, Victorine’s

words were as gentle as the moan of the wounded dove, and affection found expression even in

the cry drawn from her by pain.

From “Betrix,” Scenes from a Private Life - Honore de Balzac

II. THE BARON, HIS WIFE, AND SISTER

Early in the month of May, in the year 1836, the period when this scene opens, the family of

Guenic (we follow henceforth the modern spelling) consisted of Monsieur and Madame du

Guenic, Mademoiselle du Guenic the baron’s elder sister, and an only son, aged twenty-one,

named, after an ancient family usage, Gaudebert-Calyste-Louis. The father’s name was

Gaudebert-Calyste-Charles. Only the last name was ever varied. Saint Gaudebert and Saint

Calyste were forever bound to protect the Guenics.

The Baron du Guenic had started from Guerande the moment that La Vendee and Brittany took

arms; he fought through the war with Charette, with Cathelineau, La Rochejaquelein, d’Elbee,

Bonchamps, and the Prince de Loudon. Before starting he had, with a prudence unique in

revolutionary annals, sold his whole property of every kind to his elder and only sister,

Mademoiselle Zephirine du Guenic. After the death of all those heroes of the West, the baron,

preserved by a miracle from ending as they did, refused to submit to Napoleon. He fought on till

1802, when being at last defeated and almost captured, he returned to Guerande, and from

Guerande went to Croisic, whence he crossed to Ireland, faithful to the ancient Breton hatred for

England.

The people of Guerande feigned utter ignorance of the baron’s existence. In the whole course of

twenty years not a single indiscreet word was ever uttered. Mademoiselle du Guenic received the

rents and sent them to her brother by fishermen. Monsieur du Guenic returned to Guerande in

1813, as quietly and simply as if he had merely passed a season at Nantes. During his stay in

Dublin the old Breton, despite his fifty years, had fallen in love with a charming Irish woman,

daughter of one of the noblest and poorest families of that unhappy kingdom. Fanny O’Brien was

then twenty-one years old. The Baron du Guenic came over to France to obtain the documents

necessary for his marriage, returned to Ireland, and, after about ten months (at the beginning of

1814), brought his wife to Guerande, where she gave him Calyste on the very day that Louis

XVIII. landed at Calais,—a circumstance which explains the young man’s final name of Louis.

The old and loyal Breton was now a man of seventy-three; but his long-continued guerilla

warfare with the Republic, his exile, the perils of his five crossings through a turbulent sea in

open boats, had weighed upon his head, and he looked a hundred; therefore, at no period had the

chief of the house of Guenic been more in keeping with the worn-out grandeur of their dwelling,

built in the days when a court reigned at Guerande.

Monsieur du Guenic was a tall, straight, wiry, lean old man. His oval face was lined with

innumerable wrinkles, which formed a net-work over his cheek-bones and above his eyebrows,

giving to his face a resemblance to those choice old men whom Van Ostade, Rembrandt, Mieris,

and Gerard Dow so loved to paint, in pictures which need a microscope to be fully appreciated.

His countenance might be said to be sunken out of sight beneath those innumerable wrinkles,

produced by a life in the open air and by the habit of watching his country in the full light of the

sun from the rising of that luminary to the sinking of it. Nevertheless, to an observer enough

remained of the imperishable forms of the human face which appealed to the soul, even though

the eye could see no more than a lifeless head. The firm outline of the face, the shape of the

brow, the solemnity of the lines, the rigidity of the nose, the form of the bony structure which

wounds alone had slightly altered,—all were signs of intrepidity without calculation, faith

without reserve, obedience without discussion, fidelity without compromise, love without

inconstancy. In him, the Breton granite was made man.

