Pere Goriot (2 page)

After a lifetime avoiding marriage, Balzac wed his longtime paramour, Eveline Rzewuska, Countess Hanska, in the spring of 1850. When he died on August 21 of that year, Victor Hugo honored his passing with a memorial speech. Honoré de Balzac is buried at Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

Subject of
Père Goriot
—A good man—middle-class
lodging house—600 fr. income—having spent every
penny for his daughters who each has 50,000 fr.
income—dying like a dog.

—BALZAC

 

 

Père Goriot
is one of Balzac's best-known novels, and is widely regarded as a classic of world literature. It is often read in schools and universities, perhaps because one of the main characters in the book, the young Eugène de Rastignac, is a student (although he spends little time studying), and parts of the novel take place in and around the Latin Quarter, which houses the great French institutions of learning. A strong appeal of the book is its wonderfully vivid description of this part of the city, and indeed of all of Paris—its splendor, its squalor, its social divisions, its characters, its institutions, its life. Anyone acquainted with the architecture and topography of Paris will recognize familiar and evocative place names—the Jardin des Plantes, the Opera, the rue Saint-Jacques, Montmartre, the Place Sorbonne, Père-Lachaise cemetery—and can follow Eugene step by step on his long walks between the Chaussée d'Antin and the Faubourg Saint-Germain. So Parisian is the setting of this work that its author wondered: “Will any one without the walls of Paris understand it?” (p. 9).

Père Goriot
is also the perfect novel to start with if one has read none of the roughly ninety novels and stories that make up
La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy),
the title Balzac gave to his collected oeuvre. It is probably with
Père Goriot
that Balzac consciously set about perfecting the technique of recurring characters that marks his signal contribution to literary

history; in it, he introduces a number of people who reappear in later novels, and brings back a few who have been introduced already in earlier ones. Indeed, Rastignac stands out as an exemplary figure in this new way of envisioning the novel. Avid readers of Balzac at the time had encountered him already in
La Peau de chagrin ( The Wild Ass's Skin,
1831), a novel published before
Père Goriot
(1835) but in which Rastignac appears as a mature man, older than the young student living at the Maison Vauquer in
Père Goriot. Pere Goriot
gives us the story of Rastignac's beginnings in society; a prequel to
The Wild Ass's Skin,
it provides the backstory (as they say in Hollywood), just as other novels in
La Comédie humaine
will inform us about Rastignac's adventures later in life. Explaining his system of composition in the preface to Illusions perdues (Lost Illusions, 1843), Balzac writes: “When one of these characters finds himself, like M. de Rastignac in
Père Goriot,
arrested in mid-career, you should seek him out again in Profil de Marquise
(Profile of a Marquesa),
in
The Interdiction [L'Interdiction] ,
in The Firm of
Nucingen [La Maison Nucingen],
and finally in The Wild Ass's Skin, acting in each epoch according to the rank he has then reached.”

This explains the occasional reference in
Père Goriot
to the future life of one of its characters, as for example when Balzac writes of Rastignac that “the self-possession which pre-eminently distinguished him in later life already stood him in good stead” (p. 129). Rastignac appears in more than twenty of the novels in
La Comédie humaine,
a vast tapestry of characters whose lives are interwoven in different ways at different periods. (When one considers the incidence of recurrence of other characters from
Père Goriot
—the Baron de Nucingen appears or is mentioned in thirty-one stories, Bianchon in twenty-nine, Delphine in seventeen, Gobseck in thirteen, Madame de Beauséant in ten, etc.—one begins to get an idea of the complexity of the social tableau Balzac painted.) The interweaving is crucial: Balzac is less interested in individual characters than in the relations that bind them together at different moments in their lives. Fascinated by the social bond in its manifold forms, Balzac wrote novels and stories that abound in the representation of alliances, friendships, associations, groups, gangs, families (and pseudofamilies, such as the boarders at the Maison Vauquer). Although he is known as the creator of some of the most compelling characters of nineteenth-century fiction (including Rastignac and Vautrin from Goriot), and in spite of the fact that he wrote in an era of unprecedented individualism—the era of individual rights and bourgeois liberalism that came fast upon the revolutionary turmoil of the late eighteenth century—one could perhaps argue that Balzac's work demonstrates that there is no such entity as the individual ; there is only the collective, shared existence of humanity (the boardinghouse in
Père Goriot
is a fine example of this commonality) , along with a thoroughly modern sense of the precariousness of the very categories of individual, self, and identity, which Balzac approaches with skepticism. The method of recurring characters is designed precisely to allow for the representation of a vast social panorama in all its multiplicity as well as the successive and different selves (or “incarnations,” as he liked to say; see
La Dernière incarnation de Vautrin
[1847;
The Last Incarnation of Yautrin] )
for a single character who is anything but an individual.