The rule of a king who dressed in the bourgeois black frock coat and top hat only confirmed his cynical view of the forces in control of his country. France entered an era of capitalist and industrial expansion. “Enrichissez-vous”: get rich, the prime minister François Guizot said (perhaps apocryphally) to his countrymen. And so the French did—at least those who had the means to invest in factories, railroads, and various manipulative stock market schemes. The workers—witness the revolts of the Lyons silk workers and various short-lived uprisings of the Paris proletariat—were largely excluded from this newfound prosperity. Balzac, writing most of his Human Comedy in the 1830s and 1840s, after the July Revolution but setting the majority of his tales under the Restoration, has the benefit of a historian’s hindsight on a regime and a cultural moment that failed. That lends depth to his analysis. But hindsight also increased his anxiety about the future of French society. If social historians continue to find Balzac a great source text, it’s because he delved into most of the forces that were transforming his country and saw what the Marxists call the contradictions of a nascent capitalist society.

“Capitalist” is what Balzac calls the usurer Gobseck in the long short story, or short novella, that bears his name. It’s possibly a misuse of the term, yet Gobseck’s loans, often at exorbitant rates of interest, do oil the capitalist machinery. At a time when loans between individuals most often took the form of the kind of IOU known as a lettre de change—an exchangeable and discountable promissory note—the moneylender was a key figure. Gobseck sits at the still center of the turning earth in The Human Comedy. He probably appears in more of the novels and tales than any other character, with the possible exception of the lawyer Derville, who is the narrator of Gobseck’s story here. Sooner or later, it seems, everyone must come to Gobseck for cash. In this manner, as he tells the young Derville, he gets to see the spectacle of human emotion in its rawest and most stripped-down condition. Gobseck lives without wearing himself out through the ravages of passion, including sex, that he sees devouring his compatriots. He has learned the superior pleasures of the observer. “Well, I tell you,” he says to Derville, “every human passion, writ larger by the play of social interests, they all come and parade before me in my life of calm. Furthermore, that scientific curiosity of yours, a kind of struggle with man always getting the worst of it—I replace it with insight into the springs that set mankind moving. In a word, I possess the world with no effort at all, and the world has no grip on me.”

Money offers possession of the world without an expenditure of life’s vital forces—which Balzac believed to be limited, expendable in a brief flaming existence, or else to be hoarded over the long life of the miser and the observer. The elegant young men and women of Paris parade through Gobseck’s life—as well as the honest seamstress Fanny Malvaut, whom he will bring to Derville’s attention. In the process, we as readers get to see the stuff of other dramas recorded elsewhere in The Human Comedy in a new perspective. In particular, “Gobseck” casts a new light on the final chapter of Balzac’s most famous novel, Le Père Goriot. In Old Goriot we saw Anastasie de Restaud, one of Goriot’s daughters, as a tragic figure exploited by her husband; here we are given the husband’s point of view, as he struggles to rescue the family fortune that Anastasie is squandering on her unscrupulous lover, Maxime de Trailles.

Derville tells the story of Gobseck late one evening in the noble house of the Vicomtesse de Grandlieu, in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. The Vicomtesse is concerned that her daughter, Camille, is paying too much attention to the suit of young Comte Ernest de Restaud. She believes him to be without fortune, and though his father is of impeccable nobility, his mother (née Goriot) she can scarcely tolerate. Ostensibly, then, Derville tell his story of Gobseck in order to reassure the Vicomtesse and Camille that Ernest will soon come into a handsome fortune (though the story becomes racy enough along the way that the Vicomtesse feels obliged to pack Camille off to bed). It’s a long detour through Gobseck’s affairs—including the loan at fifteen percent that allows Derville to set up his law office—before we reach the story of how the old Comte de Restaud set up a transfer of funds into Gobseck’s name in order to save them from his wife—but then on his deathbed was so closely guarded by her (since she is afraid he will disinherit her two adulterine children in favor of Ernest) that he could not sign the codicil that would have returned the money to his son. Anastasie, Ernest, and the rest of the family are reduced to penury—which proves character-building. And now that Gobseck has died, at age eighty-nine, Ernest will have a tidy sum.

A kind of cautionary tale, then, to assuage the fears of the Vicomtesse about a future son-in-law, but far more than that: the story of money itself in its accumulation.