University of Virginia Library

Le Père Goriot.

There were a hundred students in the new class
matriculated at Yale College, in Connecticut, in the
year 18—. They were young men of different ages
and of all conditions in life, but less various in their
mien and breeding than in the characteristics of the
widely-separated states from which they came. It is
not thought extraordinary in Europe that the French
and English, the German and the Italian, should
possess distinct national traits: yet one American is
supposed to be like every other, though the two between
whom the comparison is drawn were born and
bred as far apart, and in as different latitudes, as the
Highland cateran and the brigand of Calabria.

I looked around me with some interest, when, on the
first morning of the term, the president, professors, and
students of the university assembled in the college
chapel at the sound of the prayer-bell, and, with my

brother Freshmen, I stood in the side aisle, closing up
with our motley, and, as yet, unclassical heads and
habiliments, the long files of the more initiated classes.
The berry-brown tan of the sun of Georgia, unblanched
by study, was still dark and deep on the cheek of
one; the look of command, breathing through the indolent
attitude, betrayed, in another, the young Carolinian
and slave-master; a coat of green, garnished
with fur and bright buttons, and shaped less by the
tailor than by the Herculean and expansive frame
over which it was strained, had a taste of Kentucky
in its complexion; the white skin and red or sandy
hair, cold expression, stiff black coat, and serious attention
to the service, told of the Puritan son of New-Hampshire
or Vermont; and, perked up in his well-fitted
coat, the exquisite of the class, stood the slight
and metropolitan New-Yorker, with a firm belief in his
tailor and himself written on his effeminate lip, and an
occasional look at his neighbours' coats and shoulders,
that might have been construed into wonder upon
what western river or mountain dwelt the builders of
such coats and men!

Rather annoyed at last by the glances of one or two
seniors, who were amusing themselves with my simple
gaze of curiosity, I turned my attention to my more
immediate neighbourhood. A youth with close, curling,
brown hair, rather under-size, but with a certain
decision and nerve in his lip which struck me immediately,
and which seemed to express somehow a confidence
in himself which his limbs scarce bore out,
stood with his back to the pulpit, and, with his foot on
the seat and his elbow on his knee, seemed to have
fallen at once into the habit of the place, and to be
beyond surprise or interest. As it was the custom of
the college to take places at prayers and recitation
alphabetically, and he was likely to be my neighbour

in chapel and hall for the next four years, I speculated
rather more than I should else have done on his face
and manner; and as the president came to his Amen,
I came to the conclusion, that whatever might be Mr.
“S's” capacity for friendship, his ill-will would be very
demonstrative and uncomfortable.

The term went on, the politics of the little republic
fermented, and as first appearances wore away, or
peculiarities wore off by collision or developed by intimacy,
the different members of the class rose or fell
in the general estimation, and the graduation of talent
and spirit became more just and definite. The “Southerners
and Northerners,” as they are called, soon discovered,
like the classes that had gone before them,
that they had no qualities in common, and, of the
secret societies which exist among the students in that
university, joined each that of his own compatriots.
The Carolinian or Georgian, who had passed his life
on a plantation, secluded from the society of his equals,
soon found out the value of his chivalrous deportment
and graceful indolence in the gay society for which
the town is remarkable; while the Vermontese, or
White-Mountaineer, “made unfashionably,” and ill at
ease on a carpet, took another line of ambition, and sat
down with the advantage of constitutional patience
and perseverance to the study which he would find in
the end a “better continuer,” even in the race for a
lady's favour.

It was the only republic I have ever known—that
class of Freshmen. It was a fair arena; and neither
in politics, nor society, nor literature, nor love, nor religion,
have I, in much searching through the world,
found the same fair play or good feeling. Talk of our
own republic!—its society is the very core and gall of
the worst growth of aristocracy. Talk of the republic
of letters!—the two graves by the pyramid of Caius

Cestius laugh it to scorn. Of love!—of religion.
What is bought and sold like that which has the name
of the first? What is made a snare and a tool by the
designing like the last? But here—with a government
over us ever kindly and paternal, no favor shown,
and no privilege denied,—every equality in the competitors
at all possible—age, previous education, and,
above all, worldly position,—it was an arena in which
a generous spirit would wrestle with an abandon of
heart and limb he might never know in the world
again. Every individual rising or falling by the estimation
he exacts of his fellows, there is no such
school of honor; each, of the many palms of scholarship,
from the severest to the lightest, aiming at that
which best suits his genius, and as welcome as another
to the goal, there is no apology for the laggard. Of
the feelings that stir the heart in our youth—of the
few, the very few, which have no recoil, and leave no
repentance—this leaping from the starting-post of
mind—this first spread of the encouraged wing in the
free heaven of thought and knowledge—is recorded
in my own slender experience as the most joyous and
the most unmingled. He who has soiled his bright
honor with the tools of political ambition,—he who
has leant his soul upon the charity of a sect in religion,—he
who has loved, hoped, and trusted in the
greater arena of life and manhood,—must look back
on days like these as the broken-winged eagle to the
sky—as the Indian's subdued horse to the prairie.