Pere Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
COMMENTS
Charles Baudelaire
If Balzac made something admirable, always odd and often sublime, out of this vulgar genre [of the novel], it is because he poured all his being into it. I have often been astonished that Balzac’s great glory has been to be perceived as an observer ; it always seemed to me that his principal merit was to have been a visionary, a passionate visionary.... He sometimes makes me think of those printmakers who are never content with the bite of the acid but who transform the main lines of the plate into ravines. Marvels emerge from this astonishing natural tendency. But this disposition is generally defined as “Balzac’s faults.” To put it more accurately, they are precisely his qualities. Who can boast of being as greatly gifted as he, and able to apply a method that permits him so confidently to clothe pure triviality with light and purple? Who can do that? Indeed, whoever does not do that, to tell the truth, does nothing much.
—translated by Martin Kanes, from L’Artiste (March 13, 1859)
Algernon Swinburne
The pure artist never asserts, he suggests and therefore his meaning is totally lost upon moralists and socialists—is indeed irreparably wasted upon the run of men who cannot work out suggestions. Balzac asserts; and Balzac cannot blunder or lie. So profound and extensive a capacity of moral apprehension no other prose writer, no man of mere analytic faculty, ever had or can have.
—from William Blake: A Critical Essay (1868)
Victor Hugo
All [Balzac’s] books form but a single book, a living, shining, profound book, in which our whole contemporary civilization can be seen going and coming, walking and moving, with a terrible and frightening je ne sais quoi mixed in with reality: a marvelous book called by its maker a comedy but which he might have called a history, which assumes all shapes and styles, which goes beyond Tacitus to Suetonius, and reaches beyond Beaumarchais to Rabelais; a book that is both observation and imagination, lavish in truth, intimacy, middle-class values, triviality, materiality, and that, suddenly and occasionally, tearing these realities wide open, lets us glimpse the most somber and tragic ideal.
—translated by Martin Kanes, from Actes et Paroles (1872)
Leslie Stephen
Goriot is the modern King Lear. Mesdames de Restaud and de Nucingen are the representatives of Regan and Goneril; but the Parisian Lear is not allowed the consolation of a Cordelia; the cup of misery is measured out to him drop by drop, and the bitterness of each dose is analysed with chemical accuracy. We watch the poor old broken-down merchant, who has impoverished himself to provide his daughters’ dowries, and has gradually stripped himself, first of comfort, and then of the necessaries of life to satisfy the demands of their folly and luxury, as we might watch a man clinging to the edge of a cliff and gradually dropping lower and lower, catching feebly at every point of support till his strength is exhausted, and the inevitable catastrophe follows. The daughters, allowed to retain some fragments of good feeling and not quite irredeemably hateful, are gradually yielding to the demoralising influence of a heartless vanity. They yield, it is true, pretty completely at last; but their wickedness seems to reveal the influence of a vague but omnipotent power of evil in the background....
Hideous as the performance appears when coolly stated, it must be admitted that the ladies have got into such terrible perplexities from tampering with the seventh commandment, that there is some excuse for their breaking the fifth. Whether such an accumulation of horrors is a legitimate process in art, and whether a healthy imagination would like to dwell upon such loathsome social sores, is another question. The comparison suggested with “King Lear” may illustrate the point. In Balzac all the subordinate details which Shakespeare throws in with a very slovenly touch are elaborately drawn and contribute powerfully to the total impression. On the other hand we never reach the lofty poetical heights of the grandest scenes in “King Lear.” But the situation of the two heroes offers an instructive contrast. Lear is weak, but is never contemptible; he is the ruin of a gallant old king, is guilty of no degrading compliance, and dies like a man, with his “good biting falchion” still grasped in his feeble hand. To change him into Goriot we must suppose that he had licked the hand which struck him, that he had helped on the adulterous intrigues of Goneril and Regan from sheer weakness, and that all his fury had been directed against Cornwall and Albany for objecting to his daughter’s eccentric views of the obligation of the marriage vow. Paternal affection leading a man to the most trying self-sacrifice is a worthy motive for a great drama or romance; but Balzac is so anxious to intensify the emotion, that he makes even paternal affection morally degrading. Everything must be done to heighten the colouring. Our sympathies are to be excited by making the sacrifice as complete, and the emotion which prompts it as overpowering, as possible; until at last the love of children becomes a monomania. Goriot is not only dragged through the mud of Paris, but he grovels in it with a will. In short, Balzac wants that highest power which shows itself in moderation, and commits a fault like that of an orator who emphasises every sentence. With less expenditure of horrors, he would excite our compassion more powerfully. But after all, Goriot is, perhaps, more really affecting even than King Lear.
