Honore de Balzac’s classic novel Le Pere Goriot has been divided in several different ways by its various translators in the nearly two centuries since its original publication in French; the sections here follow the helpful divisions in the Franklin Library’s 1980 edition of an anonymous 1897 translation generally attributed to Jane Minot Sedgwick.
Part One: The Vauquer House
The novel begins with an extended description of the Maison Vauquer, a shabby boardinghouse run by the even shabbier Mme Vauquer, and of its inhabitants. The year is 1819, and the novel’s three protagonists, Eugene de Rastignac, Vautrin, and Jean-Joachim ‘‘Pere’’ Goriot, are lodgers at this boardinghouse in one of the grimier corners of Paris’s Latin Quarter, as are the young Victorine Taillefer and her guardian, Mme Couture. Also residing at the Maison Vauquer, which Balzac introduces directly after asking whether it is ‘‘more horrible to look upon a withered heart or an empty skull,’’ are an ‘‘old maid,’’ Mlle Michonneau, and ‘‘an old man,’’ M Poiret. Balzac informs the reader how much each boarder is paying for lodging, and takes pains to contrast Taillefer and Rastignac with the rest of the occupants. While ‘‘the boarders were all oppressed by poverty more or less apparent,’’ and most ‘‘suggested dramas that had already been completed or were still in action,’’ Taillefer and Rastignac are different: they at least are still young, their dramas yet scarcely begun. Telling the reader that ‘‘the happiest of these afflicted souls was Mme Vauquer, who ruled in this free prison,’’ Balzac traces out Vauquer’s particular history with Goriot, whom she had initially hoped to marry because of his wealth. In the process, we learn also that Goriot has been getting progressively poorer since his arrival at the Maison Vauquer in 1813. His two daughters have spent much of his retirement money. Worse still for him, the other boarders do not believe ‘‘the women whom he called his daughters’’ really are his daughters, because they are so obviously rich and he is increasingly only ‘‘a ruined man to whom poverty has taught submission.’’
Part Two: First Glimpses of Society
In contrast to the much-ridiculed Pere Goriot, ` young Rastignac is presented as a dashing, clever student. Balzac follows him through his ambitious entrance into Parisian society, supported by his aunt, Mme de Marcillac, at a ball given by his rather distant cousin Mme de Beause´ant, and his return to the boardinghouse. Once home from the ball, Rastignac sees two odd things: evidence of Goriot’s wealth in the form of a silver breakfast set, which Rastignac assumes has been stolen, and Vautrin counting coins with a nighttime visitor.
Goriot, it transpires, is selling silver to pay the bills of a woman he claims is his daughter and whom the others believe must be his mistress. This woman, however, is indeed Goriot’s daughter, Mme Anastasie de Restaud, with whom Rastignac felt he had fallen in love at the ball the previous night. Vautrin, meanwhile, declares his intention of helping young Victorine Taillefer secure her inheritance, which her father is wrongfully withholding.
The next afternoon, Rastignac calls upon the Restaud household, where he is received with some coolness by the Mme de Restaud and her lover Comte Maxime de Trailles. Still, he meets with success in making himself welcome with her husband, the Comte de Restaud. The success is short-lived, however, as Rastignac accidentally offends the count. Later, his cousin, Mme de Beause´ant, advises him to be ruthless in his social interactions.
Rastignac resolves to pursue not Anastasie de Restaud, but her sister—Goriot’s other daughter—Delphine de Nucingen, the wife of a German capitalist and an outcast from true Parisian aristocracy. To this end, he promptly writes to his mother and younger sisters for money, threatening to ‘‘blow out my brains in despair’’ if his mother will not aid. This fresh-faced young law student from the country, son of an impoverished branch of the rural aristocracy, appears here as a changed person: a determined social climber.
