Père Goriot

Overview

About three hundred pages, published in 1835, the novel Balzac and most later readers regard as the true beginning of the Human Comedy, the vast connected sequence he would go on building for the rest of his life. It was here that Balzac first fully developed the technique of the recurring character, figures who appear as protagonists in one novel and reappear, older or younger, more or less prominent, in others, so that the reader gradually builds a sense of an entire continuous society rather than a set of isolated stories; Eugène de Rastignac, this novel’s young protagonist, returns across many later volumes of the Human Comedy as a fully matured, thoroughly compromised figure of worldly success.

Set in Paris in 1819, during the early years of the Bourbon Restoration, the novel is centered on the Maison Vauquer, a shabby, unfashionable boarding house on the edge of respectable Paris, whose lodgers, drawn from different levels of a society in the midst of real economic and social upheaval, Balzac uses to stage a compressed, intensive study of how ambition, money and family actually function beneath the surface of Restoration manners.

What happens

The boarding house. The Maison Vauquer houses a collection of lodgers distinguished mainly by how little they can afford: among them Eugène de Rastignac, a young law student from a modest provincial noble family, ambitious to rise in Parisian society but with almost no money to do it; Jean-Joaquin Goriot, an elderly former pasta and vermicelli merchant who has grown visibly poorer over the years the other lodgers have known him, moving to progressively cheaper rooms, and who is treated with a mixture of pity and contempt by the household, who assume, wrongly as it eventually becomes clear, that his poverty reflects some disreputable secret vice; and Vautrin, a magnetic, worldly, generous fellow lodger who is, unknown to most of the household for much of the novel, an escaped convict living under a false identity.

Rastignac’s ambition. Rastignac, eager to rise in Parisian society but painfully aware of his own poverty, uses a distant family connection to gain entry to the aristocratic salon of his cousin, Madame de Beauséant, who, though herself on the verge of a devastating personal humiliation as her own lover abandons her for a wealthy marriage, takes a genuine interest in Rastignac and instructs him, with worldly, somewhat bitter clarity, in exactly how Parisian society actually operates: that sentiment counts for little, that connections and calculated advantage count for nearly everything, and that a young man without fortune must attach himself strategically to a woman who can advance him if he hopes to rise at all.

Through this world Rastignac meets Delphine de Nucingen, one of old Goriot’s two daughters, now married to a wealthy but cold banker and desperate for the social position and romantic attention her marriage does not provide, and begins to court her, both for genuine attraction and for the social advancement the connection promises.

Goriot’s secret. Rastignac gradually discovers the truth about the old man everyone in the boarding house has quietly despised: Goriot has spent his entire fortune, accumulated through decades of shrewd business, providing his two daughters, Delphine and Anastasie, with enormous dowries that bought them marriages into wealthy and aristocratic families, families that now regard their own father-in-law as an embarrassment beneath their notice. Goriot, having given away nearly everything for his daughters’ social advancement, continues to give them what little he has left whenever they visit him, which they do only when they need money to cover debts, secret expenses or the demands of the lovers and extravagant lifestyles their marriages have not adequately provided for.

Vautrin’s proposition. Vautrin, observing Rastignac’s ambition and his lack of means, makes him a direct and cynical proposal: Vautrin will arrange for the murder of the brother of a fellow lodger, Victorine Taillefer, a young woman disinherited by her wealthy father in favor of that brother, clearing the way for Victorine to inherit the family fortune and for Rastignac to marry her and instantly become rich, all without Rastignac himself needing to commit any crime directly. Vautrin accompanies the offer with an extended, coldly persuasive speech arguing that respectable fortunes and criminal fortunes differ mainly in whether the crime behind them has ever been discovered, and that ambition without willingness to exploit others ruthlessly is simply ambition that will fail.