The baron had no longer any teeth. His lips, once red, now violet, and backed by hard gums only

(with which he ate the bread his wife took care to soften by folding it daily in a damp napkin),

drew inward to the mouth with a sort of grin, which gave him an expression both threatening and

proud. His chin seemed to seek his nose; but in that nose, humped in the middle, lay the signs of

his energy and his Breton resistance. His skin, marbled with red blotches appearing through his

wrinkles, showed a powerfully sanguine temperament, fitted to resist fatigue and to preserve

him, as no doubt it did, from apoplexy. The head was crowned with abundant hair, as white as

silver, which fell in curls upon his shoulders. The face, extinguished, as we have said, in part,

lived through the glitter of the black eyes in their brown orbits, casting thence the last flames of a

generous and loyal soul. The eyebrows and lashes had disappeared; the skin, grown hard, could

not unwrinkle. The difficulty of shaving had obliged the old man to let his beard grow, and the

cut of it was fan-shaped. An artist would have admired beyond all else in this old lion of Brittany

with his powerful shoulders and vigorous chest, the splendid hands of the soldier,—hands like

those du Guesclin must have had, large, broad, hairy; hands that once had clasped the sword

never, like Joan of Arc, to relinquish it until the royal standard floated in the cathedral of

Rheims; hands that were often bloody from the thorns and furze of the Bocage; hands which had

pulled an oar in the Marais to surprise the Blues, or in the offing to signal Georges; the hands of

a guerilla, a cannoneer, a common solder, a leader; hands still white though the Bourbons of the

Elder branch were again in exile. Looking at those hands attentively, one might have seen some

recent marks attesting the fact that the Baron had recently joined MADAME in La Vendee. To-

day that fact may be admitted. These hands were a living commentary on the noble motto to

which no Guenic had proved recreant: Fac!

His forehead attracted attention by the golden tones of the temples, contrasting with the brown

tints of the hard and narrow brow, which the falling off of the hair had somewhat broadened,

giving still more majesty to that noble ruin. The countenance—a little material, perhaps, but how

could it be otherwise?—presented, like all the Breton faces grouped about the baron, a certain

savagery, a stolid calm which resembled the impassibility of the Huguenots; something, one

might say, stupid, due perhaps to the utter repose which follows extreme fatigue, in which the

animal nature alone is visible. Thought was rare. It seemed to be an effort; its seat was in the

heart more than in the head; it led to acts rather than ideas. But, examining that grand old man

with sustained observation, one could penetrate the mystery of this strange contradiction to the

spirit of the century. He had faiths, sentiments, inborn so to speak, which allowed him to

dispense with thought. His duty, life had taught him. Institutions and religion thought for him.

He reserved his mind, he and his kind, for action, not dissipating it on useless things which

occupied the minds of other persons. He drew his thought from his heart like his sword from its

scabbard, holding it aloft in his ermined hand, as on his scutcheon, shining with sincerity. That

secret once penetrated, all is clear. We can comprehend the depth of convictions that are not

thoughts, but living principles,—clear, distinct, downright, and as immaculate as the ermine

itself. We understand that sale made to his sister before the war; which provided for all, and

faced all, death, confiscation, exile. The beauty of the character of these two old people (for the

sister lived only for and by the brother) cannot be understood to its full extent by the right of the

selfish morals, the uncertain aims, and the inconstancy of this our epoch. An archangel, charged

with the duty of penetrating to the inmost recesses of their hearts could not have found one

thought of personal interest. In 1814, when the rector of Guerande suggested to the baron that he

should go to Paris and claim his recompense from the triumphant Bourbons, the old sister, so

saving and miserly for the household, cried out:—

“Oh, fy! does my brother need to hold out his hand like a beggar?”

“It would be thought I served a king from interest,” said the old man. “Besides, it is for him to

remember. Poor king! he must be weary indeed of those who harass him. If he gave them all

France in bits, they still would ask.”

This loyal servant, who had spent his life and means on Louis XVIII., received the rank of

colonel, the cross of Saint-Louis, and a stipend of two thousand francs a year.

“The king did remember!” he said when the news reached him.

No one undeceived him. The gift was really made by the Duc de Feltre. But, as an act of

gratitude to the king, the baron sustained a siege at Guerande against the forces of General

Travot. He refused to surrender the fortress, and when it was absolutely necessary to evacuate it

he escaped into the woods with a band of Chouans, who continued armed until the second

restoration of the Bourbons. Guerande still treasures the memory of that siege.

