Madame Vauquer‘s speech, for example, is at once direct, vulgar, and pretentious. Readers will appreciate the niceness of Marriage’s renderings (“‘My angel,’ said she to her dear friend, ‘you will make nothing of that man yonder”’ [p. 29).

It is perhaps worth mentioning that English translations of Goriot up to the middle of the twentieth century came with few or no notes. In 1901 Ellen Marriage saw the need for only a single footnote—on p. 105 (p. 113), to explain the reference to the initials T.F., for Travaux forces (hard labor) branded onto the convict’s skin. The Crawford translation of 1951 has no notes at all. With the passage of time, which has rendered some of the allusions and references obscure or obsolete, and with the increasing role of scholars and teachers in the preparation and translation of English editions, notes and prefatory materials have proliferated. The reader might wish to remember that generations of Anglophones have read Père Goriot without interventions from translator or editor. He or she might wish also to bear in mind the following word of caution from the pen of one of the most erudite of all Balzac scholars, the literary historian Pierre-Georges Castex: “Be wary of the erudition that swirls around texts, which can help approach them, but ... which does not get at what is essential, for what is essential is in the work and one must look there in order to discover it” (cited in Ambrière, “Hommage à Pierre-Georges Castex,” p. 9). The wonder of Père Goriot is in the work, in its details (“it is the author’s firm belief that details alone shall constitute henceforth the merit of works improperly called novels,” as Balzac writes in his preface to Scenes de la vie privée [Scenes of Private Life, 1830]),—for example, the character Goriot, the former vermicelli manufacturer and expert in flour, sniffing his bread before tasting it or, in the same vein, Madame Vauquer’s vexed glance at students who consume too much bread. These details succeed not only on account of their astuteness and plausibility, which contribute to the effect of realism in this carefully observed novel. They succeed also because they allude, without clamor or insistence, to the highly Balzacian theme of the necessities of life, of the daily bread that society refuses to the hungry, of the bread that some earn, some steal, some swindle, etc.

Peter Connor is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is the author of Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). He has translated Bataille’s The Tears of Eros (City Lights Press, 1989), as well as many works in the area of contemporary French philosophy, including The Inoperative Community, by Jean-Luc Nancy (University of Minnesota Press, 1991).

NOTES

1 These numbers are from A. G. Canfield, “Les Personnages reparaissants dans la Comédie humaine,” cited in Pierre-Georges Castex, ed., Le Père Goriot (Paris: Editions Gamier, 1960), p. vi.

2 “One drank liberally under [Balzac’s] roof, but this pleasure easily took on with him a romantic and literary form. Each bottle he brought up from his cellar had a story. This one had been around the world three times; this one dated from a fabulously distant epoch; this rum came from a cask that had bobbed for a hundred years on the seas” (André Billy, Balzac [Paris: Club des Editeurs, 1959], p. 78; translation by Peter Connor).

3 The judgments of Sainte-Beuve, Zola, and Proust are collected in the Norton Critical Edition of Père Goriot, edited by Peter Brooks and translated by Burton Raffel (London and New York: W. W. Norton, 1998).

4 The reference is to the title character of Balzac’s Ferragus, part 1 of Histoire des Treize, edited by Pierre-Georges Castex (Paris: Éditions Garnier, 1966), p. 139. Shakespeare’s King Lear is often invoked as a source, especially since Balzac placed later editions of Père Goriot under the epigraph “All is true,” the subtitle of Henry VIII. The role of the missing third daughter (Cordelia) would be played by Victorine Taillefer or (see Bellos, Honoré de Balzac: Old Goriot [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987], pp. 34-35) by Rastignac himself.

5 Collins adds in a note: “This sentence has unfortunately proved prophetic. Cheap translations of Le Père Goriot and La Recherche de L Absolu were published soon after the present article appeared in print, with extracts from the opinions here expressed on Balzac’s writings appended by way of advertisement. Critical remonstrance in relation to such productions as these would be remonstrance thrown away.