In Père Goriot, there are many instances of characters believing what they want to believe, even while they’re being actively manipulated by others—or characters who abandon ideals in order to manipulate. Often, this occurs when a character is desperate to advance his or her own cause, no matter what harm is done to others in the process. Or, it happens when characters stubbornly believe in the authenticity of a relationship based on a delusion, lest they be faced with difficult truths about themselves. Rastignac’s bold manipulation of his sisters for money, encouraged by Vautrin’s amoral outlook, is one example. Perhaps the most heart-wrenching is Goriot’s lifelong devotion to his daughters, despite ample evidence that they only care about his money, not about him. Through characters like Rastignac and Goriot, who manipulate others for gain or allow themselves to be used, Balzac suggests that people are equally prone to selfishly compromise principle in order to manipulate others and to allow themselves to be used in order to cling to false beliefs.
The novel highlights how the desire for social advancement leads a person to manipulate others. To get the money for a wardrobe that will impress Parisian women, Rastignac begs for money from his sisters, who have a limited income: “He wrote to each of his sisters to ask them for their savings, and in order to extract from them a sacrifice which they would be only too happy to make for him, […] he appealed to their discretion by playing on the theme of honour, which always strikes a sensitive and resonant chord in the hearts of the young.” Rastignac plays on his sisters’ idealism in order to gain entrance into high society. His conscience is bothering him—he wants his sisters to remain discreet and not let the rest of the family know what he’s asking of them—yet he deceptively appeals to the need to appear “honorable” in Paris, which he knows will inspire them to give more generously than they can afford. A successful social life demands that a person compromise their ideals for the sake of manipulating others. “If I have one more piece of advice for you, my pet,” Vautrin tells Rastignac, “it is not to stick to your opinions any more firmly than to your words. When you are asked for them, sell them. […] There are no such things as principles, only events; no laws, only circumstances. Your exceptional man adjusts to events and circumstances in order to control them.” Vautrin insinuates that where an ordinary person might appeal to stable principles and never get anywhere as a result, an “exceptional” person adapts to whatever circumstances demand—even if it means abandoning ideals and misleading or betraying others in the process.
However, victims of manipulation are somewhat complicit, because people generally cling to what they choose to believe. When the residents of the boarding house are shocked to learn that Vautrin is actually a criminal mastermind who’s been deceiving them all along, Vautrin reacts scornfully. “The brand we bear on our shoulders [a mark branded on convicted thieves] is not as shameful as what you have in your hearts, flabby members of a putrid society. The best among you could not stand up to me!” In Vautrin’s opinion, the others aren’t necessarily any morally better than he is. It’s just that they continue to outwardly behave by society’s expectations (making them hypocrites), whereas he, more honest about his failure to adhere to ideals, refuses to be bound by society. The others, implicitly proving Vautrin’s point, don’t respond to this charge, continuing to argue among themselves over how a man as seemingly kind and upstanding as Vautrin could actually be a criminal. This delusional mindset is also evident when Goriot is on his deathbed, and he sees what he wants to see. Goriot’s last words are a joyful whisper, “Ah! My angels!” as he believes that Rastignac and the medical student tending him are actually his neglectful daughters, who never show up to bid him goodbye. Thus “that sigh summed up his whole life; he deceived himself to the end.” In other words, Goriot has spent his whole life believing that his daughters, Anastasie and Delphine, are truly devoted to him, lodging him in a self-defeating cycle of financial support that drains his resources and ultimately his life. This scene suggests, then, that by clinging to what he wants to see, Goriot brings about his own end. This is Balzac’s final remark on the role of manipulation in human life: even if people don’t delude and betray others, they help perpetuate the cycle by willfully taking comfort in manipulative lies.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Manipulation, Delusion, and Betrayal ThemeTracker
Manipulation, Delusion, and Betrayal Quotes in Père Goriot
‘The more coldly calculating you are, the further you will go. Strike without pity and people will fear you. Accept men and women as mere post horses to be left worn out at every stage and you will reach the summit of your ambitions. Don't forget that you will be nothing here unless you have a woman to take an interest in you. You need one who is young, rich, elegant. But if you have any genuine feelings, hide them like a treasure; never let anyone suspect them, or you will be lost.’
