Père Goriot

The test is subtractive, and the spine passes it. Remove Vautrin and Rastignac’s education has no tempter, so the choice at the end is no choice; remove Mme de Beauséant and nothing shows the aristocracy throwing away its own as the daughters throw away their father; remove Goriot and the education has no price. The long opening description of the pension looks removable and is not: the house is the book’s first proposition, that a milieu shapes and reveals its people. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is contrivance and repetition. The Taillefer duel, arranged off stage to make Victorine an heiress, is a mechanism; Goriot’s protestations of love recur past the point where each adds; and the narrator’s generalisations about Paris and about women restate what the scenes have shown.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: in a society where money has become the one measure, every bond is converted into it, the family first, and a love that gives without limit is consumed by those it feeds. Goriot has turned his fortune into his daughters’ dowries and their husbands into his creditors, and he is let into their houses by the back stairs. Beside it stands the disclosure that made the book a proverb, Vautrin’s lesson to Rastignac in the arbour: that a fortune made fast is made by a crime, and that honesty is a luxury of the poor and goes unrewarded. The book does not let the convict be simply wrong, since the vicomtesse’s salon teaches the same lesson in better clothes. Held off the top because the father’s passion is rendered more than understood, and the moralising sometimes states what the action already holds.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Elevation comes as pathos and as dread, and it recurs. The death of Goriot is the summit: the old man on his pallet at the Maison Vauquer calling for daughters who do not come, cursing them and then blessing them, while one of them dresses for a ball. The arrest of Vautrin is the second: the drugged convict struck on the shoulder to show the brand, rising before the police as a man of terrible grandeur. Mme de Beauséant’s farewell ball, held in full brilliance on the night she is abandoned, is the third, and the last page, Rastignac alone in the cemetery at dusk with Paris below him, is among the famous endings in the European novel. Held below the top because the register between these heights is often loud, and the pathos is pressed.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Myth built, not evoked, on three load-bearing figures. Goriot is Lear transposed into the bourgeois age: a father who has divided his kingdom, which is his capital, between two daughters, is shut out, and dies raving at them, with no Cordelia, the book’s darker turn on the pattern. Vautrin is the tempter on the mountain, offering a young man the kingdoms of the world for a crime he need not commit himself, and he returns through La Comédie humaine as its devil. Rastignac is the young man from the provinces, an archetype this book did more than any other to fix; his name entered French as a common noun for the ambitious arriviste. The particular stays particular: the vermicelli, the silver gilt porringer twisted into an ingot, the Beauséant carriages. Held a step down because the Lear pattern is announced as loudly as it is constructed.

