Novel: Père Goriot

Overview
Honoré de Balzac’s Père Goriot unfolds in Restoration-era Paris within the shabby Maison Vauquer boarding house, a microcosm where ambition, love, and money gnaw at every life. Three intersecting figures drive the story: Eugène de Rastignac, a provincial law student dazzled by high society; Jean-Joachim Goriot, a retired vermicelli maker who has impoverished himself for his daughters; and Vautrin, a sardonic lodger whose criminal genius strips Paris of its illusions. The novel belongs to La Comédie humaine, weaving recurring characters and exposing the social metabolism of a city ruled by cash and rank.

Setting and Characters
Rastignac arrives from Angoulême with modest means and great hopes, lodging among students, widows, and eccentrics presided over by the proprietress, Madame Vauquer. Goriot, once comfortably off, is mocked as a dotard; only gradually does Rastignac learn that he bankrupted himself to provide dowries and luxuries for his daughters, Anastasie de Restaud and Delphine de Nucingen, who now inhabit the salons that exclude him. Vautrin, worldly and amused, reads everyone’s price and treats morality as a costume. Around them circulate Victorine Taillefer, a sweet, disinherited girl; Bianchon, a medical student with a steady heart; and a swarm of petty spies whose neediness feeds the city’s rumor mill.

Plot
Eager to rise, Rastignac seeks tutelage from his aristocratic cousin, Madame de Beauséant, who teaches him the codes of drawing rooms where name and money outrank sincerity. His first faux pas, mentioning Goriot at Madame de Restaud’s, reveals the shame the daughters feel toward their father, whose devotion has become socially embarrassing. Through Beauséant, Rastignac meets Delphine and soon becomes her lover, securing an apartment to cement their liaison and tiptoeing into the sphere of her financier husband, Nucingen.

Vautrin dangles a shortcut: if Rastignac marries Victorine, he will ensure her inheritance by removing her legitimate brother in a staged duel. The proposition crystallizes the novel’s moral choice, patient work or ruthless efficiency. Rastignac recoils yet hesitates; Vautrin proceeds anyway, drugging the boarding house’s coffee while his plan unfolds outside. The brother dies; the police close in. In a bravura scene, Vautrin is unmasked as the notorious escaped convict Jacques Collin, known as Trompe-la-Mort, his identity betrayed by prison tattoos. He departs with ironic panache, leaving the house in scandal and Rastignac exposed to the full consequences of Parisian gamesmanship.

As public masks slip, private catastrophes mount. Anastasie is entangled with the dissipated Maxime de Trailles and ruins herself trying to redeem jewels she had pawned; her husband retaliates with legal cruelty. Delphine craves independence from Nucingen’s control and lurches from debt to debt. Each time, Goriot sacrifices another remnant of his annuity and furniture to rescue them, feeding a voracious love that is neither reciprocated nor respected. News of their latest crises breaks his health. Rastignac and Bianchon tend the old man as he raves tenderly for his daughters, who send excuses and small sums but do not come. Goriot dies abandoned, loved to the end by the one person he cannot stop loving.

The funeral is a pauper’s procession: two empty carriages from the husbands, no daughters. After the burial at Père Lachaise, Rastignac looks out over Paris and vows to master the city that has just taught him its price.

Themes and Significance
Balzac fuses domestic tragedy with a ledger-like accounting of social forces. Paternal devotion becomes a destructive addiction in a world where money defines affection, and filial ingratitude is incentivized by status. Vautrin supplies the corrosive aphorisms; Goriot, the bleeding heart; Rastignac, the flexible conscience that will shape the future of La Comédie humaine. The novel’s realism lies in its attention to credit, contracts, and reputations, the invisible currency that moves people more than ideals. By the final vow, ambition has learned compassion’s cost and resolved to spend it.