In brief
Paris, 1819. In a shabby boarding house near the Panthéon live a retired vermicelli maker whom the other lodgers mock, a jovial man of forty in a black wig who seems to know everything, and a law student from near Angoulême whose family starves itself to keep him there. The old man, Goriot, turns out to have made a fortune and given it away to his two daughters, who married into the aristocracy and the banking world and now see him only when they need money. The man in the wig, Vautrin, turns out to be an escaped convict. The student, Eugène de Rastignac, moves between the boarding house and the great houses of Paris and learns from both.
The novel is three stories braided together: a father’s tragedy, a criminal’s unmasking and a young man’s education. Each one is a lesson for Rastignac, and by the end he has drawn the same conclusion from all three.
The argument
Balzac’s claim is that in post-Napoleonic Paris money has replaced every other bond: family, love, rank and law all run on it. Rastignac gets the doctrine twice, from opposite ends of society. His cousin, the Vicomtesse de Beauséant, newly abandoned by her lover, tells him: “The more cold-blooded your calculations, the further you will go.” Men and women, she says, “must be nothing more than post-horses” to be ridden and left by the road (Madame de Beauséant). Vautrin, in the garden of the boarding house, tells him the same thing in a criminal’s language: “The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed” (Vautrin). The line is usually misquoted as “behind every great fortune is a great crime”.
The two lectures differ only in tone. The great lady and the convict agree that society is a war of all against all, and that the only mistake is to fight it with scruples. Goriot is the proof. He has done the one thing the system does not forgive, which is to give without calculating, and he dies of it. “It was all for my money,” he says of his daughters’ old affection, raving on his deathbed, and in the same speech: “They might have asked me for the very eyes out of my head and I would have bidden them to pluck them out” (the deathbed).
Rastignac draws the conclusion. He refuses Vautrin’s murder plot, nurses Goriot, pawns the watch Delphine gave him to pay for the old man’s last needs, and weeps at the grave; “with that tear that fell on Father Goriot’s grave, Eugene Rastignac’s youth ended.” Then he looks down from Père-Lachaise at the lights of the rich quarters and says, in Ellen Marriage’s version, “Henceforth there is war between us” (the last page). Balzac’s French is “À nous deux maintenant!”, closer to “Now it’s between you and me”. And his first move in that war is to go and dine with Goriot’s daughter Delphine, his mistress, who did not come to the funeral.
The shape of the book
The novel came out in the Revue de Paris over the winter of 1834–35, and the first book edition divided it into chapters with titles such as “A Bourgeois Boarding House”, “Trompe-la-Mort” and “The Father’s Death”. Later editions removed the divisions, and the Gutenberg text has none, so it reads as a single continuous movement.
It opens slowly, with some thirty pages on the house and its people before anything happens, and then accelerates. Rastignac’s first social calls produce a disaster: he names Goriot in the Comtesse de Restaud’s drawing room and is afterwards told she is not at home, because the old man he heard being kissed there is her father (the visit). Madame de Beauséant and her friend the Duchesse de Langeais explain the daughters’ story, and Rastignac begins to pursue Delphine de Nucingen, who is unhappy with her banker husband. Meanwhile Vautrin makes his offer: let him arrange a duel to kill the brother of Victorine Taillefer, a disinherited girl at the boarding house, and Rastignac can marry her fortune (the offer).
The last third of the book packs everything into a few days. The police recruit a lodger, Mademoiselle Michonneau, to drug Vautrin and confirm the brand on his shoulder (the police). Victorine’s brother dies of a sword wound in his forehead on the day Vautrin is arrested in the boarding-house dining room (the arrest). Goriot furnishes a little flat for Rastignac and Delphine, then hears in one scene that Anastasie has sold her husband’s family diamonds to pay her lover’s debts and that Delphine’s fortune is tied up by Nucingen. The shock brings on a stroke. He lies dying through Madame de Beauséant’s farewell ball, which both daughters attend, and his funeral is followed by “two empty carriages” with their husbands’ coats of arms (the funeral).
The method
The opening announces the method in English: “All is true” (the opening). This drama, the narrator insists, “is neither a fiction nor a romance”, and the reader who will finish the book in an armchair and then dine with a good appetite is warned that the tragedy is in his own house. What follows is the most famous description in French fiction. Balzac moves from the street, with “a suggestion of a jail about those high garden walls” (the street), to the façade, the garden, the sitting room, the dining room and its smell, and then to the landlady, who is at once “the embodiment and interpretation of her lodging-house, as surely as her lodging-house implies the existence of its mistress” (the landlady).
The principle is that surroundings and people explain each other, and that a trained observer can read a life from its furniture. Balzac had studied the naturalists, and the book’s dedication is to the zoologist Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire; in his 1842 preface to the Comédie humaine he compared the social species to the zoological ones. The descriptions are not scenery but evidence, which is why the novel spends so long on the boarding house and so little on the great houses: the poor are on display, and the rich keep their doors shut.
The narrator is also a commentator, given to general laws about women, Paris and youth, and to grand comparisons. Goriot embracing his daughter becomes “this Christ of paternity” (the passage). The excess is part of the effect. Balzac writes like a man who believes in what he is showing and is in a hurry to show more.
Money
As in Austen, the sums are exact, but here they are larger and dirtier. Rastignac’s family scrapes together twelve hundred francs a year for him; when he writes home for more, his mother and sisters send their savings and the narrator lets us feel what it costs them (the letters). Goriot came to the house rich, paying twelve hundred francs a year, and has been moving upstairs ever since, until he occupies a room on the third floor at forty-five francs a month. Madame Vauquer at first takes his visiting daughters for his mistresses.
