Now, an embarrassment to his wealthy daughters, he is a stranger to the world that his money created, alienated from every level of society. By the time the novel opens, in the Maison Vauquer, he has already moved from his three-room, first-floor apartment to a cheaper one on the second floor and finally to a room on the third floor, beneath the servants’ attic. He may look like an anachronism to his fellow boarders, but old man Goriot is a man of his time.

Many of Balzac’s admirers, including Victor Hugo and Friedrich Engels, noticed that his characters often seemed to contradict the author, and that, although Balzac often presented his novels as political morality tales, his reactionary views were not necessarily a reliable guide to the true significance of his work. Balzac himself talked about his characters as real people, as though he had as little control over them as Goriot has over his daughters.

As well as exemplifying life in nineteenth-century France, each character plays a symbolic role, which Balzac frequently underlines like an artist adding captions to his drawings, just as he heightens the contrasts of his tableau: age and youth, poverty and wealth, the glittering Faubourg Saint-Germain and the festering Latin Quarter. Goriot is a ‘Christ of Paternity’ (p. 192), an incarnation of Fatherhood. He expresses Balzac’s own opinion: ‘If fathers are to be trampled underfoot, the country will go to the dogs’ (p. 240). Goriot’s devotion to his daughters appears to be a dazzling exception in a world where families are cliques and marriages are business deals, where a virtuous girl like Victorine Taillefer is abandoned by her father and an ambitious young man like Rastignac uses his family as a bank.

But Goriot is not a simple advertisement of Balzac’s convictions. His love is not a model but an aberration. He pictures himself sitting in his daughters’ laps like a puppy. He dreams of rubbing up against their dresses and kisses Delphine’s feet while she talks to her lover. He funds her adulterous liaison with Rastignac and fantasizes about living above the lovers’ nest, listening to their movements when they return in the evening.

The ‘Christ of Paternity’ has reduced his life to a grim obsession. Like a strange bacterium, he feeds on lies and self-deception. As the frighteningly perspicacious Vautrin points out, Goriot is quite normal. The city is full of people who are ‘thirsty [only] for a certain kind of water drawn from a certain well’, which is ‘often stagnant’ (p. 42). To satisfy their secret passion, they would sell their families into slavery and their soul to the devil. They may be gamblers, stock-market speculators or collectors. They may have a passion for music or an all-consuming desire for sweets. ‘Old Goriot’, says Vautrin, ‘is one of those fellows.’ In Vautrin’s view, Goriot is not a tragic hero but ‘a dull stick’ (p. 43).

Balzac’s novels are remembered for their grand passions and extremes of vice and virtue, but even in his saintliest characters he also shows the frailty of true love and the extraordinary resilience of misguided devotion. He describes heroic self-sacrifice but also the insidious anaesthetic of habit, the tenacity of trivial addictions and the inexorable force of stupidity. For every luminous genius in The Human Comedy, there is an indestructible idiot like the mechanical Poiret. In a preface to the first edition of Old Man Goriot, Balzac answered complaints that his depiction of society was too bleak by publishing a sarcastic list of all his female characters. It looks like a financial statement, with virtue in the credit column and vice in the debit column. The result was thirty-eight ‘virtuous’ women and twenty ‘criminal’ women, ‘omitting on purpose more than ten virtuous women, so as not to bore the reader’. The implication was that his characters are not caricatures but human beings who muddle through, adapting their morality to circumstances. They are neither entirely virtuous nor entirely corrupt. The impressively small-minded and ultimately excusable Madame Vauquer appears in the ‘virtuous’ list, though she is marked as ‘doubtful’.

The boarding house itself, ironically, is the closest thing in the novel to a functioning urban family.