Money contaminates almost every relationship in the novel. The word argent (money) appears as often as the word amour (love), sometimes in the same sentence. Madame Vauquer judges people by the size of their purse and treats them according to their income. Vautrin gives Rastignac a detailed estimate of the cost of happiness (one million francs). Gondureau, the Chief of the Sûreté, serves the State by having criminals secretly assassinated, thereby saving the cost of trials, prison meals and legal executions. Goriot himself believes that ‘Money is life’ (p. 205). Cash has replaced the complicated moral arithmetic of vice and virtue with a single currency of success and failure. It encourages crime and cleanses consciences like an indulgent confessor.

This socio-economic view of human relations was something quite new in the French novel. To most critics of the time, mentioning sums of money in a serious work of fiction was intolerably vulgar. Balzac was accused of writing like an auctioneer drawing up a sales catalogue or like a commercial traveller displaying his wares. He was compared to his own comic character ‘the Illustrious Gaudissart’, who can sell anything from hair-restorer to insurance. Years would pass before this apparent obsession with material details was widely recognized as a mark of Balzac’s historical accuracy. It was new in the French novel because it corresponded to something new in French society.

In the early nineteenth century, France was still a rural economy. Less than a quarter of the French population lived in towns and cities. There was practically no heavy industry: the entire country had fewer than forty functioning steam engines. Cash and credit played no role in the lives of most French people. In Rastignac’s home region (the Charente), according to Vautrin there are ‘more chestnuts [poor people’s food] than hundred-sou coins’ (p. 98). The fortunes of the richest characters are either inherited (Madame de Beauséant) or based on commerce, property and speculation (Goriot and Baron Nucingen). Paris, which was the biggest city in continental Europe, with a population larger than that of the next six biggest French cities combined, was still a collection of villages. The sound of traffic barely reaches the boarding house in Old Man Goriot, and the quartier has yet to be sanitized by modern sewers and building regulations. Pigs, chickens and rabbits live in the little courtyard at the rear of the house. The household waste is swept out into the street. The seamy districts described by Balzac in that ‘illustrious valley’ of crumbling plaster and ‘mud-clogged gutters’ (p. 3) are easier to imagine today in half-abandoned hamlets of the southern Massif Central than in Paris itself.

The inmates of the boarding house are like a microcosmic provincial population, a complete society with its own dialect, customs and folklore. Yet even that small society is falling apart. Social mobility brought the characters together and social mobility will scatter them to other parts of the city. The brief appearance, in the opening pages, of a bogus countess who runs off without paying her bill is a warning that the old hierarchy is collapsing. Goriot himself began as a worker, then grew rich during the Revolution by exploiting fears of famine and selling his pasta flour at extortionate prices.