The very title of Père Goriot suggests the centrality of a paternal relationship to its plot (père is French for “father”). Goriot, an elderly, retired pasta-maker, has devoted decades to providing for his daughters, Anastasie and Delphine. By outward measures, he appears to have succeeded: both women enjoy socially advantageous marriages above the class into which they were born. Under the surface, though, things are less harmonious: Goriot’s sons-in-law snobbishly refuse to associate with him, and his daughters go along with this, only seeing their father in secret, and usually just when they need to be helped out of financial strain. Over time, their love for Goriot is consumed by their financial dependence on him—and this is evident to everyone but himself. Goriot goes along with this, idolizing his daughters and destroying himself in the process. Yet, in following the tragedy of Goriot’s self-deluding relationship with his daughters, Balzac also critiques the society that created it—suggesting not only that family relationships can become idolatrous, but that society rewards status-driven relationships while stifling those that are based on true affection.
In keeping with his society’s expectations, Goriot pours his meager financial resources into his daughters’ marriages, even when this ends up costing him personal involvement in their lives. As it’s explained to Rastignac, Goriot is “a good father who is said to have given each of them five or six hundred thousand francs to ensure their happiness by marrying them well, and only kept back [a meager amount] a year for himself. He thought that his daughters would remain his daughters and that in their homes he had created two places where he would be able to live, two houses where he would be adored and spoilt. Within two years his sons-in-law had banished him from their society as if he were the most wretched of wretches.” Goriot has provided for his daughters in the best way he knows how, according to the logic of his society, by marrying them off. In this way, he assumes that he is also providing for his comfortable retirement in the long run, but he is thwarted by the disdain of the men who now have real authority in his daughters’ lives: their husbands. In other words, a loving father-daughter dynamic is disrupted by the expectations of class and society.
Goriot’s relationship with his daughters is ultimately one-sided, bringing Goriot an illusory happiness that chases him to the grave. Goriot’s comfort and happiness are secondary to that of his daughters. Goriot explains, “My life, my own life, is all in my two daughters. If they enjoy themselves, if they are happy and finely dressed, if they have carpets to walk on, what does it matter what clothes I wear or what sort of bedroom I have? I don't feel cold if they are warm. I never feel sad if they are laughing. My only sorrows are theirs.” In fact, Goriot equates his experiences in life with his daughters’; his existence doesn’t have meaning apart from them. Goriot sees fatherhood as a transcendent experience, explaining, “when I became a father I understood God. […] Only I love my daughters more than God loves the world, because the world is not as beautiful as God, and my daughters are much more beautiful than I.” Goriot’s convoluted explanation means that he occupies a paternal experience of love and care in his daughters’ lives, much as God does in relation to the world; yet, unlike God with respect to the world, Goriot is inferior to his daughters. This tortured combination of deifying and renouncing himself shows, again, that Goriot’s existence revolves around his daughters. Near the end of his life, Goriot begins to perceive that Anastasie and Delphine don’t really love him, but only care about his ability to help them out of financial straits. “Money buys anything, even daughters. […] If I still had wealth to leave, they would be tending me, looking after me; I should hear them, see them. […] At least when a poor wretch is loved he can be sure of that love. No, I'd rather be rich, I could see them then.” Even as the truth about their relationship dawns on Goriot, he would rather see his daughters—allowing him to maintain the fiction of mutual love—than face reality head-on.
On his deathbed, Goriot muses, “You have to be dying to learn what children are. […] You give them life, they give you death. […] No, they won't come! For ten years I have known how it would be. I sometimes said so to myself, but I didn't dare to believe it.” Deep down, even Goriot has suspected the true nature of his daughters’ character and their affections toward him. Ultimately, there are two tragedies at work: Goriot’s idolizing, self-deluding devotion, and the situation of women pulled between their duty to their father and their perceived duties to society via the high-class marriages in which they are caught. But the latter causes the former to become distorted beyond recognition, and in his desperation, Goriot, too, becomes the victim of these forces.
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Family Relationships Quotes in Père Goriot
At the moment one of these two rooms belonged to a young man who had come to Paris from the Angoulême area to study law, and whose large family endured the harshest sacrifices in order to send him twelve hundred francs a year. Eugène de Rastignac, for such was his name, was one of those young men trained by poverty for hard work, who realize from their earliest youth what their parents expect of them, and from the start prepare for a successful career by working out the scope of their studies, adapting them in advance to future trends in society so that they can be the first to exploit it.
