“Tell them that I am not very well,” said Old Goriot; “that I should like to see them, to kiss them before I die.”

By and by, when the messenger had gone, the old man said:  “I don’t want to die.  To die, my good Eugene, is—­not to see them there, where I am going.  How lonely I shall be!  Hell, to a father, is to be without his children.  Tell me, if I go to heaven, can I come back in spirit and hover near them?  You saw them at the ball; they did not know that I was ill, did they?”

On the return of the messenger, Old Goriot was told that both his daughters refused to come and see him.  Delphine was too tired and sleepy; Anastasie was discussing with her husband the future disposition of her marriage portion.  Then alternately Goriot blamed his daughters and pardoned their unfilial and selfish behaviour.

“My daughters were my vice—­my mistresses.  Oh, they will come!  Come, my darlings!  A kiss, a last kiss, the viaticum of your father!  I am justly punished; my children were good, and I have spoiled them; on my head be their sins.  I alone am guilty; but guilty through love.”  Eugene tried to soothe the old man by saying that he would go himself to fetch his daughters; but Goriot kept muttering in his semi-delirium.  “Here, Nasie! here Delphine, come to your father who has been so good to you, and who is dying!  Are they coming?  No?  Am I to die like a dog?  This is my reward; forsaken, abandoned!  They are wicked; they are criminal.  I hate them.  I will rise from my coffin to curse them.  Oh, this is horrible!  Ah, it is my sons-in-law who keep them away from me!”

“My good Old Goriot,” said Eugene, “be calm.”

“Not to see them—­it is the agony of death!”

“You shall see them.”

“Ah! my angels!”

And with these feeble words, Old Goriot sank back on the pillow and breathed his last.

Anastasie did come to the death-chamber, but too late.  “I could not escape soon enough,” she said to Rastignac.  The student smiled sadly, and Madame de Restaud took her father’s hand and kissed it, saying, “Forgive me, my father.”

Goriot had a pauper’s funeral.  The aristocratic sons-in-law refused to pay the expenses of the burial.  These were scraped together with difficulty by Eugene de Rastignac, the law student, and Bianchon, the medical student, who had nursed him with loving tenderness to the last.  At the graveside in Pere Lachaise, Eugene and Christophe were the only mourners; Bianchon’s duties detained him at the hospital.  When the body of Old Goriot was lowered into the earth, the clergy recited a short prayer—­all that could be given for the student’s money.  The pall of night was falling; the mist struck a chill on Eugene’s nerves, and when he took a last glance at the shell containing all that was mortal of his old friend, he buried the last tear of his young manhood—­a tear drawn by a sacred emotion from a pure heart.

Eugene wandered to the most elevated part of the cemetery, whence he surveyed that portion of the city between the Place Vendome and the dome of the Invalides, where lives that world of fashion which he had hungered to penetrate.  With bitterness he muttered:  “Now there is relentless war between us.”  And as the first act of defiance which he had sworn against society, Rastignac went to dine with Madame Nucingen!