Score: 9.0 / 10

The inheritance is the novel of manners, the roman noir and the melodrama of the boulevards, Scott’s historical novel, which Balzac openly took as his model, and the eighteenth-century novel of education. The turn is in two things. The milieu is made causal: the house, the street, the furniture and the price of every dinner are forces that make character, and description becomes an argument. And the characters return: in writing this novel Balzac decided that his books would share one population and one society, a wager on a single work of a hundred volumes that he could not know he would live to make good. The book also joins the melodrama’s machinery, the convict, the drugged wine, the duel, to a realism of money the melodrama never had. Held below the top because those inherited materials stay visible, and the full break is the Comédie humaine, of which this is the threshold.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. The boarding house is the instrument: a vertical society in one building, the landlady and the best lodgers on the first floor, Goriot climbing floor by floor to the third as his money goes, so that the descent of a man is measured as a staircase. From that house Rastignac crosses Paris to the faubourg Saint-Germain and the Chaussée-d’Antin and back each day, and the alternation of the pension’s soup and the salon’s brilliance is the comparison the book exists to make. Three strands braided through one witness give three answers to one question, how to rise in Paris: by the father’s sacrifice, by the aristocrat’s grace, by the convict’s crime. Told as Goriot’s story alone it would be a pathetic tale. Held off the top by the narrator’s essays, where the form becomes a container for the author’s sociology.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Evidence rather than promise, over nearly two centuries. The readings are many and do not cancel: Marx and Engels’s Balzac, the historian of the bourgeoisie; Lukács’s, the realist who saw truer than his royalism; Auerbach’s chapter in Mimesis on the Vauquer description as the unity of milieu and person; the structuralists, and the readers of Vautrin’s desire for Rastignac, which the book leaves legible and unstated; and Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), which takes Vautrin’s lesson on inheritance and labour as a text for modern inequality. The questions hold open: whether Goriot’s love is virtue or a passion as blind as any other, whether Rastignac’s last words challenge society or capitulate to it, whether Vautrin’s offer is refused or only postponed. Held a step down because those questions, though real, lie near a loud surface.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The field is the French novel of the nineteenth century and, as it spread, the European novel. The intrinsic force is high: this is where the realist novel of society becomes a system, a fictional world with its own population, economy and history, which characters leave and re-enter, and the linked cycle descends from it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Zola’s Rougon-Macquart takes the cycle and the milieu as its method; Dostoevsky, who had translated Eugénie Grandet, gives Raskolnikov a version of the question Rastignac puts to Bianchon in the Luxembourg, whether one would kill a mandarin in China by a wish in order to be rich; Henry James wrote on Balzac as the master of the novel; Proust and Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha stand in the line. Held below the top because the reach is shared with the Comédie humaine as a whole, and Illusions perdues carries the young man further.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Survival is weighed over about one hundred and ninety years, in the band for seventy years to two centuries. The text survives whole, in Balzac’s revised version, with the serial and first editions known; nothing is lost, and nothing is charged on form. It has been in print without break since 1835, is the most read of Balzac’s novels in France and abroad, has been set in French schools and universities for generations, translated into the major languages more than once, and filmed and staged repeatedly; its names are in the language: a Rastignac, a Vautrin, a Maison Vauquer. Its surface is fixed to its moment, Restoration Paris, the dowry, the price of a dinner in francs, and it has outlived those conditions. Held just below the widest figure because its presence outside France is narrower than that of the most read European novels of its century, and much of it is in the academy.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Judged on Balzac’s French. The command is of construction and the scene: the three strands are timed so that Vautrin’s arrest, the Beauséant ball and Goriot’s dying fall within a few days of one another, each throwing the others into relief, and the set pieces, the arbour, the arrest, the deathbed, the ball, the cemetery, are built with a dramatist’s sense of the curtain. The portraits are exact and fixed in objects: Mme Vauquer, whose person explains the pension and the pension her person; Goriot’s decline told in his shirts, his silver and his hair powder. Vautrin’s speech is an aria of cynicism in an argot wholly his own. The charges are long recognised: haste, a prose that repeats and generalises, a narrator who explains, melodrama in the machinery, and laments that tip into rhetoric. The making bears the load in the structure more than in the sentence.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the dinner table of the Maison Vauquer, with the lodgers’ jokes in “-rama” and Poiret and Mlle Michonneau, and the salon of the vicomtesse de Beauséant in the faubourg Saint-Germain; or the convict’s slang of the bagne and the tact of the duchesse de Langeais. One law governs them: everything is bought and everyone has a price, and passion, the one force that will not calculate, destroys whoever has it. The pension sells Vautrin to the police for three thousand francs; the faubourg sells Mme de Beauséant for a marriage portion; the daughters sell their father for a ball; Goriot alone does not sell, and dies of it. Vautrin’s law and the salon’s are the same law, said plainly. Charged because the melodramatic devices obey the stage’s physics more than the book’s.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Many orders, held in one house and the city it looks down on. Consciousness, in Rastignac’s slow corruption and his scruple. The family: Goriot and his daughters, Rastignac’s mother and sisters in Angoulême who send him their savings, the Restaud and Nucingen marriages. Money in all its forms: the grain speculation by which Goriot made his fortune in the Revolution, the dowry, the bank, usury in Gobseck, debt, inheritance. Class in its layers, from the pension through the bourgeoisie and the new money of the Chaussée-d’Antin to the old aristocracy. Crime and the police, in Vautrin and Gondureau; medicine in Bianchon; the law in the student; the Revolution and the Empire behind the Restoration. They are integrated through Rastignac, who passes through every layer. Held below the top because labour is past and offstage, the sacred is present only as figure, and the natural order is absent: this is the city alone, in one winter.

Score: 8.6 / 10