Paris, France’s capital city, which is often compared to American wilderness, to forests and to a battlefield shows a typical characteristic of survival in the novel. Here people through cunning, strength and moral accommodation can not only survive but actually come out as victorious.
Old Goriot, a lonely old lodger at the pension of Madame Vaquer in Paris, sold his business of vermicelli in order to collect handsome dowries for his daughters. His life came down as the rooms he accommodated did, in the first year he occupied one of the best rooms in the house, next year he shifted to a less expensive room in the floor above and at the end to a cheap, dingy room in the third floor.
Goriot made his fortune in criminal collusion with the Langeais family. Vautrine, Goriot and Anastasie all resort to Papa Gobsek the moneylender.
We hear a precept uttered by Madame de Beauseant:
“In Paris, success is everything, it’s the key to power”.
Expressed a few pages later by Vautrin:
“Succeed!...succeed at all costs”.
Throughout the novel we see that whatever differences exist among the various levels of society, they are differences not of kind but of degree. Corruption is universal.
Then the theme of unconditional love and support is repudiated in the Paris that surrounds Goriot. This world is for individuals who stake their own territory to embrace the social mobility just as Goriot’s daughters, who were much more concerned about their name and advancement than the parental love of their father and this love and rejection leads to his dejection from the society. Goriot’s love for his daughters and the fact that it is never reciprocated is the reflection of Parisian world of the time period, a realm where social advancement was shown priority over emotional loyalty. Such transformation is the history of post revolutionary Paris. Goriot thus is the odd one out to utter:
“My real life is in my two girls, you see; and so long as they are, happily and smartly dressed, and hats off carpets under their feet, what does it matter what clothes I wear or where I Lie down of a night? I shall never feel cold so long as they are warm...”
We find him buried in a pauper’s grave the next day. And no warmness provided by him to the daughters made them pay for his burial. They didn’t even attend him with the expected love in the last moments. Just the empty carriages of Anastasie and Delphine are seen following the coffin, such loving and indulgent father thus receives his finer tribute. In this mercenary Parisian society which sees no place for the Father Goriot (Père Goriot), he is left just as a laughing stock among other people.
Balzac's novel is a critique of the early nineteenth century, following the fall of Napoleon and the Bourbon Restoration. The drama opens in 1819; Balzac writes:
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.
Balzac sets the stage for his tragedy of selfishness and self-centeredness—traits that he believes characterize France at this time. The three main characters, M. Goriot, Eugene de Rastignac, and M. Vautrin, all of whom live in Mme. Vauquer's boardinghouse, symbolize the forces in France at the time.
M. Goriot is a character deserving of pity, but, as Balzac writes, "Stately Paris ignores the existence of these faces bleached by moral or physical suffering." Beneath the glamorous facade of the city, Goriot lives in poverty, consuming only soup, vegetables, and boiled beef each day. He lives in penury to support his two selfish daughters, who seem to care very little for their father.
Eugene de Rastignac, a law student, symbolizes the way in which newcomers to Paris during this time yearned for the riches around them and became corrupted by the city. As Balzac writes about Rastignac, "If he begins by admiring the procession of carriages on sunny afternoons in the Champs-Elysees, he soon reaches the further stage of envying their owners." Rastignac begins to envy the wealth he sees around him. He begins to be corrupted by his cousin, Mme. de Beauseant, who tells him, "The more cold-blooded your calculations, the further you will go. Strike ruthlessly; you will be feared." She wants him to befriend Mme. Delphine de Nucingen, one of M. Goriot's selfish daughters, to make her fall in love with him in an attempt to get other rich women to fall in love with him.
Later, M. Vautrin tries to convince Rastignac to kill the son of Taillefer so that Rastignac can marry Mme. Victorine, Taillefer's daughter who will be wealthy once her brother is out of the way. M. Vautrin tries to convince Rastignac that he should use women as stepping stones toward social advancement. Rastignac refuses.
In the end, however, Rastignac, having witnessed Father Goriot's death without his daughters by his side, loses all his idealism. He sets off to be with Delphine, M. Goriot's daughter, who has enchanted him with her beauty. Balzac writes of Rastignac at the end of the novel, "His eyes turned almost eagerly to the space between the column of the Place Vendome and the cupola of the Invalides; there lay the shining world that he had wished to reach." In the end, Rastignac has become like all the other competitive Parisians around him. Balzac's novel is an indictment of the corruption and mercenary attitude of France at the time.
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