We must admit that the Baron du Guenic was illiterate as a peasant. He could read, write, and do

some little ciphering; he knew the military art and heraldry, but, excepting always his prayer-

book, he had not read three volumes in the course of his life. His clothing, which is not an

insignificant point, was invariably the same; it consisted of stout shoes, ribbed stockings,

breeches of greenish velveteen, a cloth waistcoat, and a loose coat with a collar, from which

hung the cross of Saint-Louis. A noble serenity now reigned upon that face where, for the last

year or so, sleep, the forerunner of death, seemed to be preparing him for rest eternal. This

constant somnolence, becoming daily more and more frequent, did not alarm either his wife, his

blind sister, or his friends, whose medical knowledge was of the slightest. To them these solemn

pauses of a life without reproach, but very weary, were naturally explained: the baron had done

his duty, that was all.

In this ancient mansion the absorbing interests were the fortunes of the dispossessed Elder

branch. The future of the exiled Bourbons, that of the Catholic religion, the influence of political

innovations on Brittany were the exclusive topics of conversation in the baron’s family. There

was but one personal interest mingled with these most absorbing ones: the attachment of all for

the only son, for Calyste, the heir, the sole hope of the great name of the du Guenics.

The old Vendean, the old Chouan, had, some years previously, a return of his own youth in order

to train his son to those manly exercises which were proper for a gentleman liable to be

summoned at any moment to take arms. No sooner was Calyste sixteen years of age than his

father accompanied him to the marshes and the forest, teaching him through the pleasures of the

chase the rudiments of war, preaching by example, indifferent to fatigue, firm in his saddle, sure

of his shot whatever the game might be,—deer, hare, or a bird on the wing,—intrepid in face of

obstacles, bidding his son follow him into danger as though he had ten other sons to take

Calyste’s place.

So, when the Duchesse de Berry landed in France to conquer back the kingdom for her son, the

father judged it right to take his boy to join her, and put in practice the motto of their ancestors.

The baron started in the dead of night, saying no word to his wife, who might perhaps have

weakened him; taking his son under fire as if to a fete, and Gasselin, his only vassal, who

followed him joyfully. The three men of the family were absent for three months without sending

news of their whereabouts to the baroness, who never read the “Quotidienne” without trembling

from line to line, nor to his old blind sister, heroically erect, whose nerve never faltered for an

instance as she heard that paper read. The three guns hanging to the walls had therefore seen

service recently. The baron, who considered the enterprise useless, left the region before the

affair of La Penissiere, or the house of Guenic would probably have ended in that hecatomb.

When, on a stormy night after parting from MADAME, the father, son, and servant returned to

the house in Guerande, they took their friends and the baroness and old Mademoiselle du Guenic

by surprise, although the latter, by the exercise of senses with which the blind are gifted,

recognized the steps of the three men in the little lane leading to the house. The baron looked

round upon the circle of his anxious friends, who were seated beside the little table lighted by the

antique lamp, and said in a tremulous voice, while Gasselin replaced the three guns and the

sabres in their places, these words of feudal simplicity:—

“The barons did not all do their duty.”

Then, having kissed his wife and sister, he sat down in his old arm-chair and ordered supper to

be brought for his son, for Gasselin, and for himself. Gasselin had thrown himself before Calyste

on one occasion, to protect him, and received the cut of a sabre on his shoulder; but so simple a

matter did it seem that even the women scarcely thanked him. The baron and his guests uttered

neither curses nor complaints of their conquerors. Such silence is a trait of Breton character. In

forty years no one ever heard a word of contumely from the baron’s lips about his adversaries. It

was for them to do their duty as he did his. This utter silence is the surest indication of an

unalterable will.

This last effort, the flash of an energy now waning, had caused the present weakness and

somnolence of the old man. The fresh defeat and exile of the Bourbons, as miraculously driven

out as miraculously re-established, were to him a source of bitter sadness.

