“The world laughs at baseness and connives at it”

“The world laughs at baseness and connives at it” is Rastignac’s judgment on the society that tolerates the very betrayals it treats as material for gossip. Spoken as Mme. de Beauséant faces the concealed marriage of the Marquis d’Ajuda-Pinto, the line reaches beyond her immediate crisis: it echoes the abandonment of Goriot and anticipates the moral test Rastignac faces as he enters Parisian society.

The Expression in Context

Rastignac speaks after learning that the Marquis d’Ajuda-Pinto is to marry Mlle. de Rochefide, while Mme. de Beauséant remains unaware of the arrangement. The marriage-contract is to be signed the next day, and the news is being kept secret even as Paris prepares to attend Mme. de Beauséant’s ball. Her cousin Delphine de Nucingen tells Rastignac what is coming; he recognizes the likely harm, while Delphine expects the fashionable world to appear regardless. His remark names the discrepancy: people may laugh at a person disgraced by betrayal and, at the same time, cooperate with the social arrangements that betray her.

The wording is especially pointed because the scandal is not merely private. The impending marriage is concealed, but its consequences are already becoming a subject of public anticipation. Society’s attendance at the ball threatens to turn Mme. de Beauséant’s grief into a spectacle. The phrase therefore condemns not only the person who commits a wrong, but also the audience that makes wrongdoing socially manageable by gossiping about it and carrying on as usual.

Goriot and the Social Double Standard

The expression also resonates with the account of Goriot’s daughters and their husbands. Goriot had devoted his fortune to his daughters, providing each with a substantial dowry and leaving himself a comparatively modest income. After their marriages, their husbands prevented them from receiving him in their homes; Goriot was left to live at Mme. Vauquer’s boarding house. Mme. de Beauséant presents this history to Rastignac as an instance of a father’s sacrifice answered by rejection, and his tears show that the account still reaches him before experience has hardened his response.

The boarding house makes that social contrast concrete. Goriot lives among lodgers whose means are limited, while the daughters whose positions were secured by his money belong to the world of marriage and status that has excluded him. His devotion persists: he longs for visits and remains absorbed in his daughters’ happiness, even when access to them is uncertain. Against this background, the phrase’s charge is not abstract. The society that can observe a father’s abandonment and turn it into conversation also sustains the status conventions that leave him isolated.

Judgment and Complicity

The book repeatedly sets public judgment against private feeling. Mme. de Beauséant describes how trouble invites friends to bring painful news and probe a person’s distress under the guise of concern. Her response—she will defend herself—shows the pressure to manage not only an injury but also the social interpretation of it. The expression about laughter and connivance belongs to the same atmosphere: an apparent moral verdict does not necessarily amount to solidarity with the person wronged.

Rastignac’s own position makes the observation unsettled rather than merely accusatory. At the Tuileries, fashionable attention to his appearance shifts his thoughts toward the rewards of Parisian society. He has not simply stood outside its temptations; the prospect of recognition and advancement is already changing what he values. The sentence therefore marks a moment of moral perception within a larger movement toward ambition. It identifies the social hypocrisy he sees, without establishing that he can remain untouched by it.

The Phrase’s Moral Counterpoint

The expression’s harshness is balanced by scenes in which genuine feeling briefly interrupts social calculation. When Mme. de Beauséant recounts Goriot’s treatment, Rastignac’s tears bring the three people present into a silence shaped by sympathy. Later, Mme. de Nucingen’s confession of financial distress and her account of love entangled with money complicate any simple division between public blame and private innocence. The narrative presents her as capable of insight into natural affection even while her marriage and social circumstances have separated her from her father.

At Goriot’s funeral, the contrast between convention and care becomes material. His sons-in-law do not appear in person; their empty carriages follow the procession, while Rastignac and Bianchon arrange what they can afford. Rastignac must borrow five francs for the gravediggers. His grief at the grave marks the end of his youth, followed by his gaze over Paris and his declaration that henceforth there is war between him and the city. The earlier phrase anticipates that confrontation: Paris both exposes human betrayal and offers rewards to those willing to navigate its standards. Its moral force rests in holding those truths together, rather than treating laughter, sympathy, or ambition as separate from the social world that produces them.