Old Man Goriot (Penguin Classics)

by Honoré de Balzac

  149. a typical banker’s house … marble mosaic landings: A reference to the grand houses built in this area at the end of the eighteenth century, designed by architects such as Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736–1806), according to neoclassical or Palladian ideals. Many were demolished later in the nineteenth century.

  150. Number NINE: At the time, there were five gaming-houses near the Palais-Royal: Numbers 9, 36, 113, 129 and 154. In the course of the Human Comedy, Balzac’s characters turn up at four of them.

  151. the misdemeanours … drives them to commit: The Code Civil (note 54) reduced women to the status of children in the eyes of the law. In La Physiologie du Mariage (1829), Balzac argues that women should have greater freedom, particularly in legal terms.

  152. a thousand écus: Rastignac returns to the carriage with 7,000 francs in winnings, having given the old man 200 francs (ten louis) in return for his advice. Delphine needs 6,000 francs to pay back de Marsay. So all she can give him is 1,000 francs, while wishing that it was 1,000 écus (calculating here in the pre-revolutionary écu, equal to six livres, so approximately 6,000 francs). See Note on Money.

  153. parochialorama: Balzac writes patriarcalorama (‘patriarchalorama’), perhaps because the boarding house is home to unfashionable old men such as Goriot and Poiret.

  154. meticulous in the matter of his linen: In his Traité de la vie élégante (‘Treatise of Fashionable Life’, 1830), Balzac considers clothes as markers of social standing, developing an idea previously introduced in the Code des gens honnêtes (‘Code for Respectable People’, 1825): ‘Speak, walk, eat or dress, and I’ll tell you who you are’. On the specific matter of linen, he quotes one of the mottos of Regency dandy Beau Brummell: ‘no perfumes, but very fine linen, plenty of it’. Balzac himself paid great attention to his linen, and ran up huge laundry bills.

  155. Mirabeau: Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, the Comte de Mirabeau (1749–91), was a skilful orator and one of the leading political figures of the earliest phase of the Revolution, despite his aristocratic background. He led a life of dissipation as a young man, running up huge gambling debts and conducting scandalous love affairs.

  156. taenias: Tapeworms, parasites that suck their host dry.

  157. Absent-minded man: One of the satirical sketches of various human types in Jean de la Bruyère’s The Characters (1688), although the episode mentioned here doesn’t feature in it.

  158. Saint Hubert’s day: This fell on 3 November, and opened the hunting season. Saint Hubert is the patron saint of hunters and hunting.

  159. Monsieur de Turenne: A reference to one of Louis XIV’s greatest marshals, Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, Vicomte de Turenne (1611–75).

  160. those who crown themselves kings: Such as Napoleon Bonaparte, who on 2 December 1804, in the presence of the Pope, crowned himself Emperor of the French, signalling that he owed his position to his own efforts, and that he recognized no overlord.

  161. Venice Preserv’d: A tragedy by Thomas Otway (1652–85), which first appeared in 1682. The two main characters, Pierre, a foreign soldier, and Jaffier, a Venetian nobleman, form an intimate bond which ends in suicide. Vautrin’s take on the play reveals his values, the importance that the bonds between men, in life and in love, have for him, and provides one of many hints in the novel as to (the nature of) his homosexuality.

  IV. CAT-O’-NINE-LIVES

  162. Rue de Jérusalem: In other words, the Préfecture de Police (police headquarters), situated on the Ile de la Cité, not far from the Palais de Justice.

  163. Caliph of Baghdad: In this comic opera by François-Adrien Boieldieu (first performed in 1800), the caliph, Isaoun, assumes the name ‘Il Bondocani’, which has a kind of magic power, so that he can roam the streets freely at night in disguise.

  164. the penal colony in Toulon: This explains Vautrin’s earlier oblique allusion (note 118), to having ‘spent some time in the Midi’.

  165. Assize Court: In France, the court dealing with major offences or felonies (crimes), such as murder and rape, and, until the abolition of capital punishment in 1981, those which incurred a death sentence.

