Essays on literary works - 2024

What Led Père Goriot to Ruin? (Based on Honoré de Balzac's Novel “Père Goriot”)

Balzac, one of the nineteenth century's most towering novelists, crafted not merely a collection of novels but a comprehensive tapestry of an entire society. His characters—doctors, lawyers, statesmen, usurers, socialites, courtesans—recur throughout his works, lending a tangible authenticity to his fictional world.

In 1834, Balzac outlined the ambitious project that would become "The Human Comedy." He initiated this monumental series with "Père Goriot," penned that same year. This novel serves as the cornerstone of his epic, introducing many of the central figures and intertwining plotlines that would be explored in subsequent masterpieces.

What unfolds within the pages of "Père Goriot"?

Balzac transports us to the Rue Saint-Geneviève in Paris, where a four-story building owned by Madame Vauquer serves as a peculiar boarding house. Its residents are a motley crew of the forgotten and the aspiring: aging tradesmen, retired bureaucrats, impoverished widows, and provincial youth seeking their fortunes in the capital. In this hidden corner of the Parisian jungle, among the throng of ordinary people, a fugitive convict lurks in disguise.

Madame Vauquer, the proprietor, doles out meager portions, particularly to the aging Goriot. She resents him for dashing her hopes. When he first arrived, he was a prosperous and eligible bachelor. But now, he has withered into a destitute old man.

Goriot's once fashionable attire has been replaced by rags; he neglects his wig and eschews tobacco. He has been relegated from the finest room in the house to a garret. The once esteemed lodger has become an outcast, the butt of everyone's jokes. Why has this happened? Madame Vauquer can only speculate.

Oblivious to his surroundings, Goriot is lost in his thoughts, idly kneading bread and inhaling its scent.

Only one of the boarding house residents regarded the old man with sympathy: the student, Rastignac. He had learned Goriot's sorrowful tale...

In his youth, Goriot had been a noodle maker, "a shrewd, thrifty, and enterprising fellow who had bought out his master's business in 1789." During the lean years of the Revolution, he had amassed a fortune speculating in flour. "His entire intellect had been devoted to the grain trade." All his affections had been centered on his family—his wife and two daughters. Beyond his shop and his home, he had no interests: he did not read books and fell asleep in the theater. Goriot's wife had died young, and he had raised his daughters himself. He had pampered them, indulging their every whim. "His paternal affection had exceeded all reasonable bounds," and his daughters had become his idols. Goriot had "exalted them above himself, loving even the evil he suffered at their hands." And with the passage of years, that evil had grown more palpable.

Having provided his daughters with substantial dowries, Goriot had married them off. The elder, Anastasie, to the Comte de Restaud; the younger, Delphine, to the banker Nucingen. They had become women of fashion, ashamed of their father's humble origins as a flour merchant. To please them, the old man had abandoned his business. His daughters had been unwilling to take him in, and their husbands were embarrassed by their plebeian father-in-law. Thus, Goriot had taken up residence in the boarding house.

He had imagined that he would spend his retirement in comfort, so long as his daughters would allow him to visit them. But they received him only rarely and then secretly, by the back door. They wanted only his money. Whenever they needed funds to indulge some whim, they turned to their father, and gradually he had given them everything he possessed. Broken and destitute, he would spend hours wandering the streets, just to catch a glimpse of his idols. And they had both turned their backs on him. "They had squeezed the orange and thrown away the peel."

In his delirium, Goriot made wild plans to acquire wealth so that he might aid his "angels." He died without his daughters at his bedside. As if gaining a moment of clarity before death, Goriot realized the cause of his misfortune. He was of no use to them because he was poor: "Ah, if only I were rich, if only I had not given them my wealth, but had kept it for myself, they would be here, and my cheeks would be rosy with their kisses."

Père Goriot is one of the most striking examples of a character consumed by passion. The relentless pursuit of such passions, leading to the complete destruction of the individual who has fallen victim to them, is one of the most characteristic features of Balzac's art. By leading his protagonist from one concession to another, from one sacrifice to the next, Balzac brings him to utter ruin. Goriot is so consumed by his paternal affection that he has nothing else in the world; he thinks of no one but his daughters. His passion, rooted in selfishness, becomes his weakness and leads him to his doom.

Balzac created the world of "The Human Comedy" in the image of the real world. His works offer a vivid portrayal of the morals of French bourgeois society in the first half of the nineteenth century, revealing the boundless power of money. He is an explorer, descending into the depths of the ocean. This ocean is human life, with its turbulent currents of everyday affairs, its storms of passion, its hidden coves of crime and vice, ever-changing, ever-moving. And within this movement, this chaos, this chain of accidents, catastrophes, human degradation, and the loftiest flights of thought, labor, and aspiration, Balzac seeks the essential, investigating the laws that govern the ebb and flow of the human ocean.