This surprising aspect of the novel passed unnoticed for over a century after its publication, just as it escapes Rastignac’s attention until Mademoiselle Michonneau shines ‘a terrifying light into his soul’ by hinting at the nature of his attachment to Vautrin (p. 184). If anyone had noticed, the novel would certainly have been banned. In Balzac’s hands, the practical impossibility of writing openly about a ‘sodomite’ became a literary advantage. Vautrin’s love is one of the secrets that Rastignac must discover for his ‘education’ to be complete. Like the reader, he must follow clues and decipher innuendos: the words ‘My angel’, Vautrin’s predilection for tales of passionate male friendship or the expression ‘men who have their passions’ (‘des hommes à passions’) (pp. 42, 146), which was prostitutes’ slang for ‘homosexuals’.
Old Man Goriot revealed the extent of Balzac’s ambition as a chronicler of modern life. It also introduced a device that would help to hold this teeming universe together. Other novelists had toyed with the idea of making characters recur from one novel to the next, but no one had applied it in such a full and systematic fashion. Rastignac had already appeared as a young dandy in The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831). In Old Man Goriot, he appears at an earlier stage of his career. The tale of Madame de Beauséant’s abandonment had already been told in ‘The Abandoned Woman’ (1833). The medical student Bianchon, who eats at the Maison Vauquer, would appear in thirty other stories. Vautrin himself, as Balzac wrote in Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (‘A Harlot High and Low’), became ‘a kind of spinal column who, by his horrible influence, joins, so to speak, Old Man Goriot to Lost Illusions and Lost Illusions to Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes’. The end of the novel looks forward to the continuing adventures of Eugène de Rastignac.
So many of Balzac’s characters are related to one another that the genealogical tree of The Human Comedy covers three walls of the Balzac museum in his house at Passy. A few heroic scholars and monomaniacal readers have managed to commit this gigantic human web to memory. However, all of Balzac’s stories can be read quite separately, without any knowledge of the others. The point was not to create a soap opera with a cast of two thousand but to reproduce the three-dimensional effects of real life. Characters become known to us, like real acquaintances, little by little, at different stages of their lives. They show the effects of passing time.
The vital importance of this device lies in the impression of interconnectedness. Every character has hypertextual connotations, just as every inanimate object vibrates with significance. The opening description of the boarding house, which is probably one of the most famous settings of a scene in the history of fiction, serves as an introduction to this alluringly consistent world of material and spiritual unity. Madame Vauquer is not a figure in front of a painted backdrop but a zoological specimen in its natural environment. The creature and its habitat are described simultaneously. Each is explained by the other. Madame Vauquer not only ties the various characters together, she also proves that there is nothing random in the world.
Balzac’s total descriptions struck many of his contemporaries as a quirky conceit. One newspaper, the Gazette des femmes, parodied his method by telling the story of a house that died of a chest complaint because its walls were thin and damp.14 Almost two centuries later, his intimation of unity in the infinitesimal bric-a-brac of daily life looks like an aspect of the novel’s modernity. His method gave the slightest detail an air of mysterious importance. It redeemed the tawdriness and the clutter. The description of the Vauquer boarding house, that Aladdin’s cave of worthless objects, has a curiously inspiring effect. It suggests that the new world of mass-produced objects had an organic life of its own, that there was mystery in streets where every house had a number and every ornament a manufacturer’s name. Even before Vautrin’s true identity is revealed, the boarding house is a crime scene in which everything is a clue to everything else. It is no coincidence that the inventor of the detective story, Edgar Allan Poe, was an avid reader of The Human Comedy. Balzac’s characters snuffle about, sifting trivial evidence, prying into private lives. Rastignac peers through Goriot’s keyhole, Madame Vauquer investigates his savings, Mademoiselle Michonneau seems to see through walls. Like a highly specialized Sherlock Holmes, Goriot can sniff a crust of bread and identify the quality and provenance of the flour. The narrator himself thinks like a detective, even when no crime has been committed and when the object of forensic investigation is something of no apparent interest, such as a piece of wallpaper or a wooden box of numbered pigeon holes containing napkins.
