Pere Goriot Read Online Free PDF Page B

(which is a “battlefield” [p. 82] ) : This is the dynamic setting for Père Goriot. In this novel there is a complex of stories, and there is also the matter, raised in the opening pages, of the reader and his or her reaction to these stories. Père Goriot tells among others the story of the “egotism and selfishness” that characterize life in Paris under the Restoration. “It is one of the privileges of the good city of Paris that any body may be born, or live, or die there without attracting any attention whatsoever” (p. 288). Yet the story of the general indifference that surrounds the sufferings and demise of the “sublime” Goriot is at once the story of the indifference, egotism, and selfishness of the reader. Père Goriot begins with an indictment of the bourgeois consumer, comfortably reclining in the “cushions of your armchair.” “You will read the story of Pére 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” (p. 10). But Père Goriot is not a romance, nor is it a fiction; it is a “drama” in which “all is true.” Balzac insists that his work has nothing to do with the still rather unserious new genre (the novel); it is a documentary of the cramped modem soul, a soul shown to be cynical, pitiless, insensible, gluttonous, scheming, and, perhaps above all, indifferent:
    There was not a soul in the house who took any trouble to investigate the various chronicles of misfortunes, real or imaginary, related by the rest. Each one regarded the others with indifference, tempered by suspicion; it was a natural result of their relative positions. Practical assistance not one of them could give, this they all knew, and they had long since exhausted their stock of condolence over previous discussions of their grievances.... There was not one of them but would have passed a blind man begging in the street, not one that felt moved to pity by a tale of misfortune (p. 24).
    Is Balzac the artist who has recorded for our modern era the death of the soul? The death of all belief in something greater, grander, than the individual? The damning portrait of the boarders seems to suggest as much. So do other passages elsewhere in Balzac’s enormous oeuvre: “With the monarchy we lost honor, with the religion of our fathers, Christian virtue, with our sterile governments, patriotism. These principles now only exist partially instead of animating the masses.... Now, shoring up society, we have no other support than egotism. Woe betide the country thus constituted. Instead of believers, we have interest” (Le Medecin de campagne [ The Country Doctor]; “interest” meaning both self-interested motivations for action and financial interest).
    â€œHe does not go in for deep psychology; he is not especially attached to the interior workings that make or unmake a soul,” wrote Lanson (in Vachon, p. 321). “I am not deep, but very thick”: The boarders in Père Goriot do not know the “interior workings,” the inner turmoil that forms the basis of the psychological novel and that marks some kind of attachment, however conflicted, to a greater ideal (of duty, faith, honor, etc.); they have known rather the strain of an exterior struggle that has worked over their bodies and left their faces “bleached by moral or physical suffering” (p. 20). Hence, Balzac claims himself to be “the inventor of the physiological novel,” a novel in which the characters, these “desolate souls” (“hapless beings” in this translation, p. 24) are moved not by pity or empathy, but by their stomachs. “‘Come, sit down to dinner, gentlemen, ”’ says Madame Vauquer, when Bianchon announces the death of Goriot, “or the soup will be cold” (p. 288). And