Pere Goriot Read Online Free PDF

customs, to learn the language, and to become familiar with the amusements of the capital” (p. 38), these should be the goals of the student, for a student in Paris is first and foremost a student of Paris.
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    On October 12, 1833, Balzac wrote to his sister, Laure: “And I am a father —that’s another secret I have for you—and thanks to a lovely person, the most naive creature, who fell like a flower from the sky, who comes to me in secret, demands of me neither letters nor attentions, and who says, ‘Love me for a year, I will love you all my life. ”’ The creature in question was Marie Daminois, a married woman, daughter of the novelist Adèle Daminois, and who bore Balzac a daughter, Marie-Caroline Du Fresnay (born June 4, 1834) . It is now known that Marie is the “Maria” to whom Eugénie Grandet is dedicated, and the title character of that novel appears to share some of her physical traits. Balzac seems to have had little to do with his daughter. He may have attended her first communion and occasionally come to play with her; in his will, he bequeathed to her a statuette of Christ on the cross (an ironic recognition of an unacknowledged child from the man who created Goriot, the “Christ of paternity” [p. 222] ) . Marie-Caroline died in Nice in 1930. She would not have known of the letter to Madame Eveline Hanska, Balzac’s longtime correspondent and companion, whom he was to marry in the last year of his life, in which her father writes: “I love Anna [Madame Hanska’s daughter] incomparably more than that little girl I see every ten years” (see Robb, Balzac: A Biography, p. 247).
    More meaningful to Balzac, but occurring after the composition of Père Goriot, seems to have been his experience with Madame Hanska, who in 1846 was expecting a child by him, although the pregnancy did not come to term. Balzac in his letters makes reference to the vital force he feels at the idea of becoming a father: “It seems to me that I have life, courage and happiness enough for three in my heart, in my veins and in my head.”
    There are several literary fathers who in Balzac’s oeuvre precede and anticipate Goriot. Among these we might single out Ferragus, chief of brigands, and a father who in his intensity and paternal absolutism seems to foreshadow Goriot: “Is it I, I who breathe only through your mouth, I who see only through your eyes, I who feel only through your heart, is it I who would fail to defend with a lion’s claws, with the soul of a father, my only possession, my life, my daughter?” 4 But in truth nothing in Balzac’s life or anything in his early works could anticipate the majestic portrait of fatherhood he offers up in Père Goriot. “Since I have been a father, I have come to understand God” (p. 140): From what source does Balzac draw such a vision of paternity? From the creative act itself? From his experience of the conception and engenderment of a work of art? Perhaps, for in at least one place (Cousine Bette) Balzac writes of “the insane joy of generation” that accompanies “the creations of Thought,” and likens the literary offspring to a child: “But to produce! But to give birth! But to laboriously raise the child, put it to bed gorged with milk every evening, to kiss it every morning with the inexhaustible heart of a mother, to lick it clean, to dress it a hundred times in the most beautiful jackets which it incessantly tears ...” (cited in Picon, Balzac, p. 79). Balzac as a mother? The line between maternity and paternity is easily crossed: “Let each of us look around, and be frank with himself, how many Goriots in skirts would we see? Now, Père Goriot’s feelings imply maternity” (second preface to Père Goriot) .
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    The flow of information, the flux of life, the endless onward (but not forward) movement of “civilization”