In a world that seems to be governed by the minor deities of money and sex, this minute omniscience suggests a higher intelligence beyond the moral chaos of the novel. The question of God’s existence hovers over the whole drama. Both Goriot and Rastignac are troubled by God’s apparent refusal to order the world as morality and their own desires would demand. Goriot claims to have understood God when he became a father, though he barely understands his own daughters. Vautrin is closer to the sceptical spirit of the novel when he gleefully imagines the disappointment of the virtuous if God fails to turn up on the Day of Judgement. Vautrin plays the role traditionally assigned to fairy godmothers and dispensers of divine justice. He penetrates and moulds the minds of the characters like a novelist. He knows how to make their dreams come true. To Rastignac, he reveals the inner workings of society. To the reader, he gives a glimpse of the ferocious intelligence that created him.
*
For most of his professional career, Balzac was admired as a writer of short stories. After his death, he was celebrated as France’s pre-eminent novelist. Old Man Goriot was seen as one of the great nineteenth-century novels, long before that century had ended. George Eliot thought it ‘hateful’,15 but she read it aloud from beginning to end. Old Man Goriot showed that the novel was a more capacious genre than anyone had supposed and that an analysis of modern society could be an enthralling tale. One day, Balzac’s innovations would appear to be the normal substance of the novel: the effects of environment and physiology on human behaviour; the depiction of social types and the accurate reproduction of their language; the attempt to catalogue the trivia of modern life, and especially the seamy side of urban life.
The idea that Balzac was a realist was already so well established in 1859, nine years after his death, that the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire thought it necessary to emphasize the supernaturalism of his characters:
I have often been amazed that Balzac’s great glory was his reputation as an observer, for it always seemed to me that his principal merit lay in his being a visionary, and an impassioned visionary. All his characters are gifted with that ardour of life that animated himself. All his fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams … In Balzac, even the door-keepers have genius. All his minds are weapons loaded to the muzzle with will – just like Balzac himself.16
Now that Old Man Goriot is well established as a monument of Western literature, the arguments that once surrounded it seem quaint and unimportant. Many critics believed that it was a profoundly immoral work. They thought – as Poiret says of convicts who live with their mistresses – that it ‘set an extremely bad example to the rest of society’ (p. 151). According to some writers of the time, young men were treating Rastignac as a role model and criminals were using Vautrin’s advice as an instruction manual. Balzac himself took accusations of immorality quite seriously. He insisted that ‘vice’ should be accurately portrayed in alluring colours, and that the morality of a tale lay in its truth not in its social acceptability. ‘The author is not deliberately moral or immoral,’ he wrote in the preface to the second edition of Old Man Goriot. ‘The general plan that joins his works one to the other … compels him to depict everything.’ Of course, he knew that his novels would be read for enjoyment, not for moral improvement, and that The Human Comedy could inspire in its readers the kind of obsessional fervour that destroys his fictional families. As Oscar Wilde observed, when he compared
Balzac’s full-blooded realism to the ghostly reality of life: ‘A steady course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our acquaintances to the shadows of shades.’17
The real story of Old Man Goriot’s critical reception lies in the unrecorded pleasure of its countless readers and in the afterlife of its characters. Rastignac and Vautrin are a shadowy presence in a hundred other ‘education’ novels: Hugo’s Les Misérables, Dickens’s Great Expectations, Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Academic critics recognized Old Man Goriot as one of the best introductions to Balzac’s colossal work and ensured that it was read, or slowly deciphered, by generations of schoolchildren. Histories of literature presented Balzac as the progenitor of Realism and Naturalism. Madame Vauquer’s boarding house found itself at the centre of modern literary history.