  166. Coignard Affair: Pierre Coignard was an escaped convict who rose to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel by pretending to be the émigré Comte de Sainte-Hélène. He was arrested in 1819.

  167. the Sûreté: ‘The French police department of criminal investigation’ (OED).

  168. Ragoulleau … Morin: A contemporary case of attempted murder. Madame Morin was sentenced to twenty years of hard labour in 1812 for having tried to kill Monsieur Ragoulleau.

  169. Argus eyes: Argus Panoptes, the ‘All-Seeing’, had a hundred eyes. He was chosen by Hera to watch over the beautiful Io, whom Zeus had turned into a white cow. After he was decapitated by Hermes, Hera placed his eyes in the tail of a peacock. Hence ‘Argus’ has come to designate a spy or a guardian.

  170. Oh Richard … The whole world has deserted you: A famous aria from the first act of Grétry’s popular opera Richard Coeur de Lion (‘Richard the Lionheart’, 1784), sung by the troubadour Blondel, the squire of the imprisoned king. According to the Mémoires of the Duchesse d’Abrantès, Napoleon sang it to himself, taking the air one night, on his way through France to Elba.

  171. Laffitte … politics doesn’t come into it: Jacques Laffitte (1767–1844), with two ‘f’s and two ‘t’s, was a famous banker and politician, and Louis-Philippe’s first prime minister. The equally famous Bordeaux claret Château-Lafite (no relative) is spelled with one of each.

  172. manna: ‘A sweet pale yellow or whitish … juice obtained from incisions in the bark of the Manna-ash, Fraxinus ornus, chiefly in Calabria and Sicily; used in medicine as a gentle laxative’ (OED). It would seem that Madame Vauquer’s cassis is the opposite of manna from heaven.

  173. Wild Mountain … The Loner … Chateaubriand: Le Mont Sauvage (‘Wild Mountain’, 1821) was a play by Pixérécourt, adapted from the sentimental novel Le Solitaire (‘The Loner’) by the Vicomte d’Arlincourt. René de Pixérécourt (1773–1844) was a prolific writer of popular melodramas. He knew his audience – ‘J’écris pour ceux qui ne savent pas lire’ (‘I write for those who cannot read’) – and, alongside the more sensational elements in his plays, sought to provide moral guidance that would be understood by the manufacturing classes. The boulevard theatres had an important social and imaginative function for the sub-literate (the literacy rate in France didn’t start to rise until 1925). Madame Vauquer mistakenly attributes the novel to François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848), and confuses his first name with the title of his novel Atala (1801). (In French you might refer to the book as ‘L’Atala de Chateaubriand’, hence Atala de Chateaubriand.) Chateaubriand was a high Romantic writer concerned with the social and aesthetic benefits of Christianity. Madame Vauquer’s confusion is comic but almost understandable: Pixérécourt’s melodramas, while appealing to a different sensibility, perhaps occupied similar imaginative terrain to high Romantic drama, as writers of all kinds attempted to come to terms with France’s new emerging social values.

  174. Sleep … for ever: A refrain from Scribe’s vaudeville, Le Somnam bule (‘The Sleepwalker’, 1819).

  175. Paul et Virginie: A popular utopian novel by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737–1814), published in 1787. Set on the island of Mauritius, it tells the tragic tale of two innocent young lovers.

  176. Gaîté: The Théâtre de la Gaîté on the Boulevard du Temple, where Vautrin took Madame Vauquer to see Mont Sauvage (note 173). A carnival atmosphere reigned on the Boulevard, which, along with its theatres, was packed with cabarets, cafés and street entertainers.

  177. col tempo: Italian, ‘with time’.

  178. Cochin hospital: In the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Jacques. Founded in 1779 as a hospice for the poor by Jean-Denis Cochin, priest of the parish of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, and later named after him.

  179. Rouge-et-Noir: Another name for the card game known as trente et quarante, in which thirty and forty are
by turns the winning and losing numbers. Rouge-et-Noir is named after the table at which it is played, which has two red and two black diamond-shaped marks on which players place their stakes. Hence, an unpredictable, high-risk game of chance where one person’s ruin is another’s gain.

