Second Republic. Louis Bonaparte is elected President. Revolutionary uprisings across Europe. Final abolition of slavery in French domains.

Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto. Gaskell, Mary Barton. Thackeray, Vanity Fair.

1849 Health deteriorates seriously. Starts work on projects he will never finish.

1850 Marries Mme Hanska in March, at Berdichev. (They are married for only five months.) On return to Paris in May, Balzac can no longer read or write. 18 August: Dies. A cast is taken of his writing hand. Hugo pronounces a funeral oration at Père Lachaise.

Courbet, A Burial at Ornans.

Introduction

Like most of Balzac’s novels, Old Man Goriot began with a bare subject and the ghost of a character: paternal love, ‘a sentiment so great that nothing can exhaust it’; ‘a man who is a father in the same way that a saint or a martyr is a Christian’.1 Almost as soon as the idea was in his head, a story began to weave itself around the ghost. He jotted down these phrases in his notebook: ‘A decent man – middle-class boarding house – 600 francs annual income – Having sacrificed every penny to his daughters, who each have an income of 50,000, dying like a dog.’2

This was the protoplasmic novel that was taking shape in Balzac’s mind when he set off for his country retreat, the little Château de Saché in the valley of the Indre, Touraine, at the end of September 1834. Five years before, Balzac had burst onto the Parisian literary stage with a historical novel, The Chouans, and an anthropological study of modern marriage presented as a self-help guide for husbands with unfaithful wives: The Physiology of Marriage. All his earlier novels had been published under pseudonyms. They were bloody melodramas and tearful romances written for undiscriminating readers. Since then, Balzac had written forty short stories, twenty tales in his own form of medieval French and five novels. He had also signed contracts for dozens of works that would never be written. His doctor had ordered a complete rest. He was not to read, write or think.

The prospect of comfortable idleness always had an energizing effect on Balzac’s brain. ‘Sometimes’, he told a correspondent as he worked on several stories at the same time, ‘I have the impression that my brain has caught fire.’3 At Saché he finished two other novels and saw the new work growing in his mind. Before a word of it was written, he knew that Old Man Goriot would be a masterpiece.

He sat at his desk on the top floor of the chateau, with a view of ancient oaks and peaceful fields, and thought of the city he had left behind, that ‘valley full of genuine suffering and frequently counterfeit joy’ (p. 3). He told his mother about the new novel as though it already existed on paper: ‘It’s a work even more beautiful than Eugénie Grandet.’4 (Eugénie Grandet, the tale of a miser and his daughter, had been published in 1833 to universal acclaim.) Later, when the new novel had been written and – to use Balzac’s image – he could turn the tapestry over and see what he had made, he would describe it in different terms: ‘Old Man Goriot is a beautiful work, but monstrously sad. In order to be complete, it was necessary to depict a moral sewer in Paris, and it looks like a repulsive wound.’5

In mid-October, Balzac was back in Paris, settling into his story like a housekeeper into a new home. He had signed a contract with the Revue de Paris, which was to publish the novel in instalments. For Balzac, this newfangled mode of publication was a blessing and a curse. The advance from the journal helped him to pay the everlasting debts that seemed to other people to be his principal motive for writing. Though he wore a monk’s robe and (as he put it himself) worked like a galley-slave, Balzac presented himself to the journalists and gossips of literary Paris as a bumptious parvenu, a conspicuous consumer who revelled in the new, socially mobile France, where money was a magic talisman and noble obscurity had no market value. As Vautrin tells Rastignac in Old Man Goriot, in order to succeed ‘you either have to be rich to start with or appear to be so’ (p. 99).