Père Goriot Honoré de Balzac

PÈRE GORIOT
Honoré de Balzac
A critical paper by
John P. Conomy

  Pour L’Amour ou L’Argent:  The Tale of Père Goriot

                        Rue Mouffetard, Église St. Médard, Paris, 1880

         Stillness, quietude, tranquility giving way to tenseness, anxiety, ennui.  The last of night, the first glimpse of morning.  Stars, one after another, yield their twinkle to the rising light of the sun coming over the rooftops, chimneys and skylights of buildings in rue Tournefort, once named rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve, Paris, 5th Arrondissment.  Stores, markets, le Poste, everything is closed, steel shutters locked down to the pavement.  A lone figure, a man, walks along, seemingly full of purpose, odd for a Frenchman at this hour on a sunrise morning. A cat crosses the empty street ahead of him, turns its head to look at the man, and seeing nothing of interest, trots on.  The Church of Saint Médard, its steeple gray against the lighting sky, lies ahead in rue Mouffetard, in ancient times the Street of Stinks.  Old gravestones lie in the Cimetière de St. Médard, the dancing grounds of the Convulsionaries of St. Médard, those shrieking, jerking and posturing women to whom we are still indebted for what we know of the dark malady of Hysteria. Ahead lies Le Jardin des Plantes, and beyond it, Gare Austerlitz, Place d’Italie and La Salpetrière, a gunpowder factory in the 16th century, now a medical city unto itself.
The ambling man is me, 1980.  I have left my lodgings at the Hôtel Claude Bernard in rue des Écoles, wedged between the Sorbonne and the Pantheon.  I am on my way to the Salle de Garde at La Salpetrière to meet my student doctors.  We will spend the day in the ancient wards, Salle Vincent de Paul and Salle Mazarin, and end it in the Libraire Charcot. I am on my way to work this morning.  Somewhere along rue Tournefort, the former “New St. Genevieve Church St.,” I pass the location of the down-in-the-heels rooming house, Maison Vauquer, run by Madam of the same name.  It is the dwelling house of Rastignac, Vautrin, Père Goriot and others of whom we now speak, studying them as they emerge, then disappear again into the pages of La Vie Privée, a fascicle of Balzac’s encyclopedic La Comédie Humaine.

          Frontespiece, Père Goriot, American Edition, Philadelphia, 1897

You have suffered my prose mimicry of Honoré de Balzac.  He did not invent the lengthy mise-en-scène of French literature, but was a master of it.  It persists today in every form of French writing from newspapers to political commentary, to novels and, to the Nobel Prize for Literature (2014) of Patrick Modiano (Rue des Boutiques Obscure) which we must read.
Some would review the story line of Père Goriot, sort out the characters (most of whom have unpronounceable surnames, even from the lips of a Frenchman) then go on to explore the complex interactions, nuanced allusions, moral challenges and existential struggles which dominate the action among them.  I will dispense with that, save to say Balzac has a sensitive eye to human motivation, and a sharp pen to record it. The story is told with Balzac the narrator sitting among his characters.  He is Shakespearian in this skill, and Père Goriot is his King Lear and Richard III. I read our livre de nuit in French and English and while the Signet Classic Edition (translated by Harry Reed, d. 1986) is faithful to the original text, it is like most things cooked up in France, best read from the original menu.
But first, the serpentine story of Père Goriot told here with grand omissions and deserved brevity. After all, this work was first a serial, stretched out, and paying its author a chapter at a time.  It opens in 1819 with Rastignac, a young man from a noble but impoverished family in southern France, arriving in Paris to study Law.  He finds himself in rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève and takes a room in the pretentious and dilapidated Latin Quarter pension run by the predatory Madam Vauquer.  No Hôtel Particulier, it is inhabited by a cast of renters who form a highly dysfunctional family in which Rastignac plays the son and tragic hero.  Finding himself immediately in desperate need of preliminary luxuries, he cons his sister out of 3000 Fr and is befriended by Père Goriot.  Père is a old man, now a down-at-the heels entrepreneur who made a fortune in the pasta business.  He sells out at the height of pasta production and uses the proceeds of his hard work to finance the marriages of his two grasping daughters, Delphine and Anastasie, to a couple of rich jerks, thus guaranteeing their keep, but not their happiness.  If Old Goriot is Lear, then these girls are Regan and Goneril. There is no Cordelia.  Rastignac finds himself involved with them, and with Victorine, another young thing and resident of Maison Vauquer, who bides her time waiting for family members to die so she can inherit 1,000,000 Fr.  Rastignac learns the ropes of social climbing from his cousin, Madame de Beauseant, and after about two weeks of law-school-cum-partying, begins to find just how much money it takes to join the upper ranks of French Society. Rastignac suffers pangs of tortured anxiety as he discovers that to live the life to which he would like to be accustomed, he requires rich and powerful friends, a rich woman, and all the accoutrements of wealth. And he has none of these.
As he sinks into indebtedness as deep as the Canyons of Verdun, playing at the fringes of the Parisian haute monde, he is offered rescue by Vautrin, a fawning predator, swindler, clever parlor psychiatrist and criminal playing the devil to Rastignac’s Faust. But Rastignac, in a fit of moral rectitude, refuses to be bought.  Vautrin, having already arranged the murder of Victorine’s brother, is arrested, and sent to prison.  Père Goriot, who spends sleepless nights in his room pounding what is left of the family silver into ingots to be sold on the street to satisfy his daughter’s needs for finery and ascension to the Parisian oligarchy, dies of a stroke, alone and bitter. Rastignac, seeing either the light or the darkness at the end of his own tunnel (depending on your position as either a romantic or rationalist) chooses to chuck the pursuit of Law (as did his inventor, Balzac, after two years of penal servitude in an advocate’s office) and join in the chase for money wrapped in the skirts of guess who? Père Goriot’s daughters, maybe?