About six o’clock on the evening of the day on which this history begins, the baron, who,

according to ancient custom, had finished dining by four o’clock, fell asleep as usual while his

wife was reading to him the “Quotidienne.” His head rested against the back of the arm-chair

which stood beside the fireplace on the garden side.

Near this gnarled trunk of an ancient tree, and in front of the fireplace, the baroness, seated on

one of the antique chairs, presented the type of those adorable women who exist in England,

Scotland, or Ireland only. There alone are born those milk-white creatures with golden hair the

curls of which are wound by the hands of angels, for the light of heaven seems to ripple in their

silken spirals swaying to the breeze. Fanny O’Brien was one of those sylphs,—strong in

tenderness, invincible under misfortune, soft as the music of her voice, pure as the azure of her

eyes, of a delicate, refined beauty, blessed with a skin that was silken to the touch and caressing

to the eye, which neither painter’s brush nor written word can picture. Beautiful still at forty-two

years of age, many a man would have thought it happiness to marry her as she looked at the

splendors of that autumn coloring, redundant in flowers and fruit, refreshed and refreshing with

the dews of heaven.

The baroness held the paper in the dimpled hand, the fingers of which curved slightly backward,

their nails cut square like those of an antique statue. Half lying, without ill-grace or affectation,

in her chair, her feet stretched out to warm them, she was dressed in a gown of black velvet, for

the weather was now becoming chilly. The corsage, rising to the throat, moulded the splendid

contour of the shoulders and the rich bosom which the suckling of her son had not deformed. Her

hair was worn in ringlets, after the English fashion, down her cheeks; the rest was simply twisted

to the crown of her head and held there with a tortoise-shell comb. The color, not undecided in

tone as other blond hair, sparkled to the light like a filagree of burnished gold. The baroness

always braided the short locks curling on the nape of her neck—which are a sign of race. This

tiny braid, concealed in the mass of hair always carefully put up, allowed the eye to follow with

delight the undulating line by which her neck was set upon her shoulders. This little detail will

show the care which she gave to her person; it was her pride to rejoice the eyes of the old baron.

What a charming, delicate attention! When you see a woman displaying in her own home the

coquetry which most women spend on a single sentiment, believe me, that woman is as noble a

mother as she is a wife; she is the joy and the flower of the home; she knows her obligations as a

woman; in her soul, in her tenderness, you will find her outward graces; she is doing good in

secret; she worships, she adores without a calculation of return; she loves her fellows, as she

loves God,—for their own sakes. And so one might fancy that the Virgin of paradise, under

whose care she lived, had rewarded the chaste girlhood and the sacred life of the old man’s wife

by surrounding her with a sort of halo which preserved her beauty from the wrongs of time. The

alterations of that beauty Plato would have glorified as the coming of new graces. Her skin, so

milk-white once, had taken the warm and pearly tones which painters adore. Her broad and

finely modelled brow caught lovingly the light which played on its polished surface. Her eyes, of

a turquoise blue, shone with unequalled sweetness; the soft lashes, and the slightly sunken

temples inspired the spectator with I know not what mute melancholy. The nose, which was

aquiline and thin, recalled the royal origin of the high-born woman. The pure lips, finely cut,

wore happy smiles, brought there by loving-kindness inexhaustible. Her teeth were small and

white; she had gained of late a slight embonpoint, but her delicate hips and slender waist were

none the worse for it. The autumn of her beauty presented a few perennial flowers of her

springtide among the richer blooms of summer. Her arms became more nobly rounded, her

lustrous skin took a finer grain; the outlines of her form gained plenitude. Lastly and best of all,

her open countenance, serene and slightly rosy, the purity of her blue eyes, that a look too eager

might have wounded, expressed illimitable sympathy, the tenderness of angels.

