The worthy woman took Victorine to Mass every Sunday and to Confession once a fortnight, to make her pious, if nothing else. With good reason. Her religious fervour gave the disowned child some hope for the future. She loved her father and tried, every year, to deliver in person her mother’s letter of forgiveness to him; but every year without fail she found the door of her father’s house closed to her. Her brother, her only possible intermediary, hadn’t once come to visit her in four years and sent her no assistance. She implored God to open her father’s eyes, to soften her brother’s heart, and prayed for both without condemning either. As far as Madame Couture and Madame Vauquer were concerned, there weren’t enough words in the dictionary of insults to describe such barbaric conduct. Whenever they spoke ill of the infamous millionaire, Victorine murmured words as gentle as the call of a wounded dove whose cry of pain still expresses love.

Eugène de Rastignac’s looks were typically southern: pale complexion, black hair, blue eyes. His bearing, his manners, his unfailing poise, all indicated that he had been born into a noble family, where every effort had been made to educate him in traditions of good taste. Although he was careful with his coats, although on a normal day you would find him still wearing out last year’s clothes, nonetheless, from time to time he was able to go out dressed like any fashionable young gentleman. Most days he wore an old frock-coat, a shabby waistcoat, the limp, sorry-looking, badly knotted black tie favoured by students, trousers in keeping with the rest and resoled boots.

Vautrin, the forty-year-old man with dyed side-whiskers, slotted in somewhere between these two characters and the other boarders. He was one of those men people call ‘the life and soul!’. He had broad shoulders, a powerful chest, bulging muscles and thick, square hands marked with distinctive growths of tufty, flame-red hair between the finger joints. His face, lined with premature wrinkles, showed signs of an intransigence which belied his accommodating and sociable ways. His bass-baritone voice, as booming as his hearty laugh, was far from displeasing. He was obliging and cheerful. If a lock was playing up, he would dismantle it, get it working, oil it, file it and put it back together again in an instant, saying, ‘I know a thing or two about that.’ Indeed, he knew a thing or two about everything: ships, the sea, France, foreign parts, business, men, current affairs, laws, grand houses and prisons. If someone had a fit of the grumbles, he offered them his services on the spot. He had on several occasions lent money to Madame Vauquer and some of her boarders; but despite his good-natured manner, those in his debt would have died rather than fail to return what they owed him, due to a certain piercing and steely look25 he had, which struck fear into the heart. His skill at aiming a stream of saliva hinted at unshakeable sang-froid, suggesting that he would stop at nothing, not even a crime, to get himself out of a tight situation. His eyes seemed to penetrate right to the heart of all matters, all consciences, all feelings, with the severity of a judge. He usually went out after déjeuner, coming back for dinner, then would disappear for the entire evening and return towards midnight, letting himself in with a master key which Madame Vauquer had let him have. He was the only one to enjoy this privilege. But then, he was on the best of terms with the widow, whom he would seize around the waist, calling her ‘Ma’, a baffling piece of flattery. The old bird still believed this feat to be within the reach of any man, but only Vautrin had long enough arms to squeeze her bulky circumference. One typically extravagant gesture of his was to pay fifteen francs a month for the gloria26 he took at dessert. Had any of the boarders been less superficial – the young caught up in the whirlwind of Parisian life, the old indifferent to anything which did not affect them directly – they might have looked beyond the ambiguous impression that Vautrin made on them. He knew or guessed the business of all those around him, while not one of them was able to read either his thoughts or his actions. Although he might cast his apparent conviviality and jollity, his constant willingness to oblige, as a barrier between himself and the others, he frequently revealed glimpses of the fearsome depths of his personality. Often, a flash of wit worthy of Juvenal27 – showing that he revelled in scoffing at the law, lashing out at high society, exposing its fecklessness – suggested that he had some score to settle with society and that there was some carefully buried mystery in his life.

Attracted, perhaps without realizing it, by the strength of the one and the beauty of the other, Mademoiselle Taillefer divided her furtive glances, her secret thoughts, between the forty-year-old man and the young student; but neither appeared to show any interest in her, even though, from one day to the next, chance might improve her lot and make her a wealthy match.