Graham Robb
NOTES
1. Balzac, Lettres à Madame Hanska, ed. Roger Pierrot (Paris: Laffont, 1990), I, p. 195 (18 October 1834).
2. Quoted by Rose Fortassier in La Comédie Humaine, ed. Pierre-Georges Castex (Paris: Gallimard, 1976–81), III, p. 5.
3. Lettres à Madame Hanska, I, p. 268 (23 August 1835).
4. Balzac, Correspondance, ed. Roger Pierrot (Paris: Garnier, 1960–69), II, p. 553 (28 September 1834).
5. Lettres à Madame Hanska, I, p. 208 (26 November 1834).
6. Antoine Fontaney, Journal intime (Paris: Les Presses françaises, 1925), p. 30 (7 September 1831).
7. Preface to the second edition of Le Père Goriot (1835): La Comédie Humaine, III, p. 46.
8. Lettres à Madame Hanska, I, p. 234 (11 March 1835).
9. Lettres à Madame Hanska, I, p. 221 (4 January 1835).
10. Lettres à Madame Hanska, I, p. 52 (end of August 1833).
11. Lettres à Madame Hanska, I, p. 204 (26 October 1834).
12. Preface to La Comédie Humaine, I, p. 9.
13. ‘Pension’, in Pierre Larousse, Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, XII (1874), p. 565.
14. ‘La Famille maigre’, Gazette des femmes, 2 December 1843.
15. Quoted by Donald Adamson in ‘Le Père Goriot devant la critique anglaise’, L’Année balzacienne (1986), p. 274.
16. Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1975–6), II, p. 120.
17. Oscar Wilde, ‘The Decay of Lying’, Intentions (1891; London: Methuen, 1913), pp. 15–16.
Further Reading
BIOGRAPHY
Hunt, Herbert J., Honoré de Balzac: A Biography (1957; New York: Greenwood Press, 1969). A short summary of Balzac’s life by one of his most scrupulous translators.
Maurois, André, Prometheus: The Life of Balzac (London: The Bodley Head Ltd, 1965). An engaging life by the biographer of Shelley, Proust, Hugo and Sand.
Robb, Graham, Balzac: A Biography (1994; London: Picador, 2000). The most recent to appear in English; Robb skilfully interweaves Balzac’s life with his work.
Zweig, Stefan, Balzac (1946; London: Cassell, 1970). Insightful and pays tribute to Balzac’s immense creative energy and vision.
INTERPRETATION
Butler, Ronnie, Balzac and the French Revolution (London and Canberra: Croom Helm; Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1983). A study of Balzac’s preoccupation with the society that emerged from the Revolution.
Kanes, Martin (ed.), Critical Essays on Honoré de Balzac (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1990). A collection of modern criticism and essays, with literary vignettes and letters by various authors.
Prendergast, Christopher, Balzac: Fiction and Melodrama (London: Edward Arnold; New York: Holmes and Meier, 1978). An exploration and appreciation of the ‘melodramatic’ aspects of Balzac’s writing.
Tilby, Michael (ed.), Balzac (Modern Literatures in Perspective series) (London and New York: Longman, 1995). Critical essays presenting reactions to Balzac’s work from the time of its publication to the present day.
HISTORY
Hemmings, F. W. J., Culture and Society in France, 1789–1848 (Leicester University Press; New York: Peter Lang, 1987). A study of cultural change and social development in the period between the two revolutions.
Perrot, Michelle (ed.), A History of Private Life: 4. From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, ed. Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1990). A Balzacian approach reflected in the title: a history of the private, everyday lives of individuals.
Note on the Text and Translation
The translation follows the text of the Pléiade edition of Le Père Goriot, edited by Rose Fortassier (Gallimard, 1976). This is based on Balzac’s personal copy of the 1843 Furne edition, which contains his final corrections in the margins.
The six sections take the titles of the four instalments of the novel as it appeared in the Revue de Paris (1835). The first and last instalments were made up of two chapters each. See Introduction pp. xvii–xviii.
The main source of nineteenth-century English equivalents for thieves’ cant and slang in the translation is Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of the Underworld (1949). Not all slang is explained in the Notes, especially where its main purpose has been to add colour or tone.