His fortune came from the Revolution. A vermicelli maker’s workman, he bought his master’s business in 1789, became president of his Section for protection, and “the foundations of his fortune were laid in the time of the Scarcity”, when bread was short and the price of grain rose enormously (his history). He married his daughters with dowries of eight hundred thousand francs apiece. One became a countess, the other a banker’s wife, and once the Bourbons returned they found a former grain dealer an embarrassment. The money moved up and the father was left behind. That is the novel’s history of France in one family.
The people
Goriot
A good man reduced to a single passion. He is not wise or even admirable in any ordinary way; he spoils his daughters, lives for glimpses of them, and sells his last spoons and forks to pay for a ball dress. The comparison with King Lear was made at once; as the critic Herbert Hunt pointed out, the difference is that Goriot has no Cordelia. Both daughters love him a little and use him a great deal.
Rastignac
The book’s eyes. He is clever, handsome, generous and ambitious, and his education consists in learning that these qualities can be priced. He keeps his decency, to the point of being the only person at Goriot’s bedside besides the medical student Bianchon, and he keeps his ambition. “I am in hell, and I must stay there,” he tells Bianchon (to Bianchon). In French a “Rastignac” has become a word for a young man who climbs by any means.
Vautrin
The most alive person in the book: jovial, strong, generous with money, clear-sighted, and a convict known as Trompe-la-Mort, Cheat-Death. Balzac had met the former criminal and police chief Vidocq in 1834 and drew on him. Vautrin is the one character who tells the truth about society, which is why he must be outside the law. His affection for Rastignac, and his promise that “I will make you an offer that no one would decline”, hint at more than patronage, and the later novels make that clearer.
The daughters and the great lady
Anastasie de Restaud is proud and reckless, ruined by her love for the gambler Maxime de Trailles. Delphine de Nucingen is softer and more selfish, kept short of money by a husband who controls her fortune. Neither is a monster; both are what their marriages made of them. Madame de Beauséant is their opposite, a woman who loved sincerely and is discarded when her lover, the Marquis d’Ajuda-Pinto, makes a more useful marriage. She gives her last ball like an execution, and leaves at dawn “to bury myself in the remotest part of Normandy” (her farewell).
How it was made
Balzac was thirty-five and deep in debt. He had already written dozens of books, first under pseudonyms and then, from Les Chouans (1829), under his own name. A note from 1834 sketches the subject in a few phrases: a good man in a middle-class boarding house, stripped bare for two daughters who each have a large income, dying like a dog. He wrote the first draft in about forty days that autumn. The serial ran from December to February, and Edmond Werdet published the book in March 1835. It was a success, and Balzac said so loudly.
The returning characters
Rastignac had already appeared in Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin (1831), as an older man of the world. While drafting the new novel Balzac first gave the student another name, then decided to make him the same Rastignac, seen earlier in his life. It was the first serious use of the device that made the Comédie humaine: characters who reappear across dozens of books at different ages, so that each novel is a window into one continuous society. Bianchon becomes a great doctor, Rastignac a rich man and a minister, Vautrin returns at the end of Lost Illusions disguised as a Spanish priest and runs the plot of A Harlot High and Low. Read afterwards, the later books change this one: La Maison Nucingen reveals that Delphine’s husband arranged her affair with Rastignac himself.
Readers and critics
Reviewers in 1835 were divided. Some praised the detail; others found the book immoral, a gallery of vice without one honest character to balance it, and some called Goriot a plagiarism of Lear. Balzac answered in a preface that his poor old man had now been rejected twice, by his daughters for losing his fortune and by the critics for being immoral.
Later readers made it the central book of Balzac’s work. Engels wrote that he had learned more about French society from Balzac than from all the professional historians and economists together. Henry James lectured on “The Lesson of Balzac” in 1905. Erich Auerbach, in Mimesis, set the description of Madame Vauquer beside Stendhal as the founding moment of modern realism, and noted how much of it is atmosphere and moral judgement rather than neutral record. Peter Brooks has read the book as melodrama in the best sense: ordinary Parisian life raised to the pitch of moral conflict.
Afterlives
Two stage versions appeared in 1835, within months of the book. There were silent films in 1915 and 1922, a French film in 1945, and a BBC version directed by Paddy Russell in 1968. The larger afterlife is the figure of Rastignac on the hill, which every nineteenth-century novel of the young man from the provinces echoes, from Flaubert’s Frédéric Moreau to Maupassant’s Bel-Ami, and Mario Puzo took the popular misquotation of Vautrin’s line about fortune and crime as the epigraph of The Godfather (1969).
How to read it
- Do not skip the description. The first thirty pages are slow, but everything later depends on them, and the house is a character.
- Read the two lectures side by side. Madame de Beauséant’s speech and Vautrin’s in the garden say the same thing in two dialects.
- Count the money. Every sum is a fact about someone’s position; the book keeps accounts as carefully as its landlady.
- Watch where Rastignac goes. The Latin Quarter, the Faubourg Saint-Germain and the Chaussée-d’Antin are three different worlds a short walk apart.
- Read the last page twice. The challenge to Paris and the dinner with Delphine are one gesture, and its irony is the novel’s verdict.
Read next
- Balzac, Lost Illusions (1837–43). Another provincial in Paris, Lucien de Rubempré, who fails where Rastignac succeeds, and Vautrin’s return.
- Balzac, Eugénie Grandet (1833). The other great study of a father and money, in a provincial town, with a miser in place of a giver.
- Stendhal, The Red and the Black (1830). The same Restoration, the same ambitious young man, seen from inside his head.
- Shakespeare, King Lear. The comparison every reader makes, and worth testing.
- Flaubert, Sentimental Education (1869). The young man in Paris a generation later, with no Vautrin to teach him.