—from Hours in a Library (1874)
Oscar Wilde
It was said of Trollope that he increased the number of our acquaintances without adding to our visiting list; but after the Comédie humaine one begins to believe that the only real people are the people who have never existed. Lucien de Rubempré, le Père Goriot, Ursule Mirouet, Marguerite Claes, the Baron Hulot, Madame Marneffe, le Cousin Pons, De Marsay—all bring with them a kind of contagious illusion of life. They have a fierce vitality about them: their existence is fervent and fierycoloured ; we not merely feel for them but we see them—they dominate our fancy and defy scepticism. A steady course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our acquaintances to the shadows of shades. Who would care to go out to an evening party to meet Tomkins, the friend of one’s boy hood, when one can sit at home with Lucien de Rubempré? It is pleasanter to have the entree to Balzac’s society than to receive cards from all the duchesses in Mayfair.
—from the Pall-Mall Gazette (September 13, 1868)
Richard Burton
[In “Père Goriot”] we are plunged into an atmosphere of greed, jealousy, uncleanliness and hate, all steeped in the bourgeois street air of Paris. In this tale of thankless daughters and their piteous old father, all the hideousness possible to the ties of kin is uncovered to our frightened yet fascinated eye. The plot holds us in a vise; to recall Madame Vauquer’s boarding house is to shudder at the sights and smells! Compare it with Dickens’s Mrs. Todgers, and once and for all you have the difference between the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic genius....
It is usual to refer to Balzac as the first great realist of the French, indeed, of modern fiction. Strictly, he is not the first in France, as we have seen, since Beyle preceded him; nor in modern fiction, for Jane Austen, so admirably an artist of verity, came a generation before. But, as always when a compelling literary force appears, Balzac without any question dominates in the first half of the nineteenth century: more than this, he sets the mold of the type which marks the second half. In fact, the modern Novel means Balzac’s recipe. English fiction, along with that of Europe, shares this influence. We shall see in dealing with Dickens how definitely the English writer adopted the Balzac method as suited to the era and sympathetic to Dickens’s own nature....
Balzac’s work has a Shakesperian universality.
—from Masters of the English Novel (1909)
William Butler Yeats
There is no evidence that Balzac knew that things exist in being perceived, or, to adopt the formula of a later idealism, that they exist in being thought; his powerful body, his imagination which saw everywhere weight and magnitude, the science of his day, made him, like Descartes, consider matter as independent of mind.
—from The London Mercury (July 1934)
In some of his novels Balzac interrupts his narrative to discourse upon all kinds of irrelevant matters, but from this defect Old Man Goriot is on the whole free. He lets his characters explain themselves by their words and actions as objectively as it was in his nature to do.
—from Great Novelists and Their Novels: Essays on the
Ten Greatest Novels of the World and the Men
and Women Who Wrote Them (1948)
QUESTIONS
1. Does Balzac mean us to understand that human character is produced by the material objects that surround us—that is, not by something internal to a person, but outside?
2. How does Balzac get us to care about the vicissitudes of an ordinary old man?
3. How would you characterize Balzac as a psychologist? Is he astute? Is he deep? Or is he relatively indifferent to the depth of psychology? Do any of his characters seem to have a subconscious ?
4. Do you find any evidence of a hidden moral, or theory about society, or any metaphysical or religious belief that organizes the particulars, especially the plot and the characters’ fates, in Père Goriot?
For Further Reading
LA COMÉDIE HUMAINE
To discover the destiny of some of the characters introduced in Père Goriot, readers should pursue other novels in Balzac’s cycle of La Comédie humaine, beginning perhaps with La Femme abandonnée (The Abandoned Woman), La Duchesse de Langeais (The Duchess of Langeais), Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (A Harlot High and Low [also translated as Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life]), and La Peau de chagrin (The Wild Ass’s Skin [also translated as The Magic Skin] ) .
Other English Translations of Père Goriot
Old Goriot. Translated by Marion Ayton Crawford. London: Penguin Books, 1951.
Père Goriot. Translated by A. J. Krailsheimer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Père Goriot. Translated by Burton Raffel. London and New York: W. W. Norton, 1994.
French Editions
Castex, Pierre-Georges, ed. Père Goriot. Paris: Editions Garnier, 1960. The most complete edition available. Contains authoritative notes as well as many of the variants among the different early editions.
Vachon, Stéphane, ed. Père Goriot. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1995. An inexpensive edition with copious notes and an excellent dossier covering the history and reception of the work.
Biographies
Robb, Graham. Balzac: A Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994. Readable and accurate.
Pritchett, V. S. Balzac. London: Chatto and Windus, 1973. A lively biography by an acclaimed novelist, with numerous illustrations.
Criticism
Bellos, David. Honoré de Balzac: Old Goriot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. An excellent monograph by a renowned critic and translator.
Brooks, Peter, ed. Père Goriot. Translated by Burton Raffel. Norton Critical Edition. London and New York: W. W. Norton, 1998. A good place to start looking at the vast corpus of critical material relating to Père Goriot. Includes essays by Balzac’s contemporaries and other novelists writing about Goriot and about Balzac’s achievement in general (Sainte-Beuve, Baudelaire, Zola, Proust, James, etc.), as well as other modern criticism (Michel Butor, Ernst Robert Curtius, Erich Auerbach, and others).
