Five-minute digest
Father Goriot (Le Père Goriot)
Summary
Father Goriot opens in 1819 in the Maison Vauquer, a shabby boarding house in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève on the poor edge of the Latin Quarter, which Balzac describes room by room, smell by smell, before introducing its lodgers. Among them are Eugène de Rastignac, a law student from a poor noble family near Angoulême; the hearty, mocking Vautrin, who claims to be a retired merchant; the spinster Mlle. Michonneau and her companion Poiret; Victorine Taillefer, a gentle girl disowned by her rich banker father; and the old man the others call Father Goriot, a retired vermicelli maker who arrived rich and has grown steadily poorer, moving to cheaper rooms each year. Rastignac, eager to rise, is introduced into high society by his cousin the Vicomtesse de Beauséant. He discovers that Goriot is the father of two fashionable women, Anastasie, Comtesse de Restaud, and Delphine, Baronne de Nucingen, wife of a banker. Goriot gave each a fortune as a dowry, and both now receive him only in secret, ashamed of the tradesman who paid for their rank. His whole life is his love for them; he sells his silver and his annuities to pay their debts. Mme. de Beauséant, herself about to be abandoned by her lover, advises Rastignac to use society coldly and to win Delphine. Vautrin sees the student's hunger and offers him a bargain: court Victorine, and Vautrin will have her brother killed in a duel so that she inherits her father's millions, in return for a share. Rastignac refuses, wavers, and is drugged at dinner so that he cannot give warning; young Taillefer is killed. Meanwhile the police, through Mlle. Michonneau, unmask Vautrin as Jacques Collin, the escaped convict called Trompe-la-Mort, and arrest him at the boarding-house table. Goriot furnishes a small apartment where Rastignac and Delphine may meet, and dreams of living near them. But the sisters' troubles overwhelm him: Anastasie has pawned her husband's family diamonds to pay the debts of her lover, Maxime de Trailles, and Delphine's fortune is locked in her husband's speculations. The daughters quarrel in his room, and he suffers a stroke. On the night Mme. de Beauséant gives her farewell ball before leaving Paris, Anastasie appears wearing the diamonds. Goriot dies slowly in the boarding house, calling for daughters who do not come. Rastignac and the medical student Horace Bianchon nurse him and pay for the funeral; Anastasie arrives only when he can no longer hear her. Two empty carriages bearing the families' arms follow the coffin to Père-Lachaise. Standing above the city, Rastignac challenges Paris and goes to dine with Delphine. Serialized in the Revue de Paris in 1834-35 and published as a book in 1835, the novel was the first in which Balzac systematically brought back characters from book to book, the method that built La Comédie humaine. Ellen Marriage's English translation appeared in 1896.
Top Lessons
A father's love without measure
Goriot gives his daughters fortunes, rank and finally his silver, annuities and health, and asks only to see them. The novel presents his devotion as both sublime and disordered: he never asks anything of them, and they learn to take everything. Balzac makes the reader feel the tragedy without letting Goriot off as blameless.
Three teachers for one student
Rastignac receives three educations: Mme. de Beauséant teaches him society's cold rules, Vautrin offers the criminal's frank version of the same rules, and Goriot shows him love that society despises. Eugène refuses Vautrin's crime but adopts much of the Vicomtesse's counsel.
The price of a place in society
Every rise in the novel has a cost: the Restaud diamonds, the Nucingen fortune, the savings of Eugène's mother and sisters, young Taillefer's life. Balzac's society runs on money that is always someone else's, and the boarding house sits beneath the grand houses as their hidden foundation.
Kindness among the poor
At the end, the only people who tend Goriot are two students and the servant Christophe, who lend money, pawn a watch and stand at the grave. The empty carriages of the daughters' families make the contrast plain.
Verified Quotes
“once for all, this drama is neither a fiction nor a romance!”
“Men and women for you must be nothing more than post-horses; take a fresh relay, and leave the last to drop by the roadside”
“There are no such things as principles; there are only events, and there are no laws but those of expediency”
Frequently cited
“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.”
“Not until you are dying do you know your children”
“You give them life; they give you your deathblow. You bring them into the world, and they send you out of it.”
“he was a good and worthy man, who never said one word louder than another; he never did any one any harm, and gave nobody any trouble.”
Frequently cited
“Henceforth there is war between us.”
Medical Lens
Horace Bianchon, here a student at the Hôpital Cochin, became Balzac's recurring physician across La Comédie humaine, and the novel's medicine is that of the Paris clinical school around 1820. Bianchon reads character by Gall's phrenology, diagnoses Goriot's collapse as serous apoplexy (an effusion of serum on the brain, a period category for some strokes), and treats it with mustard plasters on the legs to draw the congestion downward, moxas, and laudanum rubbed over the diaphragm, after a consultation including a pupil of Gall. Two druggings drive the plot: Vautrin puts a sleeping draught in the wine of Rastignac and Goriot, and the police supply Mlle. Michonneau with a dose meant to send blood to Vautrin's head so that his shoulder can be bared. The narrator says Goriot's fatherhood grew almost into a mania, in the vocabulary of the time; modern readers have discussed his devotion as an obsession, but that is interpretation. The deathbed scenes, with delirium, alternating curses and blessings, and a hired priest, are among the most detailed death scenes in the 19th-century novel.
- Dinner after the daughters' quarrel
Bianchon reads the signs of serous apoplexy in Goriot's face and eyes and gives a poor prognosis.
- Goriot's last illness
Mustard poultices, moxas from the Hospice Cochin, a medical consultation, and laudanum rubbed on the diaphragm.
- Vautrin's arrest
The police agent's drug, slipped into Vautrin's drink at table, produces a sham apoplexy so that Vautrin's brand can be found; earlier Vautrin drugs the wine of Rastignac and Goriot.
- Account of Goriot's history
The narrator traces how Goriot's fatherhood, after his wife's death, developed almost into a mania.
- Goriot's death
Delirium, calls for the absent daughters, Anastasie's arrival when he can no longer hear, and the death announced by Bianchon.