The creature and its habitat are described simultaneously. Each is explained by the other. Madame Vauquer not only ties the various characters together, she also proves that there is nothing random in the world.

Balzac’s total descriptions struck many of his contemporaries as a quirky conceit. One newspaper, the Gazette des femmes, parodied his method by telling the story of a house that died of a chest complaint because its walls were thin and damp.14 Almost two centuries later, his intimation of unity in the infinitesimal bric-a-brac of daily life looks like an aspect of the novel’s modernity. His method gave the slightest detail an air of mysterious importance. It redeemed the tawdriness and the clutter. The description of the Vauquer boarding house, that Aladdin’s cave of worthless objects, has a curiously inspiring effect. It suggests that the new world of mass-produced objects had an organic life of its own, that there was mystery in streets where every house had a number and every ornament a manufacturer’s name. Even before Vautrin’s true identity is revealed, the boarding house is a crime scene in which everything is a clue to everything else. It is no coincidence that the inventor of the detective story, Edgar Allan Poe, was an avid reader of The Human Comedy. Balzac’s characters snuffle about, sifting trivial evidence, prying into private lives. Rastignac peers through Goriot’s keyhole, Madame Vauquer investigates his savings, Mademoiselle Michonneau seems to see through walls. Like a highly specialized Sherlock Holmes, Goriot can sniff a crust of bread and identify the quality and provenance of the flour. The narrator himself thinks like a detective, even when no crime has been committed and when the object of forensic investigation is something of no apparent interest, such as a piece of wallpaper or a wooden box of numbered pigeon holes containing napkins.

In a world that seems to be governed by the minor deities of money and sex, this minute omniscience suggests a higher intelligence beyond the moral chaos of the novel. The question of God’s existence hovers over the whole drama. Both Goriot and Rastignac are troubled by God’s apparent refusal to order the world as morality and their own desires would demand. Goriot claims to have understood God when he became a father, though he barely understands his own daughters. Vautrin is closer to the sceptical spirit of the novel when he gleefully imagines the disappointment of the virtuous if God fails to turn up on the Day of Judgement. Vautrin plays the role traditionally assigned to fairy godmothers and dispensers of divine justice. He penetrates and moulds the minds of the characters like a novelist. He knows how to make their dreams come true. To Rastignac, he reveals the inner workings of society. To the reader, he gives a glimpse of the ferocious intelligence that created him.

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For most of his professional career, Balzac was admired as a writer of short stories. After his death, he was celebrated as France’s pre-eminent novelist. Old Man Goriot was seen as one of the great nineteenth-century novels, long before that century had ended. George Eliot thought it ‘hateful’,15 but she read it aloud from beginning to end. Old Man Goriot showed that the novel was a more capacious genre than anyone had supposed and that an analysis of modern society could be an enthralling tale. One day, Balzac’s innovations would appear to be the normal substance of the novel: the effects of environment and physiology on human behaviour; the depiction of social types and the accurate reproduction of their language; the attempt to catalogue the trivia of modern life, and especially the seamy side of urban life.

The idea that Balzac was a realist was already so well established in 1859, nine years after his death, that the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire thought it necessary to emphasize the supernaturalism of his characters:

I have often been amazed that Balzac’s great glory was his reputation as an observer, for it always seemed to me that his principal merit lay in his being a visionary, and an impassioned visionary. All his characters are gifted with that ardour of life that animated himself. All his fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams … In Balzac, even the door-keepers have genius.