Le Père Goriot

I’ve never read _Pere Goriot_, although I’m familiar with it because an ex-girlfriend talked about it while working on her Lit. MA. I’m only commenting because I want to share that ever since then, I occasionally sing the phrase ‘Pere Goriot’ to the tune of the chorus of Der Kommissar.

IIRC the one in the Vautrin series that’s closest to a laugh fest is “Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtesans”, (translated badly as a title “Harlot High and Low” in the version I read). Vautrin was based on a real historical character, a master criminal turned Paris police chief, who published his memoires.

Thank-you John: until today I wasn’t even aware that there was a novel called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Then I thought you were joking hyperbolically to make a point, but then I googled it, and to my surprise found there was a trilogy.

One part of me is inclined to be snobbishly dismissive; the other part is sorely tempted … :/

John Holbo, look up Cicisbeo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicisbeo

I don’t know if this was practiced in France as well as Italy, but I wouldn’t be surprised. I think the husband had to turn a blind eye to the affair because the code of honor dictated that if he acknowledged that he knew about it he would have to shoot both the wife and the lover, or at least the lover. Most aristocratic marriages were arranged for economic reasons anyway and often involved a girl just out of the convent and a tired older man who had plenty of mistresses of his own that he had no intention of giving up.

I don’t know why Père Goriot is the one always chosen as required reading for students — not that I think it is a bad book. I remember really liking Balzac’s Lost Illusions, which is, among other things, about the impact the invention of a cheaper way of making paper had on literature and society (sort of like the internet, now that one thinks about it). I also really enjoyed Cousine Bette. Balzac really revels in details: Les Lys dans la vallée is a rewarding one if you are a wild flower enthusiast.

Ok, this is Italian rather than French, but isn’t a cicisbeo basically what your question is about?

Perhaps you should review the life and writings of George Sand? Also, from my readings of Balzac so far, patrimony hasn’t come up (closest subject is heraldry), and “mail order bride” marriages don’t occur (closest subject is marriages arranged by the father to a suitable family with income for the daughter- not for the delectation of the groom).

This sounds almost like an evolution of the Medieval courtly love tradition–didn’t that feature knights competing for the favor of an already-married woman, usually above their station?

My mental prejudice against Balzac is a chapter where the protagonist waits in a sitting room to meet his beloved/colleague/antagonist/whoever, in which each piece of furniture is described, priced, and genealogized, along with a description of the factory or workshop where each was made.

There may be no such chapter in Balzac, but that’s what Lost Illusions felt like to me when I read it.

Balzac was a big fan of Hoffmann, and wrote a number of novels with gothic elements. Not simply peau de chagrin, but also L’Élixir de longue Vie and recherche de l’absolu. The latter is a sort of gothic novel set in a normal bourgeois setting where plot follows the money – imagine Doctor Frankenstein ruining the family fortune by spending everything to make the monster.
Also, in Goriot, Balzac gives form to a sort of parable that has a long history in literature: the death of the chinese mandarin. Would you accept a fortune that came to you only by your willing the death of a chinese mandarin on the other side of the world, who you do not know? Rastignac, I think, attributes the “thought experiment” – terrible phrase – to Rousseau. Carlo Ginzberg wrote a wonderful essay about it: Killing a chinese mandarin: the moral implications of distance. It is in the Wooden Eyes collection. It is, in its way, the ur-question of colonialism.

I don’t really know if Balzac has a parallel in English – it certainly isn’t Dickens. For one thing, Balzac likes dirty humor. He likes obsessives, like Dickens – Cousin Pons, for instance, the collector, could conceivably come out of Dickens – but he likes as well clearly defined obsessions with sex – with beautiful rear ends, as in Cousin Bette, or with comely guys, as in the famous Seraphita. B. prided himself on his bi-sexual leanings. For Balzac’s overt comedy I’d try the novella, the illustrious gaudissart.

Le Rouge et le noir. Everyone should read it!

Oscar Wilde said that ‘The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac’. An coffee-addicted reactionary Monarchist (sometime journalist and would-be press baron, in love with a Polish countess but sleeping with his housekeeper) that Marx and Engels couldn’t get enough of. What’s not to like?

I wonder if Le père Goriot is promoted as the go-to Balzac novel for Anglophones because it contains all the Balzacian elements in a short enough format for undergraduates? Illusions perdues gives a clearer impression of the novelist as sociologist (what Realism’s all about?) before the wacky melo-Gothic of its sequel Splendeurs et misères kicks in (by the by, Terry Pratchett’s pastiche of the former, The Truth, has lots of jokes). It’s known, among other things, for long passages that interlard narrative commentary with meticulous descriptions of how paper is manufactured and who’s getting rich from the nineteenth century’s addiction to debt and how. Oh, and Vautrin’s speech at the end is an absolute showstopper.

It seems that an obstacle for readers now is that Balzac’s melo-Gothic elements are moves in a match of shadow boxing with a largely-forgotten popular culture, which includes the most widely-read novel of the century (probably), Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris (Goriot actually predates it, but Balzac was already friends with Sue and immersed in the same world of high life and low journalism). The Mystères were read by almost everyone, critiqued by Marx, plagiarised by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (see Umberto Eco, Prague Cemetery), spun off into the mysteries of London, Madrid, Rome, Lisbon etc. (the last one was made into a great film by Raul Ruiz). It’s the godfather of pulp fiction: gore, sentiment, caped crusaders, master criminals, ‘whores with hearts of gold’. Incredibly though, with a few notable exceptions, even French studies (much less world lit) has paid little attention to Sue and other contemporary popular writers and entertainments, so it’s little surprise if the general reader needs this stuff heavily footnoted (as it is in the Gallimard and Pléiade editions) in order to see what Balzac’s doing. Even if successful, it spoils the immediacy. Perhaps this is why Marx and Wilde, much closer to the source, find Balzac anything but underwhelming.

To answer the question: you might be interested in Balzac’s Petites misères de la vie conjugale, which ends with the line ‘the only happy ménages (household, and thereby marriage, in French) are ménages à quatre, though earlier it implies that married women can only take lovers once they are past childbearing age (forty is the ‘age of indiscretions’). Countless other anecdotes, but off the top of my head, there’s an interesting passage in William Reddy’s The Navigation of Feeling (its sources are from C18 and 19 France) describing a husband being made a pariah for reacting ‘excessively’ to his wife’s infidelity, thereby endangering his legitimate child with her (IIRC). Given that breeding was the highest stakes game in town, C19 patresfamilias had good reason to be preoccupied with their succession rather than hurt feelings.

Can’t speak to Balzac, but “wife has acknowledged lover” (and husband mistress) is not only a commonplace in Dumas’ novels, whenever set, but also noted without comment in various memoirs I’ve read. EG, Cardinal de Retz finds an amorous connection behind many of the political manoeuvrings of the Fronde.

John: check out Daumier’s 3-D terracotta caricatures in the Musée d’Orsay. Fine and very unusual. Sample.

Maybe some of the old aristocrats enjoy the frisson of cuckoldery.