Old Man Goriot Read online

  Unfortunately for his finances, while other novelists followed a simple recipe and could serve up a regular slice of plot for publication, Balzac worked from the inside out, inflating his sentences, evolving digressions and making room for characters who refused to remain two-dimensional. His novel grew like a complicated organism. The original short story on the agonies of paternal love turned into an astonishingly concise, encyclopaedic novel on modern society. This tale of a father abused by his children became a drama with a large cast of memorable minor characters and three main plots: the obsessively devoted father, Goriot, ‘who resembles the murderer’s dog that licks its master’s blood-stained hand’;7 the beautiful, blue-eyed, dark-haired student from the provinces, Eugène de Rastignac, who sets sail ‘across the ocean of Paris … fishing for his fortune’ (p. 79); and the mysterious Vautrin, who seduces Rastignac with his sinister wisdom: ‘You must either plough through this mass of men like a cannonball or creep among them like the plague’ (p. 98). Several other plots were entwined around the main branches, as though Balzac were trying to cram a Thousand and One Nights of modern Paris into the space of a small novel: a young girl disowned by her father, a viscountess abandoned by her lover, a debt-ridden baroness married to a stingy millionaire.

  Fuelled by endless cups of hallucinatingly strong coffee, Balzac produced the first draft of Old Man Goriot in just over three weeks. He then began the painful process of rewriting. In all, by his own account, he spent forty days on the novel. During that time, he slept, on average, only two hours in every twenty-four. The first of four instalments, made up of two parts, ‘A Respectable Boarding House’ and ‘Two Calls are Paid’, appeared in the Revue de Paris on 14 December 1834, six weeks before the novel was completed. As usual, Balzac tormented the typesetters with his expanding paragraphs and modifications. When proofs were delivered, he would ask his two little nieces to cut them out and paste them onto large sheets of paper, which he quickly turned into a barely legible mass of corrections and additions. The corrected pages were deciphered, reset and reprinted, and the whole process began again. Balzac was, in effect, using a word processor consisting of a hydraulic press and a team of exasperated typesetters.

  The second and third instalments appeared on 28 December 1834 and 25 January 1835 under the titles ‘An Introduction to Society’ and ‘Cat-o’-Nine-Lives’. The final instalment appeared on 11 February 1835, also divided into two parts: ‘The Two Daughters’ and ‘Death of the Father’. Old Man Goriot was published by Edmond Werdet as a two-volume book on 2 March 1835. Just as he had seen the finished novel in his mind several months before it was written, he celebrated in advance its ‘incomparable success’. The ‘fools’ who made up Parisian society were buying hundreds of copies, he told his future wife.8 Two new editions were already being printed. His former mistress, Laure de Berny, according to Balzac, had enjoyed the second part so much ‘that she had a heart attack’.9

  Two years later, the Figaro newspaper offered unsold copies of Old Man Goriot to new subscribers as a free gift, which was a compliment to Balzac but hardly a sign of commercial success. A novel in which crime went unpunished and which devoted as much space to food stains and peeling wallpaper as to ball gowns and boudoirs was never likely to be a bestseller. Novels were expected to provide light relief, not to analyse the workings of society and the mind. Nonetheless, it was a notable victory. The publication in the Revue de Paris and the first two editions (March and May 1835) earned Balzac a total of 10,000 francs, which is eighteen times more than old man Goriot pays for a year’s board and lodging. Even the criminal members of the ‘Ten Thousand Club’ (p. 151), who consider 10,000 francs the smallest amount worth stealing, might have been forced to admit that virtuous hard work could be a lucrative investment.