Lukács, Georg. Studies in European Realism. London: Merlin Press, 1972.
Other
Sijie, Dai. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. Translated from the French by Ina Rilke. New York: Anchor Books, 2002. Set during China’s Cultural Revolution, this is the story of two boys, sent to a remote village for re-education, who discover a trove of Western classics in Chinese translation, including “Father Go.”
Other Works Cited in the Introduction
Ambrière, Madeleine. “Hommage à Pierre-Georges Castex.” L’Année balzacienne (1966).
Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953.
Balzac, Honoré de. Histoire des Treize. Edited by Pierre-Georges Castex. Paris: Editions Garnier, 1966.
Collins, Wilkie. My Miscellanies. In The Works of Wilkie Collins, vol. 20. New York: P. F. Collier, 1899.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. Dialogues. Translated by H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
Lanson, Gustave. Histoire de la litterature française. Paris: Hachette, 1894.
Lotte, Fernand. “Le ‘retour des personnages’ dans La Comédie humaine.” L’Année balzacienne, 1961.
Picon, Gaëtan. Balzac. Paris: Seuil, 1965.
Pugh, Anthony R. Balzac’s Recurring Characters. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974.
Vachon, Stéphane, ed. Honore de Balzac: Memoire de la critique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris, 1999.
Vidocq, François. Memoires de Vidocq. Paris: Editions Garnier (n.d.), vol. 1.
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a French naturalist (1772-1844) whose idea of creation as an organic unity greatly influenced Balzac.
b Yellow garment worn by those whom the Spanish Inquisition sent for torture.
c Analogies inspired by Balzac’s passion for the novels of James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851).
d Davin signed the introduction to Balzac’s Etudes de mœurs au XIXe siècle (Studies of Nineteenth-century Manners), although portions of it were written by Balzac.
e Today the rue Tournefort.
f Subtitle to Henry VIII (1613), attributed to Shakespeare.
g That is, the Hôpital des Capucins, also known as the Hôpital des Vénériens, in the nearby rue Saint-Jacques, specializing in venereal diseases. The hospital is named on p. 144.
Ɨ Beginning in 1750, Voltaire was forced to live largely in exile, residing first in England, then in Prussia, and finally for twenty years at Ferney on the Swiss border. He returned to Paris in 1778 (not 1777, as Balzac writes), the year of his death.
h Les Aventures de Telemaque (1699), by François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fenelon, recounts the adventures of Telemachus, son of Ulysses.
i The French text has “made in Tournai,” a town in Belgium, rather than “of Touraine,” the region around Balzac’s birthplace of Tours.
j The Zoological Gardens and site of the Museum of Natural History, where Bianchon attends lectures.
k one of the liveliest streets in Paris at the time, a meeting point for the dandies and the bohemian crowd.
l Reference to Jean de La Fontaine’s fable “The Monkey and the Cat,” in which the cat (Raton) pulls chestnuts from the fire for the monkey (Bertrand). From Fables choisies (Selected Fables; 1668-1694), book 9, fable 17.
m A louis was equal to 20 francs.
n Pigeon wings.
o Expensive snuff imported mostly from Martinique.
p The sou was the smallest monetary denomination; there were 20 sous to a franc.
q Mock Latin for “cap-wearing”; the suggestion is that Goriot has abandoned the bourgeois hat for a socially more lowly form of headgear.
r René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur (1683-1757) invented a thermometer, later modified by Anders Celsius. Balzac made several attempts here to write the word Fahrenheit, but apparently gave up due to difficulty in spelling it.
s The Bois de Boulogne; the Bouffons was an alternative name for the Theatre des Italiens, or Opéra-Comique.
t The Faubourg Saint-Germain, on the Left Bank, was the favored quarter of the aristocracy; the Chaussée d’Antin, on the Right Bank, was populated by bankers and financiers.
u In other words, a carpenter (Joseph
v Vautrin cites here the title of a comedy by Michel-Nicolas Balisson de Rougemont (1781-1840).
w Mock Latin for “down to my heels.”
x From “Consolation à M. Du Périer,” by François de Malherbe (1555-1628).
y Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754—1838), statesman for whom Balzac (who met him in 1836) had enormous respect (see also p. 121).
z Company founded in 1664 by Louis XIV and Jean-Baptiste Colbert, liquidated by the Convention in 1793.
aa Famous ship of war built in Brest in 1680; she participated in the campaigns against England, as well as in the American War of Independence.
ab Paraphrase of Virgil’s Georgics 3.250-251.
ac Her maiden name.
ad For the whole story, see Balzac’s Duchesse de Langeais (1832-1834).
ae Elsewhere, Rastignac is twenty-one; compare pp. 111, 151, 153.
af Literally, “from the same flour.”