Père Goriot Reading Order

Père Goriot (1835) by Honoré de Balzac is one of the founding texts of the French realist tradition — a novel set in a Parisian boarding house in 1819 that follows two characters whose fates Balzac interweaves: Eugène de Rastignac, a provincial law student who arrives in Paris determined to make his way in society, and Père Goriot, an elderly retired pasta merchant who has sacrificed his entire fortune and his health to give his daughters the lives they wanted. The novel introduces both characters who recur throughout La Comédie Humaine (Balzac's vast cycle of interconnected novels) and the figure of Vautrin, an escaped convict who tries to recruit Rastignac into a criminal scheme. The novel ends with one of the most famous last lines in French literature — Rastignac standing over Goriot's pauper's grave and throwing down his defiance to Parisian society: 'À nous deux maintenant!' ('Now it's between the two of us!'). Balzac's realism — his meticulous attention to social detail, to the mechanisms of money and ambition, to the way Paris works — was the foundation on which Flaubert, Zola, and the entire subsequent tradition of European realism was built.