  Just over a year before starting his novel, Balzac had conceived a ‘grand and extraordinary enterprise’.10 He had decided that all his novels, past and future, would form a vast tableau of modern society. This was the monumental oeuvre that he later called La Comédie Humaine (The Human Comedy). Unfinished at Balzac’s death in 1850, The Human Comedy in its published form contains over a hundred novels, short stories and studies of human behaviour. He defined its scope while working on Old Man Goriot: ‘all social effects, including every situation of human life, every physiognomy, male or female personality, way of life, profession, social zone, region of France, and anything to do with childhood, old age, middle age, politics, justice and war’.11

  As he explained in the preface to The Human Comedy (1842), he wanted to produce the epic, eye-witness social history that was missing for earlier civilizations. He would do for nineteenth-century France what no historian had done for Ancient Rome, Greece or Egypt. Old Man Goriot was the first big test of this scheme. Like a preview of the whole Human Comedy, it opens doors into almost every layer of Parisian society: the salons of aristocrats – both those whose noble ancestors predate the Revolution and those who owe their ennoblement to money; the halfway house of the middle class – tradesmen, civil servants, students and retired people; and some shadowy figures from the criminal underworld. There are glimpses of theatres, casinos, government offices, the fashionable fortress-mansions of the extremely rich, defended by etiquette and liveried servants, and the semi-rural plots that lay behind the squalid house fronts of the Latin Quarter.

  Balzac would have been delighted, but not surprised, to learn that historians still plunder his novel for documentary evidence. A reader of Old Man Goriot acquires, almost by accident, a vast amount of information about daily life in Restoration Paris. Thanks to Balzac, we know the muddled human contents of a typical Latin Quarter boarding house; we know what the boarders kept in their wardrobes and drawers, and how they talked to one another. We know that city-dwellers missed appointments when fog prevented them from correctly guessing the time of day, that tailors gave credit while hatters did not and that some of the dazzling young dandies who sat in theatre boxes sporting spectacular waistcoats were too deeply in debt to afford a pair of socks. We even know how much a grave-digger might have expected as a tip.

  Balzac’s aim, however, was not just to document but also to diagnose the ills of the modern world. Old Man Goriot takes place between November 1819 and February 1820. It depicts Parisian society a generation after the French Revolution and Louis XVI’s ‘little accident’ (as Madame Vauquer calls the King’s decapitation, p. 195) and five years after the fall of Napoleon. The economy was still recovering from the Napoleonic Wars. The restoration of the monarchy in 1815 gave a misleading impression of stability. It suggested that France would now return to those ‘eternal truths’ which Balzac saw as the basis of civilized society and the twin pillars of his Human Comedy: Catholicism and Royalty.

  Balzac’s political conservatism may reflect a desire to flatter his aristocratic friends, but it also reflects his view of human nature. The human race, in Balzac’s view, is directly analogous to the animal kingdom (Old Man Goriot is dedicated to a zoologist, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire). Like all species, the various types of human animal have a common origin, but they evolve and diversify according to their environment. The leafy calm of the provinces is the natural habitat of the virtuous Rastignac family. The city of Paris ‘is like a forest in the New World’, infested with ‘savage tribes’ (p. 101), where rapacious individuals, unchecked by religion and monarchy, thrive at the expense of the weak. Humans, of course, are more sophisticated than beasts: ‘In the animal kingdom, there are few dramas and little confusion: animals simply attack one another. Humans attack one another too, but the intelligence that they possess to varying degrees makes the struggle more complex.’12 Humans have arts and sciences; they surround themselves with furniture, and their behaviour changes from one period to the next.

  In the urban jungle, a few remarkable individuals rise above the mass by exercising the mysterious power of will. For Balzac, as for Vautrin, thought or will-power (volonté) was a material substance which, at a sufficient degree of intensity,
could have a visible effect on physical reality. Wielded by a monomaniac, volonté could be more destructive than an army. The ‘thin lips’ and ‘greedy teeth’ around the table at the Maison Vauquer (p. 11) are examples of the individual human animal focusing its will-power on a particular, petty object to the detriment of the community. A monarchical system of government, in Balzac’s view, prevents the mass of ravenous individuals from imposing the tyranny of its animal desires, while Christianity – whether or not a god exists – has a civilizing effect on behaviour. ‘Christianity, and especially Catholicism,’ he wrote in the preface to The Human Comedy, ‘is a complete system of repression of the depraved tendencies of man.’

