portation of grain, who had seen his
grasp of the subject, his clear insight into the principles involved,
his appreciation of weak points in the way that the system worked,
would have thought that here was the stuff of which a minister is made.
Patient, active, and persevering, energetic and prompt in action, he
surveyed his business horizon with an eagle eye. Nothing there took him
by surprise; he foresaw all things, knew all that was happening, and
kept his own counsel; he was a diplomatist in his quick comprehension
of a situation; and in the routine of business he was as patient and
plodding as a soldier on the march. But beyond this business horizon he
could not see. He used to spend his hours of leisure on the threshold of
his shop, leaning against the framework of the door. Take him from
his dark little counting-house, and he became once more the rough,
slow-witted workman, a man who cannot understand a piece of reasoning,
who is indifferent to all intellectual pleasures, and falls asleep at
the play, a Parisian Dolibom in short, against whose stupidity other
minds are powerless.

Natures of this kind are nearly all alike; in almost all of them you
will find some hidden depth of sublime affection. Two all-absorbing
affections filled the vermicelli maker's heart to the exclusion of every
other feeling; into them he seemed to put all the forces of his nature,
as he put the whole power of his brain into the corn trade. He had
regarded his wife, the only daughter of a rich farmer of La Brie, with a
devout admiration; his love for her had been boundless. Goriot had
felt the charm of a lovely and sensitive nature, which, in its delicate
strength, was the very opposite of his own. Is there any instinct more
deeply implanted in the heart of man than the pride of protection, a
protection which is constantly exerted for a fragile and defenceless
creature? Join love thereto, the warmth of gratitude that all generous
souls feel for the source of their pleasures, and you have the
explanation of many strange incongruities in human nature.

After seven years of unclouded happiness, Goriot lost his wife. It was
very unfortunate for him. She was beginning to gain an ascendency over
him in other ways; possibly she might have brought that barren soil
under cultivation, she might have widened his ideas and given other
directions to his thoughts. But when she was dead, the instinct of
fatherhood developed in him till it almost beca