appears at its best when at seven in the morning Madame Vauquer, preceded by her cat, enters it from her sleeping chamber.  She wears a tulle cap, under which hangs awry a front of false hair; her gaping slippers flop as she walks across the room.  Her features are oldish and flabby; from their midst springs a nose like the beak of a parrot.  Her small fat hands, her person plump as a church rat, her bust too full and tremulous, are all in harmony with the room.  About fifty years of age, Madame Vauquer looks as most women do who say that they have had misfortunes.

At the date when this story opens there were seven boarders in the house.  The first floor contained the two best suites of rooms.  Madame Vauquer occupied the small, and the other was let to Madame Couture, the widow of a paymaster in the army of the French Republic.  She had with her a very young girl, named Victorine Taillefer.  On the second floor, one apartment was tenanted by an old gentleman named Poiret; the other by a man of about forty years of age, who wore a black wig, dyed his whiskers, gave out that he was a retired merchant, and called himself Monsieur Vautrin.  The third story was divided into four single rooms, of which one was occupied by an old maid named Mademoiselle Michonneau, and another by an aged manufacturer of vermicelli, who allowed himself to be called “Old Goriot.”  The two remaining rooms were allotted to a medical student known as Bianchon, and to a law student named Eugene de Rastignac.  Above the third story were a loft where linen was dried, and two attic rooms, in one of which slept the man of all work, Christophe, and in the other the fat cook, Sylvie.

The desolate aspect of the interior of the establishment repeated itself in the shabby attire of the boarders.  Mademoiselle Michonneau protected her weak eyes with a shabby green silk shade mounted on brass wire, which would have scared the Angel of Pity.  Although the play of passions had ravished her features, she retained certain traces of a fine complexion, which suggested that the figure conserved some fragments of beauty.  Poiret was a human automaton, who had earned a pension by mechanical labour as a government functionary.

Mademoiselle Victorine Taillefer was of a sickly paleness, like a girl in feeble health; but her grey-black eyes expressed the sweetness and resignation of a Christian.  Her dress, simple and cheap, betrayed her youthful form.  Happy, she might have been beautiful, for happiness imparts a poetic charm to women, as dress is the artifice of it.  If love had ever given sparkle to her eyes, Victorine would have been able to hold her own with the fairest of her compeers.  Her father believed he had reason to doubt his paternity, though she loved him with passionate tenderness; and after making her a yearly allowance of six hundred francs, he disinherited her in favour of his only son, who was to be the sole successor to his millions.  Madame Couture was a distant relation of Victorine’s mother, who had died in her arms, and she had brought up the orphan as her own daughter in a strictly pious fashion, taking her with rigid regularity to mass and confession.