no one but her mother and father, as we had no
thought that was not for her; by to-morrow she will have become a
hostile stranger. The tragedy is always going on under our eyes. On the
one hand you see a father who has sacrificed himself to his son, and
his daughter-in-law shows him the last degree of insolence. On the other
hand, it is the son-in-law who turns his wife's mother out of the house.
I sometimes hear it said that there is nothing dramatic about society in
these days; but the Drama of the Son-in-law is appalling, to say nothing
of our marriages, which have come to be very poor farces. I can explain
how it all came about in the old vermicelli maker's case. I think I
recollect that Foriot----"

"Goriot, madame."

"Yes, that Moriot was once President of his Section during the
Revolution. He was in the secret of the famous scarcity of grain, and
laid the foundation of his fortune in those days by selling flour for
ten times its cost. He had as much flour as he wanted. My grandmother's
steward sold him immense quantities. No doubt Noriot shared the plunder
with the Committee of Public Salvation, as that sort of person always
did. I recollect the steward telling my grandmother that she might live
at Grandvilliers in complete security, because her corn was as good as
a certificate of civism. Well, then, this Loriot, who sold corn to
those butchers, has never had but one passion, they say--he idolizes his
daughters. He settled one of them under Restaud's roof, and grafted the
other into the Nucingen family tree, the Baron de Nucingen being a rich
banker who had turned Royalist. You can quite understand that so long as
Bonaparte was Emperor, the two sons-in-law could manage to put up with
the old Ninety-three; but after the restoration of the Bourbons, M. de
Restaud felt bored by the old man's society, and the banker was still
more tired of it. His daughters were still fond of him; they wanted
'to keep the goat and the cabbage,' so they used to see Joriot whenever
there was no one there, under pretence of affection. 'Come to-day, papa,
we shall have you all to ourselves, and that will be much nicer!'
and all that sort of thing. As for me, dear, I believe that love has
second-sight: poor Ninety-three; his heart must have bled. He saw that
his daughters were ashamed of him, that if they loved their husbands
his visits must make mischief. So he immolated himself. He made the
sacrifice because he was a father; he went i