king of the bedstead in
the desolate room; a lighted candle stood on either side, and the priest
watched at the foot. Rastignac made inquiries of this latter as to the
expenses of the funeral, and wrote to the Baron de Nucingen and the
Comte de Restaud, entreating both gentlemen to authorize their man of
business to defray the charges of laying their father-in-law in the
grave. He sent Christophe with the letters; then he went to bed, tired
out, and slept.

Next day Bianchon and Rastignac were obliged to take the certificate
to the registrar themselves, and by twelve o'clock the formalities were
completed. Two hours went by, no word came from the Count nor from the
Baron; nobody appeared to act for them, and Rastignac had already been
obliged to pay the priest. Sylvie asked ten francs for sewing the old
man in his winding-sheet and making him ready for the grave, and Eugene
and Bianchon calculated that they had scarcely sufficient to pay for the
funeral, if nothing was forthcoming from the dead man's family. So it
was the medical student who laid him in a pauper's coffin, despatched
from Bianchon's hospital, whence he obtained it at a cheaper rate.

"Let us play those wretches a trick," said he. "Go to the cemetery, buy
a grave for five years at Pere-Lachaise, and arrange with the Church and
the undertaker to have a third-class funeral. If the daughters and
their husbands decline to repay you, you can carve this on the
headstone--'_Here lies M. Goriot, father of the Comtesse de Restaud and
the Baronne de Nucingen, interred at the expense of two students_.'"

Eugene took part of his friend's advice, but only after he had gone
in person first to M. and Mme. de Nucingen, and then to M. and Mme. de
Restaud--a fruitless errand. He went no further than the doorstep in
either house. The servants had received strict orders to admit no one.

"Monsieur and Madame can see no visitors. They have just lost their
father, and are in deep grief over their loss."

Eugene's Parisian experience told him that it was idle to press the
point. Something clutched strangely at his heart when he saw that it was
impossible to reach Delphine.

"Sell some of your ornaments," he wrote hastily in the porter's room,
"so that your father may be decently laid in his last resting-place."

He sealed the note, and begged the porter to give it to Therese for her
mistress; but the man took it to the Baron de Nucingen, who flung the
note into the fire.