《高老头（英文）》青少年励志教育丛书.pdf

Father Goriot
by Honore de Balzac
Translated by Ellen Marriage
To the great and illustrious Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, a token
of admiration for his works and genius.
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
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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 o watered by streams of
black mud, a vale of sorrows which are real and joys too often
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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