Chapter 20; Father Goriot by Honore de Balzac.
July 2nd, 2015
Summary
Most of the action is centered around a boarding house called Maison Vauquer, ran by a widow, Mme. Vauquer. The story relates mostly to the interactions between Jean-Joachim Goriot, a retired vermicelli maker who bankrupted himself to give his daughters a better future; a secretive cynical anarchist called Vautran and a law student Eugène de Rastignac, descending from a poor family in Southern France attracted to Paris by an all-consuming ambition to climb the social ladder.
Old Goriot, who liked to be referred to as Father Goriot, was very often ridiculed by the others because he bankrupted himself for the sake of his daughters who had at that time a yearly income of 50.000 francs and rewarded him with despise and neglect. Meanwhile Madame de Beauséant, another but financially better off habitant of the boarding house, instructed her cousin, Rastignac about the conventions and functioning of the Parisian upper-class. Vautrin tried to engage Rastignac with a woman called Victorine, whose brother blocked her access to her share of their heritance. He offered Rastignac to kill the brother in a duel but Rastignac freaks out at the idea to murder someone for his money and is more interested in one of Old Goriot’s daughters, Delphine. In order to seduce her, he borrowed more money from his already poor family. Shortly afterwards, the habitants of the boarding house learned that Vautrin was in fact an escaped criminal nicknamed “Cheater of Dead”, because of the many times he narrowly avoided the dead penalty. In the end Rastignac cooperated with the police to capture Vautrin.
Old Goriot was supportive to Rastignac’s efforts to start an affair with his daughter because he could not stand her husband’s antics, but could in fact exercise very little influence upon the developing events. When his other daughter, Anastasia, informed him that she almost bankrupted herself to satisfy the demands of her lover, he got into such a fit of rage and frustration that it provoked a stroke. Shortly after that he died and his daughters sent just their empty coaches bearing their respective coats of arms to his funeral. The only ones in attendance were Rastignac, a servant and two paid mourners. After the funeral Rastignac takes Delphine out for dinner and makes a vow that he would conquer his way into the Parisian upper-class at whatever price or sacrifice.
Comments
This novel was first published in 1835 and gives a fair description of daily life in France in 1819 (the setting of this novel) just after Napoleons’ defeat and the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty on the French throne.
It was received with mixed feelings; a group of critics prizing Balzac for the painstaking description of his characters and their surroundings while others where condemning him for his blatant exhibition of the wide spread acts of crime, corruption and greed.
It cannot be denied that Balzac cultivated a fascination for the criminal mind and Vidoc , a famous master criminal who turned his coat and became a chief of Police, inspired him for the personage of Collin, who appears in the series as Vautrin, who showed up into several sequences of his oeuvre that he called ”La Comédie Humaine” .
Vautrin is a protagonist in the novels Lost illusions, (1837–43) and Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life (1838–44), the sequel of Lost Illusions, posing as Reverend Carlos Herrera.
The Maharajagar 