**Père Goriot** follows young Eugène de Rastignac as he navigates Parisian high society in 1819, witnessing the tragic downfall of fellow boardinghouse resident Goriot, a father destroyed by his devotion to ungrateful daughters. Balzac's 1835 novel exposes the corruption and ruthless ambition of post-revolutionary France through this tale of social climbing and family betrayal. This translation by Ellen Marriage captures the sharp social commentary of one of French literature's defining realist works.
To the great and illustrious Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, a token of admiration for his works and genius. DE BALZAC. Mme. Vauquer (_nee_ de Conflans) is an elderly person, who for the past forty years has kept a lodging-house in the Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve, in the district that lies between the Latin Quarter and the Faubourg Saint-Marcel. Her house (known in the neighborhood as the _Maison Vauquer_) receives men and women, old and young, and no word has ever been breathed against her respectable establishment; but, at the same time, it must be said that as a matter of fact no young woman has been under her roof for thirty years, and that if a young man stays there for any length of time it is a sure sign that his allowance must be of the slenderest. In 1819, however, the time when this drama opens, there was an almost penniless young girl among Mme. Vauquer’s boarders. That word drama has …Continue reading →
This is the Ellen Marriage translation, a public-domain English text. Marginalia presents it unabridged, with chapter navigation, your reading position saved, and optional AI commentary on any passage.
A towering figure of 19th-century French literature, this prolific novelist (1799-1850) created "La Comédie Humaine," an ambitious multi-volume work portraying French society with unprecedented realism. His detailed character studies and social observations helped establish the modern novel, influencing writers from Dickens to Dostoyevsky with his penetrating vision of human nature. All works by Honoré de Balzac →
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