It will be enough to say here, by way of warning to the reader, that the experiment of rendering the French of Balzac into its fair English equivalent still remains to be tried” (My Miscellanies, in The Works of Wilkie Collins, vol. 20 [New York: P. F. Collier, 1899]).
Père Goriot
TO THE GREAT AND ILLUSTRIOUS
GEOFFROY SAINT-HILAIRE,a
A TOKEN OF ADMIRATION
FOR HIS WORKS AND GENIUS.
—De Balzac
Balzac’s Second Preface to Père Goriot
Since its reprint in book form, which, according to bookstore logic, constitutes a second edition, Père Goriot has become the object of imperial censorship by His Majesty The Newspaper, that nineteenth-century autocrat who lords over kings, who counsels them, makes them or breaks them; and who, from time to time, is bound to keep watch over morality since he did away with the religion of the State. The author was fully aware that it was Père Goriot’s destiny to suffer during his literary life just as he suffered in his real life. Poor man! His daughters did not even want to acknowledge him because he had lost his fortune ; and the broadsheets also disowned him under the pretext that he was immoral. How could an author not try to rid himself of the San Benitob in which the holy or cursed inquisition of journalism cloaks him while throwing the word “immorality” in his face? If the scenes created by the author were false, the critics would have blamed him for them, saying that he had slandered modem society; if the critics hold these scenes to be true, then it is not the author’s work that is immoral. Père Goriot has not been sufficiently understood—even though the author took the trouble to explain how this man was revolting against the social laws, through ignorance and feeling, just as Vautrin revolts through his unknown power and by the instinct of his character. The author had a good laugh upon seeing some persons who, compelled to understand what they were criticizing, claimed that Père Goriot had decent sensibilities—Goriot, that Illinois of flour, that Huron of grain markets.c Why didn’t they reproach him for not knowing Voltaire or Rousseau, for not being aware of the salon manners or the French language? Père Goriot is like the murderer’s dog who licks the hand of his master when it drips with blood; he doesn’t question, he doesn’t judge, he loves. Père Goriot would wax, as he tells us, Rastignac’s boots in order to get closer to his daughter. He wants to go and hold up the bank when his daughter needs money, and yet would he not be angry with his sons-in-law if they didn’t make his daughters happy? He loves Rastignac because his daughter loves him. Let each of us look around, and be frank with himself, how many Goriots in skirts would we see? Now, Père Goriot’s feelings imply maternity. But these explanations are almost superfluous. Those who decry this work would justify it admirably if they had done it themselves! Moreover, the author is not deliberately moral or immoral, to use the false terms that have been employed. The general plan that links together his works—and that one of his friends, M. Félix Davin,d has recently described—obliges him to depict everything: Père Goriot and Marana (Les Marana), Bartholoméo di Piombo (La Vendetta) and the widow Crochard (Une double famille) , the Marquis de Léganès (El Verdugo) and Cambremer ( Un drame au bord de la mer), Ferragus (Histoire des Treize) and M. de Fontaine (Le Bal de Sceaux), and finally to grasp paternity in all the folds of his heart, to paint it in its entirety, just as he tries to represent human feelings, social crises, good and evil, the whole hotchpotch of civilization.
If some papers assailed the author, others have defended him; living in solitude, preoccupied with his works, he has not been able to thank the persons to whom he is all the more indebted since they are comrades who were entitled, by the rights of talent and longstanding friendship, to berate him, but he thanks them collectively for their useful help.
People in love with morals, who took seriously the author’s promise in a previous preface that he would portray a completely virtuous woman, will learn perhaps with satisfaction that the tableau is in the varnishing stage at this moment, that the frame is being bronzed, and lastly that, without metaphor, this difficult work, entitled Le Lys dans la vallée will soon appear in one of our serials.
Meudon, May 1, 1835.
CHAPTER 1
A Middle-Class Lodging-House
Mme. Vauquer (née de Conflans) is an elderly person, who for the past forty years has kept a lodging-house in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, e in the district that lies between the Latin Quarter and the Faubourg SaintMarcel. 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 of joys too often hollow; but this audience is so accustomed to terrible sensations, that only some unimaginable and well-nigh 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 Père 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 truef—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 at the lower end of the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve, just where the road slopes so sharply down to the Rue de I’Arbalète, 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 Panthéon and the dome of the Val-de-Grâce, 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.
1 comment