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Father Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
page 20 of 375 (05%)
for life, and her authority was recognized among them. Where else in
Paris would they have found wholesome food in sufficient quantity at
the prices she charged them, and rooms which they were at liberty to
make, if not exactly elegant or comfortable, at any rate clean and
healthy? If she had committed some flagrant act of injustice, the
victim would have borne it in silence.

Such a gathering contained, as might have been expected, the elements
out of which a complete society might be constructed. And, as in a
school, as in the world itself, there was among the eighteen men and
women who met round the dinner table a poor creature, despised by all
the others, condemned to be the butt of all their jokes. At the
beginning of Eugene de Rastignac's second twelvemonth, this figure
suddenly started out into bold relief against the background of human
forms and faces among which the law student was yet to live for
another two years to come. This laughing-stock was the retired
vermicelli-merchant, Father Goriot, upon whose face a painter, like
the historian, would have concentrated all the light in his picture.

How had it come about that the boarders regarded him with a
half-malignant contempt? Why did they subject the oldest among their
number to a kind of persecution, in which there was mingled some pity,
but no respect for his misfortunes? Had he brought it on himself by
some eccentricity or absurdity, which is less easily forgiven or
forgotten than more serious defects? The question strikes at the root
of many a social injustice. Perhaps it is only human nature to inflict
suffering on anything that will endure suffering, whether by reason of
its genuine humility, or indifference, or sheer helplessness. Do we not,
one and all, like to feel our strength even at the expense of some one
or of something? The poorest sample of humanity, the street arab, will
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