Note on Money
Financial references abound in Old Man Goriot (see Introduction pp. xviii–xxiii on Balzac’s innovative ‘socio-economic view of human relations’). Many of them are fairly complex and specific explanations, or interpretations, have been attempted in the notes. A number of general points are dealt with below.
Throughout the novel, characters refer to different currency systems, which it might be useful to clarify here.
The official currency in France at the time was the decimal (Germinal) franc, introduced by the Republican government in 1795 but not minted (due to a shortage of bullion) until 1803. The franc was divided into decimes and centimes and issued in 1-franc, 5-franc (écu) and 20-franc (napoléon) pieces.
This system replaced the Ancien Régime livre tournois (3 deniers to the liard, 12 deniers to the sou, 20 sous to the livre, 6 livres to the écu, 24 livres to the louis d’or). However, the livre tournois, exchangeable at a rate of 81 livres to 80 francs, remained in circulation until 1834.
During the Bourbon Restoration, the 20-franc piece, or napoléon, was renamed the louis.
Banknotes were issued by the Bank of France from 1800, in denominations of 500 and 1,000 francs. These replaced the unpopular revolutionary assignats, whose swift devaluation led to a long-term distrust of paper money and preference for stable coinage in France.
To give an idea of the relative worth of money in the novel: Vautrin tips the postman 20 sous (1 franc); Rastignac pays Madame Vauquer 45 francs a month for food and lodging (540 francs per year) and receives an allowance of twelve hundred a year from his cash-strapped family; Goriot’s daughters have (or are supposed to have) annual incomes of 36,000 or 50,000 francs (Goriot cites both figures); Madame Vauquer has 40,000 francs in savings; Monsieur d’Ajuda-Pinto has a carriage and pair worth ‘at least thirty thousand francs’. See also Vautrin’s rundown, for Rastignac’s benefit, of the cost of living as a man of fashion in Paris (pp. 137–8).
OLD MAN GORIOT
To the great and illustrious Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire,1 as an admiring tribute to his work and his genius.
de Balzac
I
A RESPECTABLE BOARDING HOUSE
For the last forty years, an old woman by the name of Madame Vauquer, née de Conflans, has run a boarding house in Paris, in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève,2 between the Latin Quarter and the Faubourg Saint-Marceau.3 Although this respectable establishment, known as the Maison Vauquer, accepts both men and women, young and old, its habits have never once excited malicious gossip. But then, no young lady has been seen there for thirty years and a young man who lodges there must have a very small allowance from his family. However, in 1819, the year in which this drama begins, one poor young woman was to be found there. Now, the word drama h
as fallen into some disrepute, having been bandied about in such an excessive and perverse way, in this age of tear-strewn literature,4 but it does ask to be used here. Not that this story is dramatic in the true sense of the term, but by the end of it, perhaps a few tears will have been shed intra muros et extra.5 Will it be understood outside Paris? There is room for doubt. The peculiarities of this scene packed with commentary and local colour may only be appreciated between the hills of Montmartre and the heights of Montrouge, in that illustrious valley of endlessly crumbling stucco and black, mud-clogged gutters; a valley full of genuine suffering and frequently counterfeit joy, where life is so frantically hectic that only the most freakish anomaly will produce any lasting sensation. Nonetheless, here and there, in this dense web of vice and virtue, you come across sufferings that seem grand and solemn: the selfish, the self-interested stop and feel pity; although for them such things are no sooner seen than swallowed, as swiftly as succulent fruit. A stouter heart than most may put a temporary spoke in the wheel of the chariot of civilization, which resembles that of the idol of Jaggernaut,6 but will soon be crushed as it continues its glorious progress. You will react in much the same way, you who are holding this book in your white hand, you who are sinking into a soft-cushioned chair saying to yourself: ‘Perhaps this will entertain me.’ After reading about old man Goriot’s secret woes, you will dine heartily, blaming your insensitivity firmly on the author, accusing him of exaggeration, pointing the finger at his feverish imagination. Well! Let me tell you that this drama is neither fiction nor romance. All is true,7 so true that we may each recognize elements of it close to home, perhaps even in our hearts.