All his minds are weapons loaded to the muzzle with will – just like Balzac himself.16

Now that Old Man Goriot is well established as a monument of Western literature, the arguments that once surrounded it seem quaint and unimportant. Many critics believed that it was a profoundly immoral work. They thought – as Poiret says of convicts who live with their mistresses – that it ‘set an extremely bad example to the rest of society’ (p. 151). According to some writers of the time, young men were treating Rastignac as a role model and criminals were using Vautrin’s advice as an instruction manual. Balzac himself took accusations of immorality quite seriously. He insisted that ‘vice’ should be accurately portrayed in alluring colours, and that the morality of a tale lay in its truth not in its social acceptability. ‘The author is not deliberately moral or immoral,’ he wrote in the preface to the second edition of Old Man Goriot. ‘The general plan that joins his works one to the other … compels him to depict everything.’ Of course, he knew that his novels would be read for enjoyment, not for moral improvement, and that The Human Comedy could inspire in its readers the kind of obsessional fervour that destroys his fictional families. As Oscar Wilde observed, when he compared Balzac’s full-blooded realism to the ghostly reality of life: ‘A steady course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our acquaintances to the shadows of shades.’17

The real story of Old Man Goriot’s critical reception lies in the unrecorded pleasure of its countless readers and in the afterlife of its characters. Rastignac and Vautrin are a shadowy presence in a hundred other ‘education’ novels: Hugo’s Les Misérables, Dickens’s Great Expectations, Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Academic critics recognized Old Man Goriot as one of the best introductions to Balzac’s colossal work and ensured that it was read, or slowly deciphered, by generations of schoolchildren. Histories of literature presented Balzac as the progenitor of Realism and Naturalism. Madame Vauquer’s boarding house found itself at the centre of modern literary history.

Graham Robb

NOTES

1.     Balzac, Lettres à Madame Hanska, ed. Roger Pierrot (Paris: Laffont, 1990), I, p. 195 (18 October 1834).

2.     Quoted by Rose Fortassier in La Comédie Humaine, ed. Pierre-Georges Castex (Paris: Gallimard, 1976–81), III, p. 5.

3.     Lettres à Madame Hanska, I, p. 268 (23 August 1835).

4.     Balzac, Correspondance, ed. Roger Pierrot (Paris: Garnier, 1960–69), II, p. 553 (28 September 1834).

5.     Lettres à Madame Hanska, I, p. 208 (26 November 1834).

6.     Antoine Fontaney, Journal intime (Paris: Les Presses françaises, 1925), p. 30 (7 September 1831).

7.     Preface to the second edition of Le Père Goriot (1835): La Comédie Humaine, III, p. 46.

8.     Lettres à Madame Hanska, I, p. 234 (11 March 1835).

9.     Lettres à Madame Hanska, I, p. 221 (4 January 1835).

10.   Lettres à Madame Hanska, I, p. 52 (end of August 1833).

11.   Lettres à Madame Hanska, I, p. 204 (26 October 1834).

12.   Preface to La Comédie Humaine, I, p. 9.

13.   ‘Pension’, in Pierre Larousse, Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, XII (1874), p. 565.

14.   ‘La Famille maigre’, Gazette des femmes, 2 December 1843.

15.   Quoted by Donald Adamson in ‘Le Père Goriot devant la critique anglaise’, L’Année balzacienne (1986), p.