With her lived Victorine Taillefer, a schoolgirl, to
whom she filled the place of mother. These two ladies paid eighteen
hundred francs a year.
The two sets of rooms on the second floor were respectively occupied
by an old man named Poiret and a man of forty or thereabouts, the
wearer of a black wig and dyed whiskers, who gave out that he was a
retired merchant, and was addressed as M. Vautrin. Two of the four
rooms on the third floor were also let--one to an elderly spinster, a
Mlle. Michonneau, and the other to a retired manufacturer of
vermicelli, Italian paste and starch, who allowed the others to
address him as "Father Goriot." The remaining rooms were allotted to
various birds of passage, to impecunious students, who like "Father
Goriot" and Mlle. Michonneau, could only muster forty-five francs a
month to pay for their board and lodging. Mme. Vauquer had little
desire for lodgers of this sort; they ate too much bread, and she only
took them in default of better.
At that time one of the rooms was tenanted by a law student, a young
man from the neighborhood of Angouleme, one of a large family who
pinched and starved themselves to spare twelve hundred francs a year
for him.
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