terrible distress. Her lover has
threatened to commit suicide unless he can meet a certain bill, and to
save him she has pledged certain diamonds which were heirlooms in her
husband's family. Her husband has discovered the whole transaction,
and, though not making an open scandal, imposes some severe conditions
upon her future. Old Goriot is raving against the brutality of her
husband, when Regan adds that there is still a sum to be paid, without
which her lover, to whom she has sacrificed everything, will be ruined.
Now old Goriot had employed just this sum--all but the very last
fragment of his fortune--in the service of Goneril. A desperate quarrel
instantly takes place between the two fine ladies over this last scrap
of their father's property. They are fast degenerating into Parisian
Billingsgate, when Goriot succeeds in obtaining silence and proposes to
strip himself of his last penny. Even the sisters hesitate at such an
impiety, and Rastignac enters with some apology for listening, and hands
over to the countess a certain bill of exchange for a sum which he
professes himself to owe to Goriot, and which will just save her lover.
She accepts the paper, but vehemently denounces her sister for having,
as she supposes, allowed Rastignac to listen to their hideous
revelations, and retires in a fury, whilst the father faints away. He
recovers to express his forgiveness, and at this moment the countess
returns, ostensibly to throw herself on her knees and beg her father's
pardon. She apologises to her sister, and a general reconciliation takes
place. But before she has again left the room she has obtained her
father's endorsement to Rastignac's bill. Even her most genuine fury had
left coolness enough for calculation, and her burst of apparent
tenderness was a skilful bit of comedy for squeezing one more drop of
blood from her father and victim. That is a genuine stroke of Balzac.

Hideous as the performance appears when coolly stated, it must be
admitted that the ladies have got into such terrible perplexities from
tampering with the seventh commandment, that there is some excuse for
their breaking the fifth. Whether such an accumulation of horrors is a
legitimate process in art, and whether a healthy imagination would like
to dwell upon such loathsome social sores, is another question. The
comparison suggested with 'King Lear' may illustrate the point. In
Balzac all the subordinate details which Shakespeare throws in w