There can be no prison without a warder, the one is unimaginable without the other. The pallor and portliness of this small woman are the products of the life she leads, just as typhus emanates from the vapours of a hospital. Her knitted woollen petticoat, drooping below an overskirt made from an old dress and poking out through the slits where the cloth has worn away, epitomizes the drawing room, the dining room, the garden, anticipates the cooking and prefigures the boarders. Once she’s here, the scene is set, the show can begin. Madame Vauquer, who must be about fifty years of age, resembles all women who have seen better days. She has the unflinching stare, the self-righteous manner of a Madam who will lay down the law to raise her fee, but is otherwise prepared to stop at nothing to improve her lot, to inform on Georges or Pichegru17 (if Georges and Pichegru hadn’t already been shopped). Nonetheless, the boarders would say that she was a good woman at heart, believing her to be as down on her luck as they were, hearing her groan and cough as they did. What kind of a man was Monsieur Vauquer? She tended to be uncommunicative on the subject of the deceased. How did he lose his fortune? In the troubles, she would reply. He had treated her shabbily, leaving her with only her eyes to weep with, this house as her livelihood and the right not to sympathize with anyone else in a tight spot, because, as she would say, she had suffered all that a body can suffer. Recognizing her mistress’s shuffling step, big Sylvie, the cook, would hurry out to serve déjeuner to the lodgers.

The boarders, who lived out, usually only came for dinner, which cost thirty francs a month payable in advance. At the time when this story begins, there were seven lodgers. The best apartments in the house were on the first floor. Madame Vauquer lived in the smaller of the two and the other was occupied by Madame Couture, the widow of a Commissary-General18 of the French Republic. She had in her charge a young lady of a tender age, called Victorine Taillefer, whom she cared for as a mother. These two ladies paid eighteen hundred francs for their board and lodging. The first of the two apartments on the second floor was occupied by an elderly man called Poiret; the other by a man of around forty years of age, known as Monsieur Vautrin, who wore a black wig, dyed his side-whiskers, and was by his own account a former merchant. The third floor was divided into four rooms, two of which were rented, one by an elderly spinster called Mademoiselle Michonneau; the other by a retired dealer in vermicelli, Italian pasta and starch, who had come to be known as old man Goriot. The other two rooms were intended for birds of passage, for students down on their luck who, like Goriot and Mademoiselle Michonneau, could only afford forty-five francs a month for food and lodging, but Madame Vauquer had little desire for their custom and only took them in for want of anyone better: they ate too much bread. At the time, one of these two rooms was occupied by a young man who had come to Paris from the Angoulême area to study law and whose large family were tightening their belts and making endless sacrifices in order to send him twelve hundred francs a year. Eugène de Rastignac, as he was called, was one of those young men whose lack of fortune requires them to develop an aptitude for work, who, from an early age, fully understand what their parents expect of them and prepare for greatness by calculating how far their learning will take them and adapting it in advance of shifts in society, thus ensuring they will be the first to benefit. Without his inquisitiveness and the skill with which he engineered his entry into the most exclusive Parisian society, the present account would not have been painted in such true colours, and for this we must undoubtedly thank his shrewdness and his desire to fathom the mysteries of an appalling situation, as carefully concealed by those who had created it as by the man who endured it.

Up from the third floor was an attic where the laundry was hung out, and two garrets, where Christophe the errand boy and big Sylvie the cook slept. Besides the seven lodgers, year in, year out, Madame Vauquer took eight students of law or medicine and two or three regulars who lived nearby, all of whom paid for board alone. In the evening, eighteen people sat down to eat in the dining room, which could hold up to twenty, but in the morning, only the seven residents were to be found there, so that déjeuner almost felt like a family meal. They would come downstairs in slippers and venture to make confidential remarks about the dress or appearance of the non-residents, discussing the events of the previous evening, their privacy encouraging them to speak freely. These seven lodgers were Madame Vauquer’s spoilt children and she measured out the level of care and respect due to each, depending on how much they paid, with the precision of an astronomer. The residents may have ended up under the same roof by chance, but they were all motivated by the same consideration. The two second-floor lodgers paid only seventy-two francs per month. Rates as cheap as these are only to be found in the Faubourg Saint-Marcel between the hospitals of La Bourbe and La Salpêtrière.19 Indeed, with the exception of Madame Couture, who paid more, all of the lodgers were more or less obviously down at heel. And so the dingy-looking interior of this establishment was matched by the equally shabby clothing of those who occupied it. The men wore frock-coats whose colour you’d be hard pressed to define, shoes of the kind found discarded in the road in fashionable districts, linen hanging by a thread, clothes stripped of all but their soul.