When Balzac described the seedy boarding house where much of the novel takes place, he had just redecorated his home near the Paris Observatory with expensive wallpaper. He bought gold buttons for his blue suit, a powerful spyglass made for him by the Observatory optician and a jewel-encrusted walking-stick. A young observer of literary life called Antoine Fontaney saw him at a party: ‘He is the commercial writer par excellence. “The Revue de Paris”, [Balzac] said airily, “is the best journal in Europe: it pays the biggest fees.” How disgraceful!’6

Unfortunately for his finances, while other novelists followed a simple recipe and could serve up a regular slice of plot for publication, Balzac worked from the inside out, inflating his sentences, evolving digressions and making room for characters who refused to remain two-dimensional. His novel grew like a complicated organism. The original short story on the agonies of paternal love turned into an astonishingly concise, encyclopaedic novel on modern society. This tale of a father abused by his children became a drama with a large cast of memorable minor characters and three main plots: the obsessively devoted father, Goriot, ‘who resembles the murderer’s dog that licks its master’s blood-stained hand’;7 the beautiful, blue-eyed, dark-haired student from the provinces, Eugène de Rastignac, who sets sail ‘across the ocean of Paris … fishing for his fortune’ (p. 79); and the mysterious Vautrin, who seduces Rastignac with his sinister wisdom: ‘You must either plough through this mass of men like a cannonball or creep among them like the plague’ (p. 98). Several other plots were entwined around the main branches, as though Balzac were trying to cram a Thousand and One Nights of modern Paris into the space of a small novel: a young girl disowned by her father, a viscountess abandoned by her lover, a debt-ridden baroness married to a stingy millionaire.

Fuelled by endless cups of hallucinatingly strong coffee, Balzac produced the first draft of Old Man Goriot in just over three weeks. He then began the painful process of rewriting. In all, by his own account, he spent forty days on the novel. During that time, he slept, on average, only two hours in every twenty-four. The first of four instalments, made up of two parts, ‘A Respectable Boarding House’ and ‘Two Calls are Paid’, appeared in the Revue de Paris on 14 December 1834, six weeks before the novel was completed. As usual, Balzac tormented the typesetters with his expanding paragraphs and modifications. When proofs were delivered, he would ask his two little nieces to cut them out and paste them onto large sheets of paper, which he quickly turned into a barely legible mass of corrections and additions. The corrected pages were deciphered, reset and reprinted, and the whole process began again. Balzac was, in effect, using a word processor consisting of a hydraulic press and a team of exasperated typesetters.

The second and third instalments appeared on 28 December 1834 and 25 January 1835 under the titles ‘An Introduction to Society’ and ‘Cat-o’-Nine-Lives’. The final instalment appeared on 11 February 1835, also divided into two parts: ‘The Two Daughters’ and ‘Death of the Father’. Old Man Goriot was published by Edmond Werdet as a two-volume book on 2 March 1835. Just as he had seen the finished novel in his mind several months before it was written, he celebrated in advance its ‘incomparable success’. The ‘fools’ who made up Parisian society were buying hundreds of copies, he told his future wife.8 Two new editions were already being printed. His former mistress, Laure de Berny, according to Balzac, had enjoyed the second part so much ‘that she had a heart attack’.9

Two years later, the Figaro newspaper offered unsold copies of Old Man Goriot to new subscribers as a free gift, which was a compliment to Balzac but hardly a sign of commercial success. A novel in which crime went unpunished and which devoted as much space to food stains and peeling wallpaper as to ball gowns and boudoirs was never likely to be a bestseller. Novels were expected to provide light relief, not to analyse the workings of society and the mind. Nonetheless, it was a notable victory. The publication in the Revue de Paris and the first two editions (March and May 1835) earned Balzac a total of 10,000 francs, which is eighteen times more than old man Goriot pays for a year’s board and lodging. Even the criminal members of the ‘Ten Thousand Club’ (p. 151), who consider 10,000 francs the smallest amount worth stealing, might have been forced to admit that virtuous hard work could be a lucrative investment.

Just over a year before starting his novel, Balzac had conceived a ‘grand and extraordinary enterprise’.10 He had decided that all his novels, past and future, would form a vast tableau of modern society. This was the monumental oeuvre that he later called La Comédie Humaine (The Human Comedy).