Hanska begins a primarily epis tolary affair that lasts until Balzac’s death. Balzac begins an affair with a married woman, Marie Daminois. George Sand’s Lelia appears.

1834 La Recherche de l‘absolu (The Quest for the Absolute) is pub lished. A daughter, Marie-Caroline du Fresnay, is born to Balzac and Daminois.
1835 Père Goriot is published. Despite his literary success, Balzac lives beyond his means and is pursued by debt collectors.
1836 Balzac acquires a periodical, Chronique de Paris, which soon fails. While traveling in Italy he hears that Madame de Berny has died.
1837 Although bowed by debt, Balzac builds a home outside Sèvres and names it Les Jardies. The first installment of one of his masterpieces, Illusions perdues (Lost Illusions), appears. Around this time, Balzac embarks on a scheme to make money from Sardinian silver mines, which fails miserably.
1840 Balzac founds the Revue Parisienne, which he uses as a forum to critique various contemporaries.
1841 111 health compromises Balzac’s vigorous way of life and causes him to spend more time at his home near Sèvres. The author decides to group his voluminous portrayal of post-Napoleonic Paris—comprising more than ninety novels and an astonishing 2,000 to 3,000 characters—under the umbrella title La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy) . His works are early examples of the Re alist style that will influence countless later novelists.
1842 Balzac publishes his famous avant-propos (“foreword”) to La Comédie humaine. Taking Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s the ories about the animal world and applying them to hu manity, Balzac asserts that human beings are shaped by their environments. His publisher, Hetzel, also prints works by Jules Verne, Victor Hugo, and George Sand.
1843 The final installment of Illusions perdues is published.
1844 Alexandre Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo is published.
1848 Balzac’s masterpieces La Cousine Bette and Le Cousin Pons are published. Revolutions occur throughout Europe.
1849 Eugène Delacroix paints the ceiling of the Louvre’s Salon d’Apollon.
1850 Countess Hanska and Balzac marry in Ukraine in early spring. His health deteriorates, and Balzac dies on Au gust 18. Buried at Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, he is honored with a funeral speech by Victor Hugo.

Introduction

006

Subject of Père Goriot—A good man—middle-class
lodging house—600 fr. income—having spent every
penny for his daughters who each has 50,000 fr.
income—dying like a dog.

—BALZAC

 

 

Père Goriot is one of Balzac’s best-known novels, and is widely regarded as a classic of world literature. It is often read in schools and universities, perhaps because one of the main characters in the book, the young Eugène de Rastignac, is a student (although he spends little time studying), and parts of the novel take place in and around the Latin Quarter, which houses the great French institutions of learning. A strong appeal of the book is its wonderfully vivid description of this part of the city, and indeed of all of Paris—its splendor, its squalor, its social divisions, its characters, its institutions, its life. Anyone acquainted with the architecture and topography of Paris will recognize familiar and evocative place names—the Jardin des Plantes, the Opera, the rue Saint-Jacques, Montmartre, the Place Sorbonne, Père-Lachaise cemetery—and can follow Eugene step by step on his long walks between the Chaussée d’Antin and the Faubourg Saint-Germain. So Parisian is the setting of this work that its author wondered: “Will any one without the walls of Paris understand it?” (p. 9).

Père Goriot is also the perfect novel to start with if one has read none of the roughly ninety novels and stories that make up La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy), the title Balzac gave to his collected oeuvre. It is probably with Père Goriot that Balzac consciously set about perfecting the technique of recurring characters that marks his signal contribution to literary

history; in it, he introduces a number of people who reappear in later novels, and brings back a few who have been introduced already in earlier ones. Indeed, Rastignac stands out as an exemplary figure in this new way of envisioning the novel. Avid readers of Balzac at the time had encountered him already in La Peau de chagrin ( The Wild Ass’s Skin, 1831), a novel published before Père Goriot (1835) but in which Rastignac appears as a mature man, older than the young student living at the Maison Vauquer in Père Goriot. Pere Goriot gives us the story of Rastignac’s beginnings in society; a prequel to The Wild Ass’s Skin, it provides the backstory (as they say in Hollywood), just as other novels in La Comédie humaine will inform us about Rastignac’s adventures later in life. Explaining his system of composition in the preface to Illusions perdues (Lost Illusions, 1843), Balzac writes: “When one of these characters finds himself, like M. de Rastignac in Père Goriot, arrested in mid-career, you should seek him out again in Profil de Marquise (Profile of a Marquesa), in The Interdiction [L’Interdiction] , in The Firm of Nucingen [La Maison Nucingen], and finally in The Wild Ass’s Skin, acting in each epoch according to the rank he has then reached.”

This explains the occasional reference in Père Goriot to the future life of one of its characters, as for example when Balzac writes of Rastignac that “the self-possession which pre-eminently distinguished him in later life already stood him in good stead” (p. 129). Rastignac appears in more than twenty of the novels in La Comédie humaine, a vast tapestry of characters whose lives are interwoven in different ways at different periods. (When one considers the incidence of recurrence of other characters from Père Goriot—the Baron de Nucingen appears or is mentioned in thirty-one stories, Bianchon in twenty-nine, Delphine in seventeen, Gobseck in thirteen, Madame de Beauséant in ten, etc.—one begins to get an idea of the complexity of the social tableau Balzac painted.) The interweaving is crucial: Balzac is less interested in individual characters than in the relations that bind them together at different moments in their lives. Fascinated by the social bond in its manifold forms, Balzac wrote novels and stories that abound in the representation of alliances, friendships, associations, groups, gangs, families (and pseudofamilies, such as the boarders at the Maison Vauquer). Although he is known as the creator of some of the most compelling characters of nineteenth-century fiction (including Rastignac and Vautrin from Goriot), and in spite of the fact that he wrote in an era of unprecedented individualism—the era of individual rights and bourgeois liberalism that came fast upon the revolutionary turmoil of the late eighteenth century—one could perhaps argue that Balzac’s work demonstrates that there is no such entity as the individual ; there is only the collective, shared existence of humanity (the boardinghouse in Père Goriot is a fine example of this commonality) , along with a thoroughly modern sense of the precariousness of the very categories of individual, self, and identity, which Balzac approaches with skepticism.