                              
Eugene Francois Vidocq, Swindler, Criminal, Prisoner-become-
                     Policeman on whose character Vautrin is based

          Père Goriot, along with its cast of characters (who fully numerated would roughly equal the number of allied forces landing in the invasion of Normandy in June, 1944) is a complex affair of many hearts: L’Amour.  Let me suggest another analytic perch, and an equally revealing point of dissection: L’Argent, money.  Consider Père Goriot not a tale of love, but a story about money.  My touchpoint for this far more rational and far less romantic look at Père Goriot is Thomas Piketty’s Capitalism in the 21st Century.
Rastignac comes to Paris from the farm in 1819.  Napoleon is gone to St. Helena. The Empire has collapsed, and the Bourbon Monarchy has been restored.  France is not yet the consolidated nation we know, but the Revolution and the Napoleonic wars have done little to diminish France’s national wealth.  Paris, then as now, was the beating heart of France.

Thomas Piketty

         In 1820, the average Frenchman, comprising 80% of the country, earned 400-500 Fr per year.  Rastignac’s family earned 3000 Fr per year, or 600 Fr per capita.  They did this by owning land and charging rents, in addition to selling farm products at the market.  Rastignac, favorite son that he was, took it all.
To live at the standard of Jane Austen’s characters (they roamed the printed page at the same time as Rastignac) an income of about 25,000 Fr per person per year is required. In Vautrin’s realistic accounting of Rastignac’s standard of living, about 30,000 Fr will be needed each year, and from whence comes such largesse?
Let’s look at hard work.  A successful lawyer or judge in France at the time, if he worked very, very hard and had “good friends”, would earn 4000-10,000 Fr per year.  Doctors fared somewhat worse. There goes the horses, gala balls, evenings at the opera and the chateau!
In Rastignac’s time, 80% of the national wealth in France was owned by 1% of the population, a situation not entirely dissimilar from the present day USA and Europe.  The source of income for the upper decile was wholly passive and nearly entirely derived from land rents and government bonds.  This situation was stable through the Revolution, present in France and England and stable until the wars of the 20th century.  (vide infra, Piketty, op. cit.)                                 


Rastignac, more than something of an entrepreneur in his heart of hearts from the beginning, sensed the path to the good life, and learned it proficiently as Balzac leads him through the pages of Père Goriot. Scholarship and learning, sweat and toil, produce nothing much.  If it’s money you want, and you are not born with it, and gambling and crime seem too down-sided, then marry it!  In the immortal words of Tina Turner, “What’s Love Got To Do With It?” 

         Bon Chance, Rastignac!

John P Conomy
Cleveland, February 17, 2015