deeply interested by the problem of his condition; but few problems
were more obscure. It was easy, of course, to find out whether Goriot
had really been a vermicelli manufacturer; the amount of his fortune
was readily discoverable; but the old people, who were most
inquisitive as to his concerns, never went beyond the limits of the
Quarter, and lived in the lodging-house much as oysters cling to a
rock. 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. As for the
creatures whom he called his daughters, all Mme. Vauquer's boarders
were of her opinion. With the faculty for severe logic sedulously
cultivated by elderly women during long evenings of gossip till they
can always find an hypothesis to fit all circumstances, she was wont
to reason thus:

"If Father Goriot had daughters of his own as rich as those ladies who
came here seemed to be, he would not be lodging in my house, on the
third floor, at forty-five francs a month; and he would not go about
dressed like a poor man."

No objection could be raised to these inferences. So by the end of the
month of November 1819, at the time when the curtain rises on this
drama, every one in the house had come to have a very decided opinion
as to the poor old man. He had never had either wife or daughter;
excesses had reduced him to this sluggish condition; he was a sort of
human mollusk who should be classed among the capulidoe, so one of the
dinner contingent, an _employe_ at the Museum, who had a pretty wit of