Père Goriot
by Honoré de Balzac
Summary
Old Goriot lives on the top floor of a shabby Paris boarding house, the Maison Vauquer, having beggared himself to marry his two daughters into wealth and status. Delphine and Anastasie visit only to extract more money, ashamed of their father's trade as a vermicelli maker and indifferent to what his sacrifices have cost him. In the same house lodges Eugene de Rastignac, a poor law student from the provinces who wants into Parisian society and is willing to learn from anyone who can teach him, including the mysterious fellow lodger Vautrin, an escaped convict living under a false name who offers Rastignac a shortcut to fortune built on crime and calmly explains why honest ambition never wins. Rastignac refuses the bargain but absorbs the lesson anyway, watching Goriot die abandoned and unvisited by either daughter, both too occupied with a ball to sit with their dying father, while Rastignac is the one who arranges and pays for the funeral.
Balzac writes Paris as a machine that runs on money and appearances, and the novel's real subject is Rastignac's education in how that machine works, delivered through Goriot's ruin as the case study. The prose is dense with specific, accumulated detail, the boarding house's smell and furniture catalogued as carefully as its residents' finances, and the effect builds rather than drags once the pattern becomes clear. It is a hard, clear eyed book about love curdled into obsession and about a young man choosing, in its last lines, to fight the city that has just shown him exactly what it costs to win.
Rastignac's final address to Paris from the cemetery on the hill, a challenge rather than a farewell, is one of the most quoted moments in French fiction.
Historical Context & Significance
Serialised in the Revue de Paris over the winter of 1834 and 1835 before appearing as a book, Père Goriot became the keystone of Balzac's vast project La Comédie humaine, the scheme by which characters recur across his novels so that a minor figure in one book carries a full history from another. Early reception was divided, some readers praising the density of observed detail, others objecting to the moral bleakness and the amount of unpleasant human behaviour on display; a contemporary reviewer for a women's journal wrote that Balzac's eye penetrated everywhere like a cunning serpent.
Its standing has only grown since. The novelist Félicien Marceau's remark that "we are all children of Le Père Goriot" is a common shorthand for its influence, and Vautrin's cynical instruction to Rastignac about fortunes and crime still circulates, loosely paraphrased, as a proverb about the origins of wealth. The novel has been adapted for stage and screen repeatedly through the twentieth century.