Pere Goriot by Honoré de Balzac Read Free Book Online

“Les Personnages reparaissants dans la Comédie humaine,” cited in Pierre-Georges Castex, ed., Le Père Goriot (Paris: Editions Gamier, 1960), p. vi.
    2 “One drank liberally under [Balzac’s] roof, but this pleasure easily took on with him a romantic and literary form. Each bottle he brought up from his cellar had a story. This one had been around the world three times; this one dated from a fabulously distant epoch; this rum came from a cask that had bobbed for a hundred years on the seas” (André Billy, Balzac [Paris: Club des Editeurs, 1959], p. 78; translation by Peter Connor).
    3 The judgments of Sainte-Beuve, Zola, and Proust are collected in the Norton Critical Edition of Père Goriot, edited by Peter Brooks and translated by Burton Raffel (London and New York: W. W. Norton, 1998).
    4 The reference is to the title character of Balzac’s Ferragus, part 1 of Histoire des Treize, edited by Pierre-Georges Castex (Paris: Éditions Garnier, 1966), p. 139. Shakespeare’s King Lear is often invoked as a source, especially since Balzac placed later editions of Père Goriot under the epigraph “All is true,” the subtitle of Henry VIII. The role of the missing third daughter (Cordelia) would be played by Victorine Taillefer or (see Bellos, Honoré de Balzac: Old Goriot [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987], pp. 34-35) by Rastignac himself.
    5 Collins adds in a note: “This sentence has unfortunately proved prophetic. Cheap translations of Le Père Goriot and La Recherche de L Absolu were published soon after the present article appeared in print, with extracts from the opinions here expressed on Balzac’s writings appended by way of advertisement. Critical remonstrance in relation to such productions as these would be remonstrance thrown away. It will be enough to say here, by way of warning to the reader, that the experiment of rendering the French of Balzac into its fair English equivalent still remains to be tried” (My Miscellanies, in The Works of Wilkie Collins, vol. 20 [New York: P. F. Collier, 1899]).

Père Goriot

    TO THE GREAT AND ILLUSTRIOUS
GEOFFROY SAINT-HILAIRE, a
A TOKEN OF ADMIRATION
FOR HIS WORKS AND GENIUS.
    â€”De Balzac

CHAPTER 1
    A Middle-Class Lodging-House

    M me. Vauquer (née de Conflans) is an elderly person, who for the past forty years has kept a lodging-house in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, e in the district that lies between the Latin Quarter and the Faubourg SaintMarcel. Her house (known in the neighborhood as the Maison Vauquer) receives men and women, old and young, and no word has ever been breathed against her respectable establishment ; but, at the same time, it must be said that as a matter of fact no young woman has been under her roof for thirty years, and that if a young man stays there for any length of time it is a sure sign that his allowance must be of the slenderest. In 1819, however, the time when this drama opens, there was an almost penniless young girl among Mme. Vauquer’s boarders.
    That word drama has been somewhat discredited of late; it has been overworked and twisted to strange uses in these days of dolorous literature; but it must do service again here, not because this story is dramatic in the restricted sense of the word, but because some tears may perhaps be shed intra et extra muros before it is over.
    Will any one without the walls of Paris understand it? It is open to doubt. The only audience who could appreciate the results of close observation, the careful reproduction of minute detail and local color, are dwellers between the heights of Montrouge and Montmartre, in a vale of crumbling stucco watered by streams of black mud, a vale of sorrows which are real and of joys too often hollow; but this audience is so accustomed to terrible sensations, that only some unimaginable and well-nigh impossible woe could produce any lasting impression there. Now and again there are