Rastignac turns his attention to learning the history of Goriot, Delphine’s father and the man he hopes to use to make his fortune. Here, Goriot appears as a doting father, an opportunist who has profited by the 1789 Revolution and subsequent Napoleonic empire, and also as a casualty of the return of the old aristocracy to Paris in 1815. His debased condition and his daughters’ scorn of him is due in large part to the aristocracy’s disdain for business (they believed working for a living, even if one earned a lot of money, was vulgar) and to the deep unpopularity of the friends of the Revolution after the Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy.
Part Three: The Debut
A letter arrives from Rastignac’s mother, and though he weeps to read that she has sold her jewels, a second letter, from his sister, revives his spirits. His sister’s innocent faith in him leaves him determined that ‘‘every coin must tell to the utmost advantage,’’ and he immediately begins spending the money as planned, though it has not yet arrived, on new clothing, meals out, and the other goods that he feels will help him make his way into society. Forced to borrow a franc from Vautrin a short while later, Rastignac makes haste to return it immediately. As he acknowledges, he does not trust ‘‘the sphinx in a wig.’’ This distrust, though, and his way of communicating it, are insulting to the point that the other boarders believe Vautrin and Rastignac will have a duel. Later Vautrin tells Rastignac his idea: he will kill Victorine’s brother in a duel, in exchange for Rastignac’s giving him two hundred thousand francs of Victorine’s once she inherits. He does this on the presumption that Rastignac will court and win the young girl’s heart.
However, Rastignac is already courting Goriot’s second daughter, Delphine de Nucingen. And Goriot, for his part, is only too obliging, falling over himself to help Rastignac. Likewise, Rastignac’s cousin Mme de Beause´ant, despite an initial reluctance brought on by her heartache at the prospect of losing her lover (the Marquis d’Ajuda-Pinto), takes pains to help Rastignac. Bringing him with her to the opera, she points out Mme de Nucingen, whom Rastignac meets by the Marquis d’Ajuda-Pinto’s good graces. When left alone together, Rastignac quickly makes a move, giving ‘‘sweet speeches’’ that ‘‘a woman likes nothing better than to hear.’’ All, however, has not gone quite so swimmingly as he thinks. At the end of the opera, ‘‘The poor fellow [is] quite unaware that the Baroness [Nucingen] had paid no attention to him and was expecting a delusive and agonizing letter from De Marsay,’’ the lover who has deserted her.
No one in all this is happier than old Goriot, whose hideous little room at the Maison Vauquer makes quite a contrast to the grandeur of even his daughter’s carriage at the opera. The extent of Goriot’s delusions becomes apparent as Rastignac tells the old man about his evening with Delphine. At one point, he cries, ‘‘Mme de Restaud is fond of me too, I know, for a father sees into his children’s hearts and judges their intentions just as God does ours.’’ To Rastignac’s objection that it is odd that daughters who love him so much should allow him to live in poverty while they enjoy immense luxury, Goriot explains that he cannot explain—but that he ‘‘live[s] three lives,’’ his own and his daughters’.
All this has stirred Rastignac’s own ambition still further, and he begins to give serious thought to Vautrin’s offer. Rastignac’s need for funds becomes all the more apparent in a subsequent encounter with Mme de Nucingen. She invites him to her house, and then goes with him to a gambling den, where she asks him to bet with her money. Fortunately, Rastignac does well, though he is completely ignorant of the rules of the game he is playing. He returns to Delphine with seven thousand francs—enough to pay off her ex-lover’s debts, with a thousand francs to spare. This transaction solidifies their affair. But the high living to which he is now committed takes its toll, and Rastignac finds himself heavily in debt. Vautrin’s offer looms ever-present in the background, promising Rastignac a way out of his financial difficulties.
Part Four: Shadows of Intrigue
Rastignac toys more and more with the idea of courting Victorine Taillefer. Meanwhile, M Poiret and Mlle Michonneau are approached by a policeman, M Gondureau, who seeks their help in capturing the man they know as Vautrin. Vautrin, he explains, is actually ‘‘Jacques Collin, surnamed Trompe-la-Mort [Cheat-death or Beat-death],’’ a criminal of the highest order. Moreover, he tells the mindless Poiret and the canny Michonneau, they will need to drug Vautrin into sleep, because he is a homosexual and cannot be distracted by Michonneau. Gondureau promises to pay Michonneau three thousand francs to drug Vautrin.
