Father Goriot

1835

Balzac's 1835 novel of the Maison Vauquer, a shabby Paris boarding house where a retired vermicelli merchant has sold everything he owns to keep his two married daughters in society. The law student Eugene de Rastignac lodges in the same house and watches Goriot's ruin while the escaped convict Vautrin teaches him exactly what Paris costs. Ellen Marriage's translation of the novel that opens the Human Comedy.