" said Bianchon.

"What does he go on living for?" said Sylvie.

"To suffer," answered Rastignac.

Bianchon made a sign to his friend to follow his example, knelt down and
pressed his arms under the sick man, and Rastignac on the other side did
the same, so that Sylvie, standing in readiness, might draw the sheet
from beneath and replace it with the one that she had brought. Those
tears, no doubt, had misled Goriot; for he gathered up all his remaining
strength in a last effort, stretched out his hands, groped for the
students' heads, and as his fingers caught convulsively at their hair,
they heard a faint whisper:

"Ah! my angels!"

Two words, two inarticulate murmurs, shaped into words by the soul which
fled forth with them as they left his lips.

"Poor dear!" cried Sylvie, melted by that exclamation; the expression of
the great love raised for the last time to a sublime height by that most
ghastly and involuntary of lies.

The father's last breath must have been a sigh of joy, and in that sigh
his whole life was summed up; he was cheated even at the last. They laid
Father Goriot upon his wretched bed with reverent hands. Thenceforward
there was no expression on his face, only the painful traces of the
struggle between life and death that was going on in the machine; for
that kind of cerebral consciousness that distinguishes between pleasure
and pain in a human being was extinguished; it was only a question of
time--and the mechanism itself would be destroyed.

"He will lie like this for several hours, and die so quietly at last,
that we shall not know when he goes; there will be no rattle in the
throat. The brain must be completely suffused."

As he spoke there was a footstep on the staircase, and a young woman
hastened up, panting for breath.

"She has come too late," said Rastignac.

But it was not Delphine; it was Therese, her waiting-woman, who stood in
the doorway.

"Monsieur Eugene," she said, "monsieur and madame have had a terrible
scene about some money that Madame (poor thing!) wanted for her father.
She fainted, and the doctor came, and she had to be bled, calling
out all the while, 'My father is dying; I want to see papa!' It was
heartbreaking to hear her----"

"That will do, Therese. If she came now, it would be trouble thrown
away. M. Goriot cannot recognize any one now."

"Poor, dear gentleman, is he as bad at that?" said Therese.

"You don't want me now, I must go and look after my