ensations, that only some unimaginable and
well-neigh impossible woe could produce any lasting impression there.
Now and again there are tragedies so awful and so grand by reason of the
complication of virtues and vices that bring them about, that egotism
and selfishness are forced to pause and are moved to pity; but the
impression that they receive is like a luscious fruit, soon consumed.
Civilization, like the car of Juggernaut, is scarcely stayed perceptibly
in its progress by a heart less easy to break than the others that lie
in its course; this also is broken, and Civilization continues on her
course triumphant. And you, too, will do the like; you who with this
book in your white hand will sink back among the cushions of your
armchair, and say to yourself, "Perhaps this may amuse me." You will
read the story of Father Goriot's secret woes, and, dining thereafter
with an unspoiled appetite, will lay the blame of your insensibility
upon the writer, and accuse him of exaggeration, of writing romances.
Ah! once for all, this drama is neither a fiction nor a romance! _All is
true_,--so true, that every one can discern the elements of the tragedy
in his own house, perhaps in his own heart.

The lodging-house is Mme. Vauquer's own property. It is still standing
in the lower end of the Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve, just where the road
slopes so sharply down to the Rue de l'Arbalete, that wheeled traffic
seldom passes that way, because it is so stony and steep. This position
is sufficient to account for the silence prevalent in the streets shut
in between the dome of the Pantheon and the dome of the Val-de-Grace,
two conspicuous public buildings which give a yellowish tone to the
landscape and darken the whole district that lies beneath the shadow of
their leaden-hued cupolas.

In that district the pavements are clean and dry, there is neither mud
nor water in the gutters, grass grows in the chinks of the walls. The
most heedless passer-by feels the depressing influences of a place where
the sound of wheels creates a sensation; there is a grim look about the
houses, a suggestion of a jail about those high garden walls. A Parisian
straying into a suburb apparently composed of lodging-houses and public
institutions would see poverty and dullness, old age lying down to die,
and joyous youth condemned to drudgery. It is the ugliest quarter of
Paris, and, it may be added, the least known. But, before all things,
the Rue Nueve-Sa