These replaced the unpopular revolutionary assignats, whose swift devaluation led to a long-term distrust of paper money and preference for stable coinage in France.

To give an idea of the relative worth of money in the novel: Vautrin tips the postman 20 sous (1 franc); Rastignac pays Madame Vauquer 45 francs a month for food and lodging (540 francs per year) and receives an allowance of twelve hundred a year from his cash-strapped family; Goriot’s daughters have (or are supposed to have) annual incomes of 36,000 or 50,000 francs (Goriot cites both figures); Madame Vauquer has 40,000 francs in savings; Monsieur d’Ajuda-Pinto has a carriage and pair worth ‘at least thirty thousand francs’. See also Vautrin’s rundown, for Rastignac’s benefit, of the cost of living as a man of fashion in Paris (pp. 137–8).

OLD MAN GORIOT

To the great and illustrious Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire,1 as an admiring tribute to his work and his genius.

de Balzac

A RESPECTABLE BOARDING HOUSE

For the last forty years, an old woman by the name of Madame Vauquer, née de Conflans, has run a boarding house in Paris, in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève,2 between the Latin Quarter and the Faubourg Saint-Marceau.3 Although this respectable establishment, known as the Maison Vauquer, accepts both men and women, young and old, its habits have never once excited malicious gossip. But then, no young lady has been seen there for thirty years and a young man who lodges there must have a very small allowance from his family. However, in 1819, the year in which this drama begins, one poor young woman was to be found there. Now, the word drama has fallen into some disrepute, having been bandied about in such an excessive and perverse way, in this age of tear-strewn literature,4 but it does ask to be used here. Not that this story is dramatic in the true sense of the term, but by the end of it, perhaps a few tears will have been shed intra muros et extra.5 Will it be understood outside Paris? There is room for doubt. The peculiarities of this scene packed with commentary and local colour may only be appreciated between the hills of Montmartre and the heights of Montrouge, in that illustrious valley of endlessly crumbling stucco and black, mud-clogged gutters; a valley full of genuine suffering and frequently counterfeit joy, where life is so frantically hectic that only the most freakish anomaly will produce any lasting sensation. Nonetheless, here and there, in this dense web of vice and virtue, you come across sufferings that seem grand and solemn: the selfish, the self-interested stop and feel pity; although for them such things are no sooner seen than swallowed, as swiftly as succulent fruit. A stouter heart than most may put a temporary spoke in the wheel of the chariot of civilization, which resembles that of the idol of Jaggernaut,6 but will soon be crushed as it continues its glorious progress. You will react in much the same way, you who are holding this book in your white hand, you who are sinking into a soft-cushioned chair saying to yourself: ‘Perhaps this will entertain me.’ After reading about old man Goriot’s secret woes, you will dine heartily, blaming your insensitivity firmly on the author, accusing him of exaggeration, pointing the finger at his feverish imagination. Well! Let me tell you that this drama is neither fiction nor romance. All is true,7 so true that we may each recognize elements of it close to home, perhaps even in our hearts.

The premises used for the business of the boarding house are owned by Madame Vauquer. The building stands at the foot of the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, just where the ground shelves into the Rue de l’Arbalète so sharply and inconveniently that horses rarely go up or down it. This circumstance contributes to the silence which prevails in these streets wedged between the domes of the Val-de-Grâce and the Panthéon,8 two monuments which modify the atmospheric conditions, giving the light a jaundiced tinge, while the harsh shadows cast by their cupolas make everything gloomy. The pavements are dry, the gutters are empty of either water or mud, grass grows out of the walls. Every passer-by – even the most carefree man in the world – feels dejected here, where the sound of a carriage is a momentous event, the houses are drab and the walls make you feel boxed in. A Parisian who strayed this way would see nothing but boarding houses and institutions, tedium and wretchedness, old age dying, blithe youth forced to toil. No district of Paris is less attractive, nor, it must be said, so little known. The Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève itself is like a bronze frame, the only one that fits this tale, for it prepares the mind only too well with its murky colours and sobering thoughts; just as, step by step, the daylight fades and the guide’s patter rings hollow, when the traveller descends into the Catacombs. A fitting comparison! Who is to say which sight is the more horrible: shrivelled hearts, or empty skulls?

The front of the building overlooks a small patch of garden, while the boarding house as a whole stands at a right angle to the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, where you see its depth in cross-section. Between the house and the garden, a sunken gravel strip a fathom wide runs the length of the façade, fronted by a sandy path bordered with geraniums, oleanders and pomegranate trees planted in large blue and white porcelain vases. The entrance to this path is through a secondary door, above which is a sign declaring: MAISON VAUQUER, and underneath: Lodgings for persons of both sexes et cetera. During the day, at the end of the path, through an openwork gate with a strident bell, you might glimpse a green marble arcade painted by a local artist on the wall facing the street. A statue of Eros stands in the recess suggested by the painting. Those fond of symbols might see in its blistering coat of varnish a kind of love more Parisian than mythical, one which is cured a stone’s throw away.9 Beneath the pedestal, this half-eroded inscription, with its fashionable enthusiasm for Voltaire on his return to Paris in 1777,10 reveals the ornament’s age:

Whoever you are, your master you see:

For that’s what he is, was, or shall be.

At nightfall, the openwork gate is covered with a solid one. The patch of garden, as wide as the façade is long, is boxed in by the street wall and the adjoining wall of the house next door, whose thick curtain of ivy is so unusually picturesque for Paris that passers-by find their eye drawn to it. The garden walls are covered in espaliers and vines, whose spindly and powdery attempts at fruit each year provide Madame Vauquer with a source of concern and conversation with her lodgers. Along each wall a narrow path leads to an area overshadowed by lime trees, which Madame Vauquer, albeit née de Conflans, obstinately calls ly-ums, despite her boarders’ remarks on her pronunciation. Two paths run either side of a bed of artichokes bordered with sorrel, lettuce and parsley, and flanked by tapering fruit trees.11 A round table, painted green and surrounded by seats, stands beneath the spreading lime branches. On sweltering summer days, those boarders who can afford to take coffee come and sip it here, in heat strong enough to hatch eggs.