  180. sheet anchor: The largest of a ship’s anchors, used only in an emergency. Figuratively, ‘That on which one places one’s reliance when everything else has failed’ (OED).

  181. the old death’s-head: In French, la camuse or la camarde – from camus, having a snub or flattened nose. The death’s-head is depicted as a face stripped of flesh, a skull whose nose appears flat, as reduced to its bridge of bone.

  182. Silk-Thread: A literal translation from the French. English thieves’ cant expressions around silk perhaps have similar associations. According to Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of the Underworld, a ‘silk’ is a swindler (whose talk is ‘smooth as silk’); a ‘silk-hat’, a high-class con-man or a gangster who affects respectability and elegance. In Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (‘A Harlot High and Low’), we learn that this convict’s real name is Sélérier.

  183. grasshoppers: In English thieves’ cant, a ‘grass’, rhyming on ‘coppers’.

  184. Ninon … Pompadour … Père-Lachaise Venus: The first two references are to famous courtesans. Despite being a woman of independent means, Ninon (Anne) de Lenclos (c. 1620–1705), a renowned intellect, was perhaps given this tag because of her open sexuality and her rebuttal of patriarchal authority. Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour (1721–64), a well-educated woman of wealthy bourgeois stock, was Louis XV’s most famous and cherished mistress; a patron of the philosophes, her political and cultural influence was considerable. Although history has since refreshed the reputations of these women, Vautrin’s intention is to imply that Mademoiselle Michonneau is a prostitute who is past her best, while ‘Père-Lachaise Venus’ (‘Vénus de Père-Lachaise’) also suggests that she is more cemetery statue (see note 199 on Père Lachaise) than Venus de Milo.

  185. Quai des Orfèvres: The famous French equivalent of Scotland Yard (Criminal Investigations Department) is located on the left-bank side of the Ile de la Cité, near the police headquarters and the law courts.

  186. Jean-Jacques: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), the Swiss writer and thinker, whose immensely influential – and controversial – work The Social Contract (1762) rejects the assumption that any human being has the authority to wield power over another, positing instead the idea of the state as a pact between citizens. His ideas on freedom, virtue, law and equality have been widely (mis)interpreted over the centuries.

  187. Flicoteaux’s: An establishment described in detail in Lost Illusions (Part II, Chapter 2):

  Flicoteaux is a name inscribed in many memories. Few are the students who, having lived in the Latin quarter during the first twelve years of the Restoration, did not frequent this shrine of hunger and poverty … What has no doubt prevented Flicoteaux the friend of youth from making a colossal fortune is a certain feature in his programme … thus stated: BREAD AT YOUR DISCRETION – an indiscretion as far as restaurant-proprietors are concerned.

  (Lost Illusions, tr. Herbert J. Hunt, Penguin Classics, 1971)

  As we know, Madame Vauquer keeps a sharp eye on how much bread her student boarders consume.

  188. Leaving for Syria … Dunois: ‘Partant pour la Syrie’ or ‘Le beau Dunois’ was a song written in the medievalizing Romance or Troubadour style which originated during the First Empire. The poem tells the story of a crusader who, on the eve of his departure for Syria, prays that his bravery in battle will be rewarded by the love of a beautiful woman. Composed by Bonaparte’s step-daughter, Hortense de Beauharnais, the song was a huge popular success, played by hurdy-gurdies on street corners everywhere. It also became a Bonapartist rallying cry during the Restoration.

  189. trahit sua quemque voluptas … Virgil: From Eclogues II.65.

  190. the Café des Anglais: Situated on the corner of the Boulevard des Italiens and the Rue de Marivaux, this establishment, noted for the quality of its food and wine, was frequented by the Parisian elite.

  191. bitter aloes: ‘A drug of nauseous odour, bitter taste and purgative qualities’ (OED).

  192. love-seat: A small sofa for two, known in French as a ‘causeuse’, from causer, ‘to chat’.

