r a word just then.

"Yes, Monsieur Eugene," said Christophe, "he was a good and worthy man,
who never said one word louder than another; he never did any one any
harm, and gave nobody any trouble."

The two priests, the chorister, and the beadle came, and said and did
as much as could be expected for seventy francs in an age when religion
cannot afford to say prayers for nothing.

The ecclesiatics chanted a psalm, the _Libera nos_ and the _De
profundis_. The whole service lasted about twenty minutes. There was but
one mourning coach, which the priest and chorister agreed to share with
Eugene and Christophe.

"There is no one else to follow us," remarked the priest, "so we may as
well go quickly, and so save time; it is half-past five."

But just as the coffin was put in the hearse, two empty carriages, with
the armorial bearings of the Comte de Restaud and the Baron de Nucingen,
arrived and followed in the procession to Pere-Lachaise. At six o'clock
Goriot's coffin was lowered into the grave, his daughters' servants
standing round the while. The ecclesiastic recited the short prayer that
the students could afford to pay for, and then both priest and lackeys
disappeared at once. The two grave diggers flung in several spadefuls of
earth, and then stopped and asked Rastignac for their fee. Eugene
felt in vain in his pocket, and was obliged to borrow five francs of
Christophe. This thing, so trifling in itself, gave Rastignac a terrible
pang of distress. It was growing dusk, the damp twilight fretted his
nerves; he gazed down into the grave and the tears he shed were drawn
from him by the sacred emotion, a single-hearted sorrow. When such tears
fall on earth, their radiance reaches heaven. And with that tear that
fell on Father Goriot's grave, Eugene Rastignac's youth ended. He folded
his arms and gazed at the clouded sky; and Christophe, after a glance at
him, turned and went--Rastignac was left alone.

He went a few paces further, to the highest point of the cemetery, and
looked out over Paris and the windings of the Seine; the lamps were
beginning to shine on either side of the river. His eyes turned almost
eagerly to the space between the column of the Place Vendome and the
cupola of the Invalides; there lay the shining world that he had wished
to reach. He glanced over that humming hive, seeming to draw a foretaste
of its honey, and said magniloquently:

"Henceforth there is war between us."

And by way of th