However, Vautrin’s actions soon sour Rastignac on the idea of dueling with Victorine’s brother. Vautrin enters a room where Rastignac and Victorine are sitting together to ‘‘suddenly disturb their happiness by singing in a loud jeering voice.’’ Later he discusses with Rastignac the murder-to-be of Victorine’s brother in an extremely callous manner. Indeed, so disturbed is Rastignac that he ‘‘resolve[s] to go that evening to warn M Taillefer and his son.’’ It is at just this moment that Goriot enters, brimming with good cheer. He draws Rastignac aside to inform him that he has secured a nice apartment for the young man and Delphine—as long as they consent to his living just above them. Vautrin subsequently overhears Rastignac telling Goriot about the plan to kill Victorine’s brother in a duel, and Rastignac’s good intentions go for naught. Vautrin slips a sleeping potion into the other men’s drinks to keep them from warning M Taillefer of the impending duel.
Only a short while later Mlle Michonneau, on instructions from the police, slips a drug into Vautrin’s own drink. News arrives that Victorine’s brother is near death from wounds sustained in a duel, and Victorine and Mme Couture leave to attend to this surprising turn of events. A short while later, Vautrin falls down as though dead. Rastignac goes out to fetch his friend Bianchon, and is struck during his solitary wanderings—for the first time in the novel—by pangs of conscience regarding the sanctity of marriage. He works to convince himself that an affair with Delphine will not be wronging her husband, and has more or less succeeded by the time he returns to the boardinghouse. The police arrive moments later; Vautrin offers no resistance to arrest. Instead, he makes a grand speech. In speaking to the assembled company (only Goriot is absent), he becomes ‘‘no longer a single man, but the epitome of a degenerate nation, of a people at once savage, logical, brutal, and facile.’’ His courage and powerful personality, his intensity and authenticity, leave the rest of the boarders awed. As Sylvie puts it, ‘‘Well, he was a man all the same!’’ Accordingly, the rest of the company insists that Michonneau and Poiret, now branded as police spies, leave the Maison Vauquer immediately. Goriot returns to whisk Rastignac away to his new apartment, and only ten of the usual eighteen are left to dine at Mme Vauquer’s establishment.
In the new apartment, Rastignac has qualms about accepting so much from Delphine and her father. Balzac writes, ‘‘the arrest of Vautrin, which showed him the depths of the abyss into which he had so nearly fallen, had strengthened his delicacy and better feelings. . . powerfully.’’ Goriot reveals that he is prepared to lend Rastignac all he needs; however, Goriot must absurdly deprive himself to make it possible. He tells the couple, ‘‘I can live like a king on two francs a day, and I shall have something left over.’’ All is not necessarily well, though, as Goriot acts almost as though he, not Rastignac, is his daughter’s lover:
“They behaved like children all through the evening, and Pere Goriot was not the most sensible ` of the three. He sat at his daughter’s feet and kissed them; he gazed long into her eyes, rubbed his head against her dress and, in short, was as foolish as the youngest and most tender lover could be.”
Part Five: Confrontation
Much has been settled, but one great event remains: Mme de Nucingen’s introduction into the upper echelons of Parisian high society at a grand ball thrown by Rastignac’s cousin, Mme de Beause´ant. Delphine is overjoyed to see the invitation, which clearly notes that her husband, the Baron de Nucingen, is not to attend. The following day, though, as he is gathering the very last of his effects from the Maison Vauquer, Rastignac overhears a troubling conversation between Goriot and Delphine. The Baron de Nucingen, it seems, has all of her money tied up in shady investments, and she has little truly available to her. Meanwhile, Anastasie de Restaud enters and begs help from her father. She has sold the Restaud family jewels to a moneylender in order to support her cheating lover Maxime de Trailles and been found out by her husband, who is dispossessing her of all that she has—even of her children—and threatening to dramatically curtail her movements. All this is too much for Goriot: ‘‘It is the end of the world,’’ he cries, ‘‘I am sure the world is going to pieces. Go and save yourselves before it happens!’’ The two women begin to argue, and Goriot becomes increasingly hysterical.