  193. perpetuity … life annuity: Two different kinds of bond that yield the investor a yearly interest payment. The payments on the former continue for ever (at a lower rate), and on the latter cease at the death of the investor (at a higher rate). Goriot’s wealth is now almost at its lowest level. We know that prior to retirement his income was 60,000 livres (francs) a year, with comparatively modest yearly expenses of twelve hundred francs. He gives his daughters dowries of 800,000 francs each (by his own account, less by other people’s), and when he moves into the Maison Vauquer, he is left with an annual income of eight to 10,000 francs, already a significant reduction. Now, his income is reduced to twelve hundred francs a year – equivalent to the amount he paid Madame Vauquer in rent on his arrival – and the interest he’ll receive will only just cover 50 écus’ (250 francs) rent per year, and daily expenses of 40 sous (2 francs). To place Goriot’s sacrifice in perspective, see Note on Money.

  194. Croesus: King of Lydia during the sixth century BC, famous for his wealth.

  195. Marius … Carthage: Caius Marius, Roman general and politician (c. 156–86 BC). Following an initially successful career, he was outlawed from Rome by his rival Sulla, and escaped to Africa. The image of Marius in exile, sitting on the ruins of Carthage, came to symbolize the unpredictable swings in human fortunes (and Balzac uses it more than once in the Human Comedy, for example, in Cousin Bette). Marius returned from Africa to capture Rome and ordered the massacre of his opponents.

  196. Tasso: Byron’s The Lament of Tasso, describing the sufferings of the great Italian poet in Ferrara, was translated into French in 1830 by Amédée Pichot.

  V. THE TWO DAUGHTERS

  197. cuffs … a thousand écus apiece: Louise de La Vallière reputedly ripped the king’s lace cuffs as she clung to him in agony during labour throes. Later replaced as his mistress by Madame de Montespan, she withdrew to a convent. Balzac had a particular (and personal) interest in fine linen and its costs (see note 154).

  198. Rubicon: The name of the small stream which marked the southern boundary between Cisalpine Gaul and Italy, on the east coast of northern Italy. It was forbidden for a general to cross it with his army; Caesar, in doing so, effectively declared war against Pompey. Hence, proverbially, the expression ‘to cross the Rubicon’ means ‘to take a decisive or final step’ (OED).

  199. Père Lachaise: This famous cemetery is situated in the present-day twentieth arrondissement in eastern Paris; when it was founded in 1804, it was on the outskirts of the city. It was a destination Balzac often aimed for as he walked the streets of Paris, during his early years as a writer, when he lived in the Rue Lesdiguières (near the Place de la Bastille). See also note 223.

  200. separate assets: Goriot is clutching at straws. Even under the terms of this kind of contract, the law stipulated that a wife was not allowed to sell or mortgage her property without her husband’s signature, whereas the husband was able to dispose of his wife’s property as he wished without involving her. See note 54 on the Code Civil.

  201. Place de Grève: Historically, it was on this square, on the right bank of the Seine, that judicial executions were carried out. The last was held in 1830 and the name was subsequently changed to Place de l’Hôtel de Ville.

  202. men of straw … duped contractors … Vienna: In this scam, it seems that some kind of fake sale is taking place between the men of straw and Nucingen. The former acknowledge receipt of payment, i.e. that Nucingen has purchased the buildings from them, even though he hasn’t paid full price for them. The men of straw then go bankrupt and default on the bills used to pay the contractors, so the latter foot the cost of construc
tion. As Nucingen appears to have legal ownership of the buildings, and as no direct agreement exists between him and the contractors, they have little or no recourse. To cover his tracks further he transfers some of his wealth abroad so that, if he’s ever questioned, he can claim that the money was spent on purchasing the houses, and his books will appear to balance.

  203. Sainte-Pélagie: Debtors prison, located in the present-day fifth arrondissement, opposite the boarding house on which Balzac may have modelled the Maison Vauquer.

  204. the Bank: The Banque de France, founded under Napoleon in 1800 to stabilize the French financial system, following the hyperinflationary trauma of the post-revolutionary years caused by excessive note issue (the unpopular assignats).