The film without the cuts. And the book itself.
A steep, silent Paris street hides a boarding house where the poor watch, judge, and dine on humiliation. Every lodger here is a life pressed downward.
Father Goriot
An old vermicelli-maker is gradually stripped of comfort while clinging to the daughters who consume his fortune.
Maison Vauquer
Under one stale roof, the poor and the ambitious watch each other and keep score.
He dares readers to face a tragedy they will recognize, then dismiss.
Read →All Is True
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.
Balzac decides to insult the very person paying to read him. He imagines you settling into your armchair with the book in your white, well-kept hand, expecting light amusement, and he tells you in advance exactly how you will fail Goriot: you will read about the old man's suffering, then eat dinner with a good appetite and complain that the author laid it on too thick. By naming your indifference before you can feel it, he traps you. If you stay comfortable, you prove him right; the closing insistence that "All is true" then dares you to look for the same misery in your own house.
The House of Misfortune
A steep, silent Paris street hides a boarding house where the poor watch, judge, and dine on humiliation. Every lodger here is a life pressed downward.
Goriot’s Silver Service
Silver that once meant a comfortable home becomes the metal Goriot melts down for his daughters.
Eugène de Rastignac
A poor law student studies Paris as carefully as his books, learning how ambition changes the soul.
Father Goriot
The cast, locations, objects of note, core concepts, and selected passages in the Author’s Pen - at your own pace.
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