Around two o'clock, old Goriot's body was carried to the church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, his parish. The service was sung as one sings for a beggar. Rastignac had spent the last of his money to buy a shroud worthy of that father who, in his lifetime, had given everything he possessed to his daughters, down to his last loaf of bread, down to his last gold coin. They set out for Père-Lachaise in two hired carriages, in which the coffin had been placed, and the two young men, Rastignac and Bianchon, climbed into one of them. Not one of the students, not one relative, not one friend surrounded the procession. Anastasie and Delphine, his adored daughters, the daughters for whom he had exhausted his fortune, his life, his heart, did not come. They were dressing, no doubt, for a ball, for a supper, for the theater; they shone in the salons of Paris while their father was going down into the earth. On the way, the cold bit at their faces, the sky was gray, and the streets seemed deserted, as if Paris itself wished to accompany in silence this man whom the city had stripped bare. When they arrived at the cemetery, the weather was of a gray sadness, of a melancholy that suited such a scene. The two young men walked behind the coffin, alone with two priests, a chorister and a sexton. The priest recited the prayers for the dead, blessed the grave, sprinkled holy water, and there was no one to answer the priest, no one to say a word, to shed one more tear than those shed by the two friends. The grave was dug in a spot overlooking the city: one could see Paris, the Seine, the countless rooftops, the great city that devours its children. When the ceremony was over, the priest withdrew, the sexton waited for his tip while throwing a few shovelfuls of earth onto the coffin, and Rastignac then understood the vanity of all human greatness in this place where everything ends. There was not even a stone to mark the poor father's grave. Christophe, the servant of the Maison Vauquer, who had come out of devotion and had fallen asleep on a stone while waiting for the service to end, woke only at the moment they were about to leave; he threw three shovelfuls of earth onto the coffin, without knowing it, and went away. Rastignac, left alone with Bianchon, took a few steps toward the grave, looked at the gaping hole, cast upon it a gaze in which anger, disgust and pity mingled, and shed his last tear as a young man, that sacred tear that a young heart sheds upon the earth, the tear he had promised to the poor old man. He remained there a moment, motionless, bent over that grave in which was buried, along with the father, all the illusions of his youth, all his belief in the human heart, all his faith in gratitude and love. He had seen the two daughters, he had seen their gilded luxury, their superb selfishness, and he had seen the father, who had nothing left, who had stripped himself of everything for them, who had died of their ingratitude as from a disease. He understood that Society was like the city before his eyes, a mire in which pure souls are swallowed up, where the tears of fathers are not worth a yard of velvet. Then, rising, he cast one last glance at the grave. It was the burial of the old father, the final homage paid to betrayed goodness, to unrecognized devotion. The cold, the silence, the grandeur of the sight, the majesty of that immense city—all this gave him a singular strength, a fierce strength. He straightened up like a man renouncing the weaknesses of his heart in order to conquer the world by sheer will. The light of the setting sun lit the upper reaches of Père-Lachaise, and Paris lay peacefully along the Seine at his feet, glittering with lights, blind and deaf to its own miseries. Rastignac, leaning forward, could see that river of torches rolling through the waves, those columns, those towers, those monuments, those roofs, the façade of the left bank and that of the faubourg Saint-Germain, all that Paris which drew him, which called to him, which promised him wealth, glory, power. He cast upon that society a despairing yet commanding gaze, the gaze of ambition that has just lost its last illusions and has only its audacity left for a fortune. Then, in order to consume his youth, his tears, his regrets, all the beautiful remains of a man's heart that had just died within him, he looked one last time at the grave, and, rising to his feet, said in an energetic voice: "It's between you and me now!" And, as the first act of the challenge he flung down to Society, he went to dine with Madame de Nucingen.