Father Goriot by Honoré de Balzac

Le Père Goriot
Father Goriot
Also translated as Old Goriot

 

Madame Vauquer has run a boarding House for forty years. Although very rundown and verging on squalor, Maison Vauquer has a respectable reputation. The drawing-room is depressing and reeks of the odeur de pension (boarding house smell). Yet it could be considered delicately perfumed in comparison to the dining-room which could spoil anyone’s appetite. It will seat twenty; there are currently eighteen paying for dinner, including others from the neighborhood who come partake of the cheap fare. Breakfast is casual, like family, with only the residents in attendance.

Father Goriot by Honoré de Balzac

Le Père Goriot
Father Goriot
Also translated as Old Goriot

This masterpiece is another example of Balzac’s skill at depicting the complexity of human behaviour.  He uses a boarding house as a setting to show the deleterious impact of social mobility in post-revolutionary Paris…the irony is, of course, that all this inequity takes place after the Revolution which was meant to end it.