Rastignac, horrified, refuses the specific proposal, but the encounter marks him permanently; he cannot fully unhear Vautrin’s argument even as he declines to act on it, and the novel’s remaining chapters trace how much of Vautrin’s cynical worldview Rastignac nonetheless absorbs and increasingly acts on in subtler form. Vautrin himself is eventually exposed and arrested as the escaped convict he actually is, in one of the novel’s most dramatic set pieces, staged at the boarding house’s dinner table in front of the assembled, horrified lodgers.

Goriot’s death. As the novel moves toward its close, Goriot’s health, worn down by years of self-denial and by the emotional toll of his daughters’ continued demands and neglect, collapses entirely. On his deathbed, having given away literally his last possessions to fund his daughters’ immediate social needs one final time, he begs repeatedly to see them, and neither Delphine nor Anastasie comes, each occupied that evening with the demands of the very social world their father’s sacrifices purchased for them. Goriot dies alone except for Rastignac and a fellow lodger, in a scene of real and unsparing devastation, his final words a mixture of continued excuses for his daughters and a brief, terrible recognition of what has actually been done to him.

The final page. Rastignac, essentially alone, arranges and personally pays for Goriot’s meager funeral, since neither daughter provides for it and neither attends in person, sending only their empty carriages, bearing their coats of arms, as a token gesture of respect that arrives without either woman inside it. Afterward, Rastignac climbs to the height of the Père Lachaise cemetery and looks down over the whole of Paris spread below him, and in the novel’s famous closing lines, issues a direct challenge to the city, now it is between the two of us, before descending to dine, that same evening, with Madame de Nucingen, Goriot’s own surviving daughter, in a final, unresolved gesture that suggests Rastignac’s education in the city’s actual values is now essentially complete.

How to read it

Read the boarding house chapters carefully as an establishing microcosm; Balzac’s minute cataloguing of the Maison Vauquer’s shabby furnishings and its lodgers’ reduced circumstances is doing real work, setting the material baseline against which the novel’s later movements into wealth and aristocratic society will be measured.

Pay particular attention to Vautrin’s speech to Rastignac. It is the novel’s intellectual center, and Rastignac’s ultimate refusal to act on the specific criminal proposal should not obscure how much of the underlying cynical analysis of how society actually rewards success he goes on, in subtler and more socially acceptable form, to act on anyway.

Notice how carefully Balzac avoids making Goriot’s daughters simple monsters. They are not depicted as uniquely cruel so much as thoroughly absorbed into a social world that has trained them to treat their father’s devotion as a resource to be drawn on rather than a relationship requiring any reciprocal obligation, which makes the novel’s critique broader and more unsettling than a story of two uniquely bad daughters would be.

Read the final scene at Père Lachaise as the novel’s real climax rather than as an epilogue. Rastignac’s challenge to Paris, delivered immediately after burying a man destroyed by exactly the social world Rastignac is about to enter fully, is the moment that determines everything the character will become across the many later volumes of the Human Comedy in which he reappears.

Read this novel alongside Eugénie Grandet to see two very different Balzac fathers and two very different outcomes: one who impoverishes his family while sitting on hidden wealth, one who genuinely beggars himself for his daughters’ advancement, and consider what each version reveals about how paternal devotion can distort or be exploited within a family.

Questions it raises

• Is Goriot’s devotion to his daughters admirable, self-destructive, or some inseparable combination, and does the manner of his death answer that question or leave it open?
• Vautrin’s cynical account of how fortunes are actually made goes largely unrefuted by events in the novel. Does Balzac intend the reader to accept it, or only to recognize its persuasive power without endorsing it?
• Rastignac refuses Vautrin’s specific criminal proposal but appears to absorb much of his underlying worldview. What is the difference between refusing a crime and refusing the logic that makes the crime tempting?
• Are Goriot’s daughters simply cruel, or are they doing what the social world around them has trained them to regard as normal? Does that distinction change how the reader should judge them?
• What does Rastignac’s challenge to Paris at the novel’s end actually mean? Is it a declaration of ambition, of vengeance, of resignation to how the city works, or some combination?
• The novel closes with Rastignac going to dine with Delphine the very evening he buries her father. What does that immediate juxtaposition suggest about how completely his education in Parisian values is now finished?