The sight of his family in such constant distress, which they had generously kept from him, the comparison he was forced to make between his sisters, who had seemed so lovely when he was a child, and the Parisian women who were the living fulfilment of his earlier dreams of beauty, the precarious future of this large family which depended on him, the penny-pinching care with which he saw them save every scrap and crumb, and drink the dregs from the wine press, in a word numerous circumstances which it would be pointless to relate, vastly increased his desire for success and made him crave distinction.
By pronouncing the name of Père Goriot Eugène had again waved the magic wand, but this time with an effect quite contrary to that produced by the words ‘related to Madame de Beauséant.’ He was in the situation of someone admitted as a favour into the house of a curio collector who inadvertently knocks into a cabinet full of sculptured figures, breaking off three or four insecurely fastened heads. He wished the earth would swallow him up.
‘Their father […] is said to have given each of them five or six hundred thousand francs to ensure their happiness by marrying them well, and only kept back eight or ten thousand livres a year for himself. He thought that his daughters would remain his daughters and that in their homes he had created two places where he would be able to live, two houses where he would be adored and spoilt. Within two years his sons-in-law had banished him from their society as if he were the most wretched of wretches…’
‘You can understand that under the Empire the two sons-in-law did not make too much fuss about receiving in their homes the old revolutionary of '93; it was still all right under Buonaparte. But when the Bourbons came back, the old chap was an embarrassment to Monsieur de Restaud, and still more so to the banker. The daughters, who may perhaps still have been fond of their father, tried to play a double game, keeping their father and their husbands sweet at the same time. […] Personally, my dear, I believe that genuine feelings are neither blind nor stupid, so the poor old 93er's heart must have bled.’
He was ashamed of what he had written. How intense would be their heartfelt wishes for him, how pure their fervent prayers to heaven! How they would delight in their self-sacrifices! How his mother would grieve if she could not send the whole sum! He would use such fine sentiments, such fearful sacrifices as rungs in a ladder to reach Delphine de Nucingen. Tears, a last few grains of incense cast on the sacred altar of the family, fell from his eyes.
‘My word,’ he said with seeming indifference, ‘what good would it do me to live in greater comfort? I really can’t explain that sort of thing; I can’t put two words together properly. That's what it's all about,’ he added, striking his heart. ‘My life, my own life, is all in my two daughters. If they enjoy themselves, if they are happy and finely dressed, if they have carpets to walk on, what does it matter what clothes I wear or what sort of bedroom I have? I don't feel cold if they are warm. I never feel sad if they are laughing. My only sorrows are theirs.’
It was midnight. […] Père Goriot and the student returned to the Maison Vauquer talking about Delphine with increasing fervour, each trying to outdo the other, expressing the strength of his passion in curious contention. Eugène could not deny that the father's love, unblemished by any selfish interest, left his own far behind in scope and persistence. For the father, his idol was always pure and beautiful, and his worship was intensified by all that lay in the past as well as in the future.
Today I have only one fear, I can imagine only one disaster, and that would be to lose the love which has made me glad to be alive. Apart from that love, nothing matters, nothing else in the world means anything to me. You are everything to me. If I enjoy being rich, it is to enable me to give you more pleasure. I am, to my shame, more lover than daughter. Why? I don't know. My whole life is in you. My father gave me a heart, but you made it beat. The whole world may condemn me, what do I care?
He saw society as an ocean of mire into which one had only to dip a toe to be buried in it up to the neck. 'The only crimes committed there are petty ones!' he said to himself. 'Vautrin was a bigger man than that.' […] In his thoughts he returned to the bosom of his family. He remembered the pure emotions of that tranquil life, he recalled days spent among those who held him dear. By following the natural laws of hearth and home, those dear creatures found complete, unbroken, untroubled happiness. Despite such worthy thoughts, he did not feel bold enough to go to Delphine and confess the faith of pure souls by bidding her follow Virtue in the name of Love.
‘They are busy, they are sleeping, they won't come. I knew it. You have to be dying to learn what children are. Ah! my friend, don't get married, don't have children! You give them life, they give you death. You bring them into the world, they drive you out of it. No, they won't come! For ten years I have known how it would be. I sometimes said so to myself, but I didn't dare to believe it.’
