wo sets of rooms on the second floor were respectively occupied by
an old man named Poiret and a man of forty or thereabouts, the wearer
of a black wig and dyed whiskers, who gave out that he was a retired
merchant, and was addressed as M. Vautrin. Two of the four rooms on
the third floor were also let--one to an elderly spinster, a Mlle.
Michonneau, and the other to a retired manufacturer of vermicelli,
Italian paste and starch, who allowed the others to address him as
"Father Goriot." The remaining rooms were allotted to various birds of
passage, to impecunious students, who like "Father Goriot" and Mlle.
Michonneau, could only muster forty-five francs a month to pay for their
board and lodging. Mme. Vauquer had little desire for lodgers of this
sort; they ate too much bread, and she only took them in default of
better.

At that time one of the rooms was tenanted by a law student, a young man
from the neighborhood of Angouleme, one of a large family who pinched
and starved themselves to spare twelve hundred francs a year for him.
Misfortune had accustomed Eugene de Rastignac, for that was his name, to
work. He belonged to the number of young men who know as children that
their parents' hopes are centered on them, and deliberately prepare
themselves for a great career, subordinating their studies from the
first to this end, carefully watching the indications of the course of
events, calculating the probable turn that affairs will take, that they
may be the first to profit by them. But for his observant curiosity, and
the skill with which he managed to introduce himself into the salons
of Paris, this story would not have been colored by the tones of
truth which it certainly owes to him, for they are entirely due to his
penetrating sagacity and desire to fathom the mysteries of an appalling
condition of things, which was concealed as carefully by the victim as
by those who had brought it to pass.

Above the third story there was a garret where the linen was hung to
dry, and a couple of attics. Christophe, the man-of-all-work, slept in
one, and Sylvie, the stout cook, in the other. Beside the seven inmates
thus enumerated, taking one year with another, some eight law or medical
students dined in the house, as well as two or three regular comers who
lived in the neighborhood. There were usually eighteen people at dinner,
and there was room, if need be, for twenty at Mme. Vauquer's table; at
breakfast, however, only the se