shrunken, his cheeks, once so puffed
out by contented bourgeois prosperity, were covered with wrinkles, and
the outlines of the jawbones were distinctly visible; there were deep
furrows in his forehead. In the fourth year of his residence in the Rue
Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve he was no longer like his former self. The hale
vermicelli manufacturer, sixty-two years of age, who had looked scarce
forty, the stout, comfortable, prosperous tradesman, with an almost
bucolic air, and such a brisk demeanor that it did you good to look at
him; the man with something boyish in his smile, had suddenly sunk into
his dotage, and had become a feeble, vacillating septuagenarian.

The keen, bright blue eyes had grown dull, and faded to a steel-gray
color; the red inflamed rims looked as though they had shed tears of
blood. He excited feelings of repulsion in some, and of pity in others.
The young medical students who came to the house noticed the drooping
of his lower lip and the conformation of the facial angle; and, after
teasing him for some time to no purpose, they declared that cretinism
was setting in.

One evening after dinner Mme. Vauquer said half banteringly to him, "So
those daughters of yours don't come to see you any more, eh?" meaning to
imply her doubts as to his paternity; but Father Goriot shrank as if his
hostess had touched him with a sword-point.

"They come sometimes," he said in a tremulous voice.

"Aha! you still see them sometimes?" cried the students. "Bravo, Father
Goriot!"

The old man scarcely seemed to hear the witticisms at his expense that
followed on the words; he had relapsed into the dreamy state of mind
that these superficial observers took for senile torpor, due to his lack
of intelligence. If they had only known, they might have been deeply
interested by the problem of his condition; but few problems were more
obscure. It was easy, of course, to find out whether Goriot had really
been a vermicelli manufacturer; the amount of his fortune was readily
discoverable; but the old people, who were most inquisitive as to his
concerns, never went beyond the limits of the Quarter, and lived in
the lodging-house much as oysters cling to a rock. As for the rest, the
current of life in Paris daily awaited them, and swept them away with
it; so soon as they left the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve, they forgot the
existence of the old man, their butt at dinner. For those narrow souls,
or for careless youth, the misery