Of this, more in a moment. I turn now to Esther.

No reader of Balzac has ever met her before or will ever meet her again, though he may have met her mother in César Birotteau and her mother’s uncle there and elsewhere, most notably in Gobseck, a story published in 1830, four years before Le Père Goriot, seven before César Birotteau, thirteen before Illusions perdues, seventeen before the completion of Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes. His niece, Sara, a prostitute known as ‘la belle Hollandaise’, Esther’s mother, was murdered in 1818, but Gobseck, a Jewish moneylender from Antwerp, was not to die until 1830. As the reader will see, had he died earlier, none of the sad events in this book need have taken place. When he wrote Gobseck, Honoré de Balzac was a young man of thirty-one. When he finished Splendeurs et misères, he was forty-eight and had three more years to live, for he died at the same age as Proust, having achieved at least quantitatively more.

His intention had been to write a novel about prostitution. His title for this was to be La Torpille, the professional nickname of the heroine, Esther Gobseck, Sara’s daughter. La Torpille as projected was in fact written, and much of it was published in periodicals, some under that title, some under the title Esther, ou les amours d’un banquier. Projected in 1837, partly written in 1838 and completed in 1843, La Torpille now forms Parts One and Two of the present book. After the death of Esther, the book is not much concerned with prostitution, and so the overall title is something of a misnomer, though fully applicable to Parts One and Two. Of the sense of the nickname and first title, I shall need to say something in the course of justifying what I have done with it.

About the forty-three characters in this book, other than Lucien, who occur elsewhere, the reader who wants to follow them up could do much worse than consult Félicien Marceau’s book, Balzac and his World, readily available in English. The hypothetical reader who knows only Le Père Goriot may care to be reminded that one of the Goriot daughters, with whom Rastignac is having an affair, is married to Baron Nucingen, of whom we hear much in the present volume and in three others. In Le Père Goriot, Dr Bianchon is a medical student who plays a wholly admirable part. Corentin and Peyrade appear elsewhere, as does the unfortunate Contenson under another name. Mme de Sérisy figured in La Femme de trente ans. Clotilde de Grandlieu remains faithful to Lucien’s memory in Béatrix. But knowledge of all these ramifications can add only marginally to any reader’s enjoyment of the present volume. Of the supposed Spanish priest Don Carlos Herrera, whose real name turns out to be Jacques Collin, a little may perhaps usefully be said here.

In Le Père Goriot, he appears as the respectable, if disconcerting, Monsieur Vautrin, life and soul of the party at the table d’hôte in Madame Vauquer’s boarding-house, who was really… what he turned out to be. The events in Le Père Goriot belong to the years 1819–20 (the book was written in 1834). In 1840, a play called Vautrin was performed once at the Porte Saint Martin theatre. It is not a good play, but the shortness of its run was due to the fact that the star, the great actor of his day, Frederick Lemaître, made himself up in one scene to look like the reigning monarch, Louis-Philippe. The basis for Lemaître’s unfortunate joke (perhaps, indeed, not so intended) was this. It was widely understood, by 1840, that the figure of Vautrin in M. Balzac’s famous novel had been based on a real-life police chief, formerly an escaped convict, finally retired some eight years before, who had indeed borne some resemblance to Louis-Philippe, a fact which, after 1830, the date of Louis-Philippe’s accession, had frequently been made the subject of comment, doubtless to the detriment of Vidocq. For the real-life figure was that great name in criminological history, François-Eugène Vidocq, the ex-convict who became the founder of the French Sûreté and thus the ancestor of criminal investigation departments throughout the world.

Of course, to say that Vidocq was ‘the original’ of Balzac’s Vautrin is greatly to over-simplify the matter. He has also been said to be ‘the original’ of Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Both these characters in great works of fiction had, indeed, something in common with the real-life Vidocq, but the differences are as significant as the resemblances. This is a matter I study closely in a recent volume. Here, I must content myself with repeating what has been so often said and with qualifying it. The Jacques Collin of the present volume, for instance, owes something to at least four other real-life figures, those of the impostors Coignard and a supposed Count of Montealbano, to a master of disguise, Anthime Collet, and even to the murderer Lacenaire.