The years passed, and with the gentleness of a broken spirit, beaten down to the docility of misery, Goriot curtailed his personal expenses, and again removed his lodgings; this time to the third floor.  His dress turned shabbier; with each ascending grade his diamonds, gold snuff-box, and jewels disappeared.  He grew thinner in person; his face, which had once the beaming roundness of a well-to-do middle-class gentleman, became furrowed with wrinkles.  Lines appeared in his forehead, his jaws grew gaunt and sharp; and at the end of the fourth year he bore no longer the likeness of his former self.  He was now a wan, worn-out septuagenarian—­stupid, vacillating.

Eugene de Rastignac had ambitions, not only to win distinction as a lawyer, but also to play a part in the aristocratic society of Paris.  He observed the influence which women exert upon society; and at his suggestion his aunt, Madame de Marcillac, who lived with his father in the old family chateau near Angouleme, and who had been at court in the days before the French Revolution, wrote to one of her great relatives, the Viscomtesse de Beauseant, one of the queens of Parisian society, asking her to give kindly recognition to her nephew.  On the strength of that letter Eugene was invited to a ball at the mansion of the viscomtesse in the Faubourg Saint-Germain.  The viscomtesse became interested in him, especially as she was suffering from the desertion of the Marquis d’Ajuda-Pinto, a Portuguese nobleman who had been long her lover, and stood sponsor for him in society.  At the Faubourg, Eugene met the Duchesse de Langeais, from whom he learned the history of Old Goriot.

“During the Revolution,” said the duchesse, “Goriot was a flour and vermicelli merchant, and, being president of his section, was behind the scenes.  When a great scarcity of food was at hand he made his fortune by selling his goods for ten times what they cost him.  He had but one passion; he loved his daughters, and by endowing each of them with a dot of eight hundred thousand francs, he married the eldest, Anastasie, to the Count de Restaud, and the youngest, Delphine, to the Baron de Nucingen, a rich German financier.  During the Empire, his daughters sometimes asked their father to visit them; but after the Restoration the old man became an annoyance to his sons-in-law.  He saw that his daughters were ashamed of him; he made the sacrifice which only a father can, and banished himself from their homes.  There is,” continued the duchesse, “something in these Goriot sisters even more shocking than their neglect of their father, for whose death they wish.  I mean their rivalry to each other.  Restaud is of ancient family; his wife has been adopted by his relatives and presented at court.  But the rich sister, the beautiful Madame Delphine de Nucingen, is dying with envy, the victim of jealousy.  She is a hundred leagues lower in society than her sister.  They renounce each other as they both renounced their