  In Old Man Goriot, the fixed, feudal society, which the French Revolution had weakened but not destroyed, is being further undermined by poorly regulated capitalism. Baron Nucingen, the husband of Goriot’s younger daughter, is able to make a killing, quite legally, by bankrupting the entrepreneurs who build houses on his land. Money contaminates almost every relationship in the novel. The word argent (money) appears as often as the word amour (love), sometimes in the same sentence. Madame Vauquer judges people by the size of their purse and treats them according to their income. Vautrin gives Rastignac a detailed estimate of the cost of happiness (one million francs). Gondureau, the Chief of the Sûreté, serves the State by having criminals secretly assassinated, thereby saving the cost of trials, prison meals and legal executions. Goriot himself believes that ‘Money is life’ (p. 205). Cash has replaced the complicated moral arithmetic of vice and virtue with a single currency of success and failure. It encourages crime and cleanses consciences like an indulgent confessor.

  This socio-economic view of human relations was something quite new in the French novel. To most critics of the time, mentioning sums of money in a serious work of fiction was intolerably vulgar. Balzac was accused of writing like an auctioneer drawing up a sales catalogue or like a commercial traveller displaying his wares. He was compared to his own comic character ‘the Illustrious Gaudissart’, who can sell anything from hair-restorer to insurance. Years would pass before this apparent obsession with material details was widely recognized as a mark of Balzac’s historical accuracy. It was new in the French novel because it corresponded to something new in French society.

  In the early nineteenth century, France was still a rural economy. Less than a quarter of the French population lived in towns and cities. There was practically no heavy industry: the entire country had fewer than forty functioning steam engines. Cash and credit played no role in the lives of most French people. In Rastignac’s home region (the Charente), according to Vautrin there are ‘more chestnuts [poor people’s food] than hundred-sou coins’ (p. 98). The fortunes of the richest characters are either inherited (Madame de Beauséant) or based on commerce, property and speculation (Goriot and Baron Nucingen). Paris, which was the biggest city in continental Europe, with a population larger than that of the next six biggest French cities combined, was still a collection of villages. The sound of traffic barely reaches the boarding house in Old Man Goriot, and the quartier has yet to be sanitized by modern sewers and building regulations. Pigs, chickens and rabbits live in the little courtyard at the rear of the house. The household waste is swept out into the street. The seamy districts described by Balzac in that ‘illustrious valley’ of crumbling plaster and ‘mud-clogged gutters’ (p. 3) are easier to imagine today in half-abandoned hamlets of the southern Massif Central than in Paris itself.

  The inmates of the boarding house are like a microcosmic provincial population, a complete society with its own dialect, customs and folklore. Yet even that small society is falling apart. Social mobility brought the characters together and social mobility will scatter them to other parts of the city. The brief appearance, in the opening pages, of a bogus countess who runs off without paying her bill is a warning that the old hierarchy is collapsing. Goriot himself began as a worker, then grew rich during the Revolution by exploiting fears of famine and selling his pasta flour at extortionate prices. Now, an embarrassment to his wealthy daughters, he is a stranger to the world that his money created, alienated from every level of society. By the time the novel opens, in the Maison Vauquer, he has already moved from his three-room, first-floor apartment to a cheaper one on the second floor and finally to a room on the third floor, beneath the servants’ attic. He may look like an anachronism to his fellow boarders, but old man Goriot is a man of his time.

  Many of Balzac’s admirers, including Victor Hugo and Friedrich Engels, noticed that his characters often seemed to contradict the author, and that, although Balzac often presented his novels as political morality tales, his reactionary views were not necessarily a reliable guide to the true significance of his work. Balzac himself talked about his characters as real people, as though he had as little control over them as Goriot has over his daughters.

