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In 1819, in a shabby boarding house in Paris run by Madame Vauquer, live a strange collection of lodgers: Eugène de Rastignac, a poor, ambitious law student…
In 1819, in a shabby boarding house in Paris run by Madame Vauquer, live a strange collection of lodgers: Eugène de Rastignac, a poor, ambitious law student from the provinces; Vautrin, a mysterious, cynical man who offers him a criminal shortcut to fortune; and old Goriot, a retired vermicelli maker, once rich and now mocked by everyone. Rastignac discovers that Goriot has given all his money to his two daughters, who married into high society and are ashamed of him, and watches a father's love being exploited to the end.
Context and significance
Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) published the novel in 1835. It was the first in which he brought back characters from earlier books, creating the huge linked world of his Human Comedy, and Rastignac's challenge to Paris on its last page, 'À nous deux maintenant!', became famous. Ellen Marriage, who translated much of the Human Comedy in the 1890s, made this English version. Compare King Lear, and read Balzac's Eugénie Grandet.
About the author
Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) was born in Tours, trained as a lawyer and failed as a printer and publisher, leaving debts that pursued him all his life. To pay them he wrote at night, fuelled by enormous quantities of coffee, producing nearly a hundred novels and stories in twenty years.
He gathered them into The Human Comedy, a vast portrait of French society with characters who reappear from book to book; Eugénie Grandet is one of its best-known parts. After eighteen years of letters he married the Polish countess Ewelina Hańska, months before his death.