Pere Goriot

Table of Contents

 

 

 

Step by step the daylight decreases, and the cicerone's droning voice grows hollower as the traveler descends into the Catacombs. The comparison holds good! Who shall say which is more ghastly, the sight of the bleached skulls or of dried-up human hearts?

(page 11)

 

This laughing-stock was the retired vermicelli-merchant, Father Goriot, upon whose face a painter, like the historian, would have concentrated all the light in his picture.

(page 25)

 

“If ever you explore a Parisian woman's heart, you will find the money-lender first, and the lover afterwards.”

(page 51)

 

“Our heart is a treasury; if you pour out all its wealth at once, you are bankrupt. We show no more mercy to the affection that reveals its utmost extent than we do to another kind of prodigal who has not a penny left. Their father had given them all he had. For twenty years he had given his whole heart to them; then, one day, he gave them all his fortune too. The lemon was squeezed; the girls left the rest in the gutter.”

(pages 83-84)

 

“In Paris success is everything.”

(page 86)

 

Goriot had raised the two girls to the level of the angels; and, quite naturally, he himself was left beneath them. Poor man! he loved them even for the pain that they gave him.

(page 96)

 

“Don't stick to your opinions any more than to your words. If any one asks you for them, let him have them—at a price. A man who prides himself on going in a straight line through life is an idiot who believes in infallibility. There are no such things as principles; there are only events, and there are no laws but those of expediency: a man of talent accepts events and the circumstances in which he finds himself, and turns everything to his own ends.”

(page 120)

 

“Now and then in life, you see, you must play for heavy stakes, and it is no use wasting your luck on low play.”

(page 144)

 

“Oh! so we have still a few dubious tatters of the swaddling clothes of virtue about us!”

(page 182)

 

The pain expressed in his face seemed greater than it is given to humanity to know. The agony of this Christ of paternity can only be compared with the masterpieces of those princes of the palette who have left for us the record of their visions of an agony suffered for a whole world by the Saviour of men.

(page 222)

 

The words came from him like a sob, a hoarse sound like the death rattle of a dying man; it seemed indeed like the agony of death when the father's love was powerless.

(page 242)

 

Madame de Beauséant stood at the door of the first salon to receive the guests who were styled her friends. She was dressed in white, and wore no ornament in the plaits of hair braided about her head; her face was calm; there was no sign there of pride, nor of pain, nor of joy that she did not feel. No one could read her soul; she stood there like some Niobe carved in marble. For a few intimate friends there was a tinge of satire in her smile; but no scrutiny saw any change in her, nor had she looked otherwise in the days of the glory of her happiness. The most callous of her guests admired her as young Rome applauded some gladiator who could die smiling. It seemed as if society had adorned itself for a last audience of one of its sovereigns.

(page 262)

 

“My cup of misery is full.”

(page 287)

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Le Père Goriot
was originally published in the Revue de Paris in 1834 and in book form in 1835. Ellen Marriage's English translation first appeared in 1901.

 

Published in 2005 by Barnes & Noble Classics with new Introduction, Notes, Biography,

Chronology, Inspired By, Comments & Questions, and For Further Reading.

 

Introduction, Notes, and For Further Reading

Copyright @ 2005 by Peter Connor.

 

Note on Honoré de Balzac, The World of Honoré de Balzac and
Père Goriot,

Inspired by
Père Goriot
and
La Comédie humaine,
Comments & Questions, and translation of “Balzac's Second Preface to
Père Goriot”

 

Copyright © 2005 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

 

In our section Comments & Questions, the selections by Charles Baudelaire and Victor Hugo are from
Critical Essays on Honoré de Balzac,
by Martin Kanes, G.K Hall,

© 1990 by G.K Hall. Reprinted by permission of The Gale Group.

 

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FIRST PRINTING

Honoré de Balzac had a complex and dynamic life—as a writer, raconteur, rogue, dandy, business failure, and workaholic. The novels of
La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy)
made him a literary giant of his day (and ours), and the most comprehensive chronicler of post-Napoleonic Paris. Balzac was born in Tours, France, on May 20, 1799, to a bourgeois family that had little interest or involvement in their son's childhood. Placed in boarding school when he was very young, Balzac studied little and read voraciously, and suffered a depressive breakdown. After leaving school, he worked for several years as a law clerk in Paris but abandoned the legal profession to pursue his dream of writing.

The tireless author rented a musty attic flat and spent days and nights composing sensationalist novels. When they did not make money, he tried his hand at business, with equally disheartening results. He was buoyed emotionally by a liaison with a woman twice his age, Madame de Berny, but impending bankruptcy led him to attempt writing once more. The resulting novels,
Les Chouans
and the controversial satire
Physiologie du Mariage,
brought him success at last, and open invitations to the literary salons of Paris.

Now with some means at his disposal, Balzac lived as a dandy and, despite his unremarkable appearance, charmed and seduced many women. Fueling himself with potent coffee, he slept little; over his lifetime he created more than ninety novels and between 2,000 and 3,000 characters, in addition to numerous journal articles. Despite his literary success, Balzac made a series of bad investments. Debt was the bane of his life; for a time it even put him in hiding from creditors.

In 1841 Balzac grouped his novels of post-Napoleonic Paris and its rising middle class under the umbrella title
La Comédie humaine. Père Goriot, Les Illusions perdues (Lost Illusions), Cousine Bette, Cousin Pons, and Eugénie Grandet
are some of his masterpieces. Balzac's realistic style and sociological detailing of industrial-era France went on to influence some of the country's great authors, such as Émile Zola and Gustave Flaubert.