Father Goriot | Page 3

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Typed and first proof by Dagny [email protected]

FATHER GORIOT
by HONORE DE BALZAC

Translator Ellen Marriage

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 been somewhat discredited of late; it has been
overworked and twisted to strange uses in these days of dolorous
literature; but it must do service again here, not because this story is
dramatic in the restricted sense of the word, but because some tears
may perhaps be shed /intra et extra muros/ before it is over.
Will any one without the walls of Paris understand it? It is open to
doubt. The only audience who could appreciate the results of close
observation, the careful reproduction of minute detail and local color,
are dwellers between the heights of Montrouge and Montmartre, in a

vale of crumbling stucco watered by streams of black mud, a vale of
sorrows which are real and joys too often hollow; but this audience is
so accustomed to terrible sensations, that only some unimaginable and
well-neigh impossible woe could produce any lasting impression there.
Now and again there are tragedies so awful and so grand by reason of
the complication of virtues and vices that bring them about, that
egotism and selfishness are forced to pause and are moved to pity; but
the impression that they receive is like a luscious fruit, soon consumed.
Civilization, like the car of Juggernaut, is scarcely stayed perceptibly in
its progress by a heart less easy to break than the others that lie in its
course; this also is broken, and Civilization continues on her course
triumphant. And you, too, will do the like; you who with this book in
your white hand will sink back among the cushions of your armchair,
and say to yourself, "Perhaps this may amuse me." You will read the
story of Father Goriot's secret woes, and, dining thereafter with an
unspoiled appetite, will lay the blame of your insensibility upon the
writer, and accuse him of exaggeration, of writing romances. Ah! once
for all, this drama is neither a fiction nor a romance! ALL IS
TRUE,--so true, that every one can discern the elements of the tragedy
in his own house, perhaps in his own heart.
The lodging-house is Mme. Vauquer's own property. It is still standing
in the lower end of the Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve, just where the
road slopes so sharply down to the Rue de l'Arbalete, that wheeled
traffic seldom passes that way, because it is so stony and steep. This
position is sufficient to account for the silence prevalent in the streets
shut in between the dome of the Pantheon and the dome of the
Val-de-Grace, two conspicuous public buildings which give a
yellowish tone to the landscape and