  As well as exemplifying life in nineteenth-century France, each character plays a symbolic role, which Balzac frequently underlines like an artist adding captions to his drawings, just as he heightens the contrasts of his tableau: age and youth, poverty and wealth, the glittering Faubourg Saint-Germain and the festering Latin Quarter. Goriot is a ‘Christ of Paternity’ (p. 192), an incarnation of Fatherhood. He expresses Balzac’s own opinion: ‘If fathers are to be trampled underfoot, the country will go to the dogs’ (p. 240). Goriot’s devotion to his daughters appears to be a dazzling exception in a world where families are cliques and marriages are business deals, where a virtuous girl like Victorine Taillefer is abandoned by her father and an ambitious young man like Rastignac uses his family as a bank.

  But Goriot is not a simple advertisement of Balzac’s convictions. His love is not a model but an aberration. He pictures himself sitting in his daughters’ laps like a puppy. He dreams of rubbing up against their dresses and kisses Delphine’s feet while she talks to her lover. He funds her adulterous liaison with Rastignac and fantasizes about living above the lovers’ nest, listening to their movements when they return in the evening.

  The ‘Christ of Paternity’ has reduced his life to a grim obsession. Like a strange bacterium, he feeds on lies and self-deception. As the frighteningly perspicacious Vautrin points out, Goriot is quite normal. The city is full of people who are ‘thirsty [only] for a certain kind of water drawn from a certain well’, which is ‘often stagnant’ (p. 42). To satisfy their secret passion, they would sell their families into slavery and their soul to the devil. They may be gamblers, stock-market speculators or collectors. They may have a passion for music or an all-consuming desire for sweets. ‘Old Goriot’, says Vautrin, ‘is one of those fellows.’ In Vautrin’s view, Goriot is not a tragic hero but ‘a dull stick’ (p. 43).

  Balzac’s novels are remembered for their grand passions and extremes of vice and virtue, but even in his saintliest characters he also shows the frailty of true love and the extraordinary resilience of misguided devotion. He describes heroic self-sacrifice but also the insidious anaesthetic of habit, the tenacity of trivial addictions and the inexorable force of stupidity. For every luminous genius in The Human Comedy, there is an indestructible idiot like the mechanical Poiret. In a preface to the first edition of Old Man Goriot, Balzac answered complaints that his depiction of society was too bleak by publishing a sarcastic list of all his female characters. It looks like a financial statement, with virtue in the credit column and vice in the debit column. The result was thirty-eight ‘virtuous’ women and twenty ‘criminal’ women, ‘omitting on purpose more than ten virtuous women, so as not to bore the reader’. The implication was that his characters are not caricatures but human beings who muddle through, adapting their morality to circumstances. They are neither entirely virtuous nor entirely corrupt. The impressively small-minded and ultimately excusable Madame Vauquer appears in the ‘virtuous’ list, though she is marked as ‘doubtful’.

  The boarding house itself, ironically, is the closest thing in the novel to a functioning urban family. For
all their foibles and obsessions, the boarders form a society which is capable of acting for the general good. Perhaps, as Madame Vauquer believes, the decline of her boarding house is a greater tragedy than the demise of Old Goriot. Here, too, Balzac was conveying a historical truth. He was analysing a relatively recent state of affairs which has since become a social norm. The enormous nineteenth-century Larousse encyclopaedia found his description of a typical boarding house ‘too gloomy’ (‘usually, these modest establishments are clean, pleasant and discreet’), but it agreed with him that the boarding house played a vital role in the city of strangers and misfits: a secular cloister ‘for those who like to eat invariably the same thing, from the same plate, in front of the same faces … It replaces the missing family with a kind of adopted family.’13

  The greatest irony of all is that Balzac’s novel about paternal love contains one of the first sympathetic depictions of a form of love that was associated with the disintegration and ‘demoralization’ of society. Vautrin is the first three-dimensional homosexual character of modern fiction whose love is not automatically condemned and whose personality is not defined exclusively by his ‘vice’. Unlike most of the other characters, Vautrin is capable of true devotion. Compared to Goriot’s violent obsession, his love is silent, discreet and devastatingly effective, as Rastignac discovers.