Père Goriot

4 ideas

1. Goriot's daughters drain him and abandon him

   Jean-Joachim Goriot, a retired vermicelli maker who made his fortune selling flour during the Revolution, gives his two daughters, Anastasie and Delphine, large dowries so they can marry into the aristocracy and the banking world. He then sells off his annuities and his silver and moves into ever-cheaper rooms at the Maison Vauquer boarding house to pay their debts and their lovers' debts. Only the student Rastignac and a medical student attend him, and Rastignac pays for the pauper's funeral with his last coins.

2. Unconditional giving trains its recipients to contempt

   Goriot's love takes the form of never refusing money, so his daughters learn that he is a resource and not a person. Their regard for him falls as his fortune falls, and once he is ruined they are embarrassed by his tradesman's origins. The novel argues that a sacrifice with no limits does not create a bond of gratitude. It creates a one-way extraction that ends when there is nothing left to extract.

3. Society as a war with hidden rules

   The criminal Vautrin tells Rastignac that Paris rewards neither merit nor honest work, which takes too long. By his account, great fortunes rest on crimes that were never discovered, and laws are nets that catch small offenders while large ones break through. From this view, respectable society and the criminal underworld look like the same system operating at different levels of visibility.

4. The moral price of social ascent

   Rastignac arrives from the provinces with scruples and learns in stages that entry into high society requires money, a well-placed mistress, and the willingness to use family and lovers as stepping stones. Each concession he makes, such as asking his sisters for their savings or becoming Delphine's lover, makes the next one easier. He refuses Vautrin's openly criminal offer to arrange a murder that would win him an heiress, but absorbs the same logic in legal forms. His closing challenge to Paris from the Père Lachaise cemetery, 'À nous deux maintenant!' ('It's between you and me now!'), marks his final acceptance of those terms.

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