Rastignac rushes in with a bill of exchange— much like a present-day bank check—that Vautrin had given him when he tried to persuade him to swindle Victorine out of her family money. Anastasie accepts the money without gratitude, and heaps insults upon her sister until Goriot cries out repeatedly, ‘‘They are killing me.’’ And indeed the old man does seem to be dying, which does not stop Mme de Restaud from leaving as soon as she has secured his signature on the bill of exchange. Bianchon arrives and confirms that Goriot is dying. Rastignac recalls ‘‘how the old man’s two daughters had worked upon their father’s heart without mercy’’ although he chooses to believe that Delphine at least loves her father. That evening, at the opera, he takes ‘‘precautions to avoid alarming Mme de Nucingen,’’ but these prove unnecessary. She is not inclined to believe her father is truly dying, though she does hold him in part responsible for her unhappiness over the past years. She is much more interested in being courted by Rastignac and in gossiping about the Marquis d’Ajuda-Pinto’s impending marriage, which will take place on the day his former mistress, Mme de Beause´ant, holds her grand ball.
Part Six: The End Approaches
Caught up in the pleasure of being alone together, neither Delphine nor Rastignac think of Goriot until late the next day. When Rastignac arrives at the Maison Vauquer, he finds that Goriot had gone out to sell the very last thing of value that he had—the first set of silver cutlery he ever owned, and which he has kept to this moment as a reminder of happier times— and subsequently collapsed. Bianchon tends to the old man, who has sold the silver to pay a final debt for Anastasie and who now talks irrationally of returning to business, of buying grain abroad and selling it for a profit in France. With Bianchon, Rastignac keeps watch over Goriot, whose condition improves somewhat as the day of the ball approaches. Neither daughter visits, with Mme de Restaud, far too focused on the ball, sending only a messenger to pick up the money her father has procured for her and Mme de Nucingen.
At the ball itself, Mme de Beause´ant is glad to see Rastignac, the only person there whom she feels she can truly trust, and gives him a letter for the Marquis d’Ajuda-Pinto. Rastignac is deeply affected by Beause´ant’s grief. Back at the Maison Vauquer, the dying Goriot is himself tormented by a feverish grief and a tragic awareness of his own previous blindness regarding his daughters’ supposed devotion to him.
Torn at the thought of the old man dying alone, Rastignac goes to find Mme de Restaud, but her husband will not let her leave. She, for her part, is a changed person: ‘‘Before turning to Rastignac, her timid glance at her husband told of the prostration of a will, crushed by moral and physical tyranny.’’ Rastignac is also unsuccessful with Delphine. Delphine does not at first believe her father is deathly ill, and once she has been convinced, she is willing to come but is also held back by her husband. Upon Rastignac’s return to the boardinghouse, Mme Vauquer presses him for money for Goriot’s rent and a shroud in which to wrap him. When paid, she sends Sylvie to collect a set of moldy sheets to use as a shroud. Goriot’s final words are ‘‘My darlings!’’ Mme de Restaud, at least, is there for his death; Delphine never arrives, and neither woman’s family is willing to pay funeral expenses or even to receive Rastignac when he calls on them. At the Pere-Lachaise cemetery, ` Rastignac and the servant Christophe are the only mourners, and Rastignac must borrow a franc from Christophe in order to pay the gravediggers their fee. Still, in the end he is able to look out over the evening lights of Paris from the cemetery on its hill, and to see in the city his future. The novel closes with a foreshadow of this future: ‘‘Then, as a first challenge offered to Society, Rastignac [goes] to dine with Mme de Nucingen.’’
Source Credits:
Sara Constantakis, Novels for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context & Criticism on Commonly Studied Novels, Honore de Balzac, Volume 33, Gale-Cengage Learning, 2010