Father Goriot

Father Goriot is an 1835 novel by Honoré de Balzac and a central work in La Comédie humaine. Set in Paris in 1819, it brings together characters from opposite ends of society inside the shabby Maison Vauquer boarding house.

Jean-Joachim Goriot, once a prosperous maker of vermicelli, has given almost everything to his married daughters Anastasie and Delphine. Their demands continue while their willingness to acknowledge or care for him diminishes.

The ambitious law student Eugène de Rastignac discovers that access to fashionable Paris has its own price. As he enters Delphine's world, the criminal Vautrin offers him a faster and murderous route to wealth, and the secrets of the boarding house converge around Goriot's final sacrifices.

Balzac sets paternal devotion against money, status, and appetite. The novel is at once an intimate tragedy and a map of a city in which family affection, marriage, and social advancement have all acquired an exchange value.

"Mme. 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, in the district that lies between the Latin Quarter and the Faubourg Saint-Marcel."

This edition uses the English translation by Ellen Marriage.