At the other chimney-corner, in an arm-chair, the octogenarian sister, like in all points save

clothes to her brother, sat listening to the reading of the newspaper and knitting stockings, a work

for which sight is needless. Both eyes had cataracts; but she obstinately refused to submit to an

operation, in spite of the entreaties of her sister-in-law. The secret reason of that obstinacy was

known to herself only; she declared it was want of courage; but the truth was that she would not

let her brother spend twenty-five louis for her benefit. That sum would have been so much the

less for the good of the household.

These two old persons brought out in fine relief the beauty of the baroness. Mademoiselle

Zephirine, being deprived of sight, was not aware of the changes which eighty years had wrought

in her features. Her pale, hollow face, to which the fixedness of the white and sightless eyes gave

almost the appearance of death, and three or four solitary and projecting teeth made menacing,

was framed by a little hood of brown printed cotton, quilted like a petticoat, trimmed with a

cotton ruche, and tied beneath the chin by strings which were always a little rusty. She wore a

cotillon, or short skirt of coarse cloth, over a quilted petticoat (a positive mattress, in which were

secreted double louis-d’ors), and pockets sewn to a belt which she unfastened every night and

put on every morning like a garment. Her body was encased in the casaquin of Brittany, a

species of spencer made of the same cloth as the cotillon, adorned with a collarette of many

pleats, the washing of which caused the only dispute she ever had with her sister-in-law,—her

habit being to change it only once a week. From the large wadded sleeves of the casaquin issued

two withered but still vigorous arms, at the ends of which flourished her hands, their brownish-

red color making the white arms look like poplar-wood. These hands, hooked or contracted from

the habit of knitting, might be called a stocking-machine incessantly at work; the phenomenon

would have been had they stopped. From time to time Mademoiselle du Guenic took a long

knitting needle which she kept in the bosom of her gown, and passed it between her hood and her

hair to poke or scratch her white locks. A stranger would have laughed to see the careless manner

in which she thrust back the needle without the slightest fear of wounding herself. She was

straight as a steeple. Her erect and imposing carriage might pass for one of those coquetries of

old age which prove that pride is a necessary passion of life. Her smile was gay. She, too, had

done her duty.

As soon as the baroness saw that her husband was asleep she stopped reading. A ray of sunshine,

stretching from one window to the other, divided by a golden band the atmosphere of that old

room and burnished the now black furniture. The light touched the carvings of the ceiling,

danced on the time-worn chests, spread its shining cloth on the old oak table, enlivening the still,

brown room, as Fanny’s voice cast into the heart of her octogenarian blind sister a music as

luminous and as cheerful as that ray of sunlight. Soon the ray took on the ruddy colors which, by

insensible gradations, sank into the melancholy tones of twilight. The baroness also sank into a

deep meditation, one of those total silences which her sister-in-law had noticed for the last two

weeks, trying to explain them to herself, but making no inquiry. The old woman studied the

causes of this unusual pre-occupation, as blind persons, on whose soul sound lingers like a

divining echo, read books in which the pages are black and the letters white. Mademoiselle

Zephirine, to whom the dark hour now meant nothing, continued to knit, and the silence at last

became so deep that the clicking of her knitting-needles was plainly heard.

“You have dropped the paper, sister, but you are not asleep,” said the old woman, slyly.

At this moment Mariotte came in to light the lamp, which she placed on a square table in front of

the fire; then she fetched her distaff, her ball of thread, and a small stool, on which she seated

herself in the recess of a window and began as usual to spin. Gasselin was still busy about the

offices; he looked to the horses of the baron and Calyste, saw that the stable was in order for the

night, and gave the two fine hunting-dogs their daily meal. The joyful barking of the animals was

the last noise that awakened the echoes slumbering among the darksome walls of the ancient

house. The two dogs and the two horses were the only remaining vestiges of the splendors of its

chivalry. An imaginative man seated on the steps of the portico and letting himself fall into the

poesy of the still living images of that dwelling, might have quivered as he heard the baying of

the hounds and the trampling of the neighing horses.

