s were old enough to be married, they were left free to
choose for themselves. Each had half her father's fortune as her dowry;
and when the Comte de Restaud came to woo Anastasie for her beauty,
her social aspirations led her to leave her father's house for a more
exalted sphere. Delphine wished for money; she married Nucingen, a
banker of German extraction, who became a Baron of the Holy Roman
Empire. Goriot remained a vermicelli maker as before. His daughters
and his sons-in-law began to demur; they did not like to see him still
engaged in trade, though his whole life was bound up with his business.
For five years he stood out against their entreaties, then he yielded,
and consented to retire on the amount realized by the sale of his
business and the savings of the last few years. It was this capital
that Mme. Vauquer, in the early days of his residence with her, had
calculated would bring in eight or ten thousand livres in a year. He had
taken refuge in her lodging-house, driven there by despair when he knew
that his daughters were compelled by their husbands not only to refuse
to receive him as an inmate in their houses, but even to see him no more
except in private.

This was all the information which Rastignac gained from a M. Muret
who had purchased Goriot's business, information which confirmed
the Duchesse de Langeais' suppositions, and herewith the preliminary
explanation of this obscure but terrible Parisian tragedy comes to an
end.

Towards the end of the first week in December Rastignac received two
letters--one from his mother, and one from his eldest sister. His heart
beat fast, half with happiness, half with fear, at the sight of the
familiar handwriting. Those two little scraps of paper contained life
or death for his hopes. But while he felt a shiver of dread as he
remembered their dire poverty at home, he knew their love for him so
well that he could not help fearing that he was draining their very
life-blood. His mother's letter ran as follows:--

"MY DEAR CHILD,--I am sending you the money that you asked for.
Make a good use of it. Even to save your life I could not raise so
large a sum a second time without your father's knowledge, and
there would be trouble about it. We should be obliged to mortgage
the land. It is impossible to judge of the merits of schemes of
which I am ignorant; but what sort of schemes can they be, that
you should fear to tell me about them? Volumes of expl