they are laughing. I have no troubles but theirs.
When you, too, are a father, and you hear your children's little voices,
you will say to yourself, 'That has all come from me.' You will feel
that those little ones are akin to every drop in your veins, that they
are the very flower of your life (and what else are they?); you will
cleave so closely to them that you seem to feel every movement that they
make. Everywhere I hear their voices sounding in my ears. If they are
sad, the look in their eyes freezes my blood. Some day you will find
out that there is far more happiness in another's happiness than in your
own. It is something that I cannot explain, something within that sends
a glow of warmth all through you. In short, I live my life three times
over. Shall I tell you something funny? Well, then, since I have been
a father, I have come to understand God. He is everywhere in the world,
because the whole world comes from Him. And it is just the same with my
children, monsieur. Only, I love my daughters better than God loves
the world, for the world is not so beautiful as God Himself is, but my
children are more beautiful than I am. Their lives are so bound up with
mine that I felt somehow that you would see them this evening. Great
Heaven! If any man would make my little Delphine as happy as a wife is
when she is loved, I would black his boots and run on his errands. That
miserable M. de Marsay is a cur; I know all about him from her maid. A
longing to wring his neck comes over me now and then. He does not love
her! does not love a pearl of a woman, with a voice like a nightingale
and shaped like a model. Where can her eyes have been when she married
that great lump of an Alsatian? They ought both of them to have married
young men, good-looking and good-tempered--but, after all, they had
their own way."

Father Goriot was sublime. Eugene had never yet seen his face light
up as it did now with the passionate fervor of a father's love. It is
worthy of remark that strong feeling has a very subtle and pervasive
power; the roughest nature, in the endeavor to express a deep and
sincere affection, communicates to others the influence that has put
resonance into the voice, and eloquence into every gesture, wrought a
change in the very features of the speaker; for under the inspiration
of passion the stupidest human being attains to the highest eloquence of
ideas, if not of language, and seems to move in some sphere of light.