Gasselin was one of those short, thick, squat little Bretons, with black hair and sun-browned

faces, silent, slow, and obstinate as mules, but always following steadily the path marked out for

them. He was forty-two years old, and had been twenty-five years in the household.

Mademoiselle had hired him when he was fifteen, on hearing of the marriage and probable return

of the baron. This retainer considered himself as part of the family; he had played with Calyste,

he loved the horses and dogs of the house, and talked to them and petted them as though they

were his own. He wore a blue linen jacket with little pockets flapping about his hips, waistcoat

and trousers of the same material at all seasons, blue stockings, and stout hob-nailed shoes.

When it was cold or rainy he put on a goat’s-skin, after the fashion of his country.

Mariotte, who was also over forty, was as a woman what Gasselin was as a man. No team could

be better matched,—same complexion, same figure, same little eyes that were lively and black. It

is difficult to understand why Gasselin and Mariotte had never married; possibly it might have

seemed immoral, they were so like brother and sister. Mariotte’s wages were ninety francs a

year; Gasselin’s, three hundred. But thousands of francs offered to them elsewhere would not

have induced either to leave the Guenic household. Both were under the orders of Mademoiselle,

who, from the time of the war in La Vendee to the period of her brother’s return, had ruled the

house. When she learned that the baron was about to bring home a mistress, she had been moved

to great emotion, believing that she must yield the sceptre of the household and abdicate in favor

of the Baronne du Guenic, whose subject she was now compelled to be.

Mademoiselle Zephirine was therefore agreeably surprised to find in Fanny O’Brien a young

woman born to the highest rank, to whom the petty cares of a poor household were extremely

distasteful,—one who, like other fine souls, would far have preferred to eat plain bread rather

than the choicest food if she had to prepare it for herself; a woman capable of accomplishing all

the duties, even the most painful, of humanity, strong under necessary privations, but without

courage for commonplace avocations. When the baron begged his sister in his wife’s name to

continue in charge of the household, the old maid kissed the baroness like a sister; she made a

daughter of her, she adored her, overjoyed to be left in control of the household, which she

managed rigorously on a system of almost inconceivable economy, which was never relaxed

except for some great occasion, such as the lying-in of her sister, and her nourishment, and all

that concerned Calyste, the worshipped son of the whole household.

Though the two servants were accustomed to this stern regime, and no orders need ever have

been given to them, for the interests of their masters were greater in their minds than their

own,—were their own in fact,—Mademoiselle Zephirine insisted on looking after everything.

Her attention being never distracted, she knew, without going up to verify her knowledge, how

large was the heap of nuts in the barn; and how many oats remained in the bin without plunging

her sinewy arm into the depths of it. She carried at the end of a string fastened to the belt of her

casaquin, a boatswain’s whistle, with which she was wont to summon Mariotte by one, and

Gasselin by two notes.

Gasselin’s greatest happiness was to cultivate the garden and produce fine fruits and vegetables.

He had so little work to do that without this occupation he would certainly have felt lost. After he

had groomed his horses in the morning, he polished the floors and cleaned the rooms on the

ground-floor, then he went to his garden, where weed or damaging insect was never seen.

Sometimes Gasselin was observed motionless, bare-headed, under a burning sun, watching for a

field-mouse or the terrible grub of the cockchafer; then, as soon as it was caught, he would rush

with the joy of a child to show his masters the noxious beast that had occupied his mind for a

week. He took pleasure in going to Croisic on fast-days, to purchase a fish to be had for less

money there than at Guerande.

Thus no household was ever more truly one, more united in interests, more bound together than

this noble family sacredly devoted to its duty. Masters and servants seemed made for one

another. For twenty-five years there had been neither trouble nor discord. The only griefs were

the petty ailments of the little boy, the only terrors were caused by the events of 1814 and those

of 1830. If the same things were invariably done at the same hours, if the food was subjected to

the regularity of times and seasons, this monotony, like that of Nature varied only by alterations

of cloud and rain and sunshine, was sustained by the affection existing in the hearts of all,—the

more fruitful, the more beneficent because it emanated from natural causes.

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