For all their foibles and obsessions, the boarders form a society which is capable of acting for the general good. Perhaps, as Madame Vauquer believes, the decline of her boarding house is a greater tragedy than the demise of Old Goriot. Here, too, Balzac was conveying a historical truth. He was analysing a relatively recent state of affairs which has since become a social norm. The enormous nineteenth-century Larousse encyclopaedia found his description of a typical boarding house ‘too gloomy’ (‘usually, these modest establishments are clean, pleasant and discreet’), but it agreed with him that the boarding house played a vital role in the city of strangers and misfits: a secular cloister ‘for those who like to eat invariably the same thing, from the same plate, in front of the same faces … It replaces the missing family with a kind of adopted family.’13

The greatest irony of all is that Balzac’s novel about paternal love contains one of the first sympathetic depictions of a form of love that was associated with the disintegration and ‘demoralization’ of society. Vautrin is the first three-dimensional homosexual character of modern fiction whose love is not automatically condemned and whose personality is not defined exclusively by his ‘vice’. Unlike most of the other characters, Vautrin is capable of true devotion. Compared to Goriot’s violent obsession, his love is silent, discreet and devastatingly effective, as Rastignac discovers.

This surprising aspect of the novel passed unnoticed for over a century after its publication, just as it escapes Rastignac’s attention until Mademoiselle Michonneau shines ‘a terrifying light into his soul’ by hinting at the nature of his attachment to Vautrin (p. 184). If anyone had noticed, the novel would certainly have been banned. In Balzac’s hands, the practical impossibility of writing openly about a ‘sodomite’ became a literary advantage. Vautrin’s love is one of the secrets that Rastignac must discover for his ‘education’ to be complete. Like the reader, he must follow clues and decipher innuendos: the words ‘My angel’, Vautrin’s predilection for tales of passionate male friendship or the expression ‘men who have their passions’ (‘des hommes à passions’) (pp. 42, 146), which was prostitutes’ slang for ‘homosexuals’.

Old Man Goriot revealed the extent of Balzac’s ambition as a chronicler of modern life. It also introduced a device that would help to hold this teeming universe together. Other novelists had toyed with the idea of making characters recur from one novel to the next, but no one had applied it in such a full and systematic fashion. Rastignac had already appeared as a young dandy in The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831). In Old Man Goriot, he appears at an earlier stage of his career. The tale of Madame de Beauséant’s abandonment had already been told in ‘The Abandoned Woman’ (1833). The medical student Bianchon, who eats at the Maison Vauquer, would appear in thirty other stories. Vautrin himself, as Balzac wrote in Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (‘A Harlot High and Low’), became ‘a kind of spinal column who, by his horrible influence, joins, so to speak, Old Man Goriot to Lost Illusions and Lost Illusions to Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes’. The end of the novel looks forward to the continuing adventures of Eugène de Rastignac.

So many of Balzac’s characters are related to one another that the genealogical tree of The Human Comedy covers three walls of the Balzac museum in his house at Passy. A few heroic scholars and monomaniacal readers have managed to commit this gigantic human web to memory. However, all of Balzac’s stories can be read quite separately, without any knowledge of the others. The point was not to create a soap opera with a cast of two thousand but to reproduce the three-dimensional effects of real life. Characters become known to us, like real acquaintances, little by little, at different stages of their lives. They show the effects of passing time.

The vital importance of this device lies in the impression of interconnectedness. Every character has hypertextual connotations, just as every inanimate object vibrates with significance. The opening description of the boarding house, which is probably one of the most famous settings of a scene in the history of fiction, serves as an introduction to this alluringly consistent world of material and spiritual unity. Madame Vauquer is not a figure in front of a painted backdrop but a zoological specimen in its natural environment.