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.
‘You stand at the crossroads of your life, young man, you must choose. You have already made one choice; you went to see your Beauséant cousin and had a taste of luxury. You went to visit Madame de Restaud, Père Goriot's daughter, and had a taste of how Parisian women live. That day you came back with a word marked on your forehead, and one I could read easily enough: Succeed! succeed at any price. Bravo! I said, there's a lad after my own heart.’
‘If I have one more piece of advice for you, my pet, it is not to stick to your opinions any more firmly than to your words. When you are asked for them, sell them. A man who boasts that he never changes his opinions is a man committed always to follow a straight line, an idiot who believes in infallibility. There are no such things as principles, only events; no laws, only circumstances. Your exceptional man adjusts to events and circumstances in order to control them. If there really were fixed principles and fixed laws, nations would not keep changing them as we change our shirts.’
What moralists call the depths of the human heart are merely the disappointments, the involuntary reactions of self-interest. These ups and downs so often bemoaned, these sudden reversals, are quite calculated for the enhancement of our pleasures. Seeing himself well dressed, with smart gloves, smart boots, Rastignac forgot his virtuous resolution. Young people do not dare look into the mirror of their consciences when they are being tempted to do wrong, while those of riper years have already seen themselves reflected there; therein lies the difference between these two periods of human life.
The student walked back from the Théâtre-Italien to the rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, his head full of the most alluring plans. He had not failed to notice how closely Madame de Restaud had observed him, both in the vicomtesse's box and in that of Madame de Nucingen, and he presumed that he would no longer find the comtesse's door closed to him. He could already count on four major contacts in the most select Parisian society […]
'If Madame de Nucingen takes an interest in me, I will teach her how to manipulate her husband. Her husband is a very successful businessman, and he'll be able to help me make my fortune in less than no time.'
‘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.’
In the course of the next few days Rastignac led an extremely dissipated life. He dined almost every day with Madame de Nucingen, and went everywhere as her escort. He would come home at three or four in the morning, rise at midday to get ready to go out, and then go for a turn in the Bois when it was fine. He wasted time like this, heedless of the cost, and absorbed all the lessons and allurements of luxury […] He played for high stakes, losing or winning a lot of money, and finally grew used to the extravagant life of the young man in Paris.
Rastignac was indeed in a state of perplexity which must be familiar to many young men. Whether she really loved him or was just leading him on, Madame de Nucingen had inflicted on Rastignac all the pains of a genuine passion […] For the past few months she had so inflamed Eugène's senses that she finally affected his inward heart. If in the initial stages of his liaison the student had believed himself to be the master, Madame de Nucingen had now gained the upper hand[.]
Everyone now fully understood Vautrin, his past, present and future, his ruthless doctrines, his religion of indulging his own good pleasure, his regal authority, deriving from the cynicism of his thoughts and deeds and a power of organization applied to everything. The blood rushed to his face, his eyes glittered like those of a wildcat. He bounded up and down with such ferocious energy, he roared so fiercely, that he wrung cries of terror from all the boarders.
‘Try and be philosophical, Ma,’ Collin went on. ‘Did it do you any harm being in my box at the Gaîté last night?' he exclaimed. ‘Are you any better than us? The brand we bear on our shoulders is not as shameful as what you have in your hearts, flabby members of a putrid society. The best among you could not stand up to me!’
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.
By enjoying the material advantages of wealth, as he had so long enjoyed the moral advantages of noble birth, he had sloughed off his skin as a provincial, and smoothly moved into a position from which he could look forward to a fine future. So, as he waited for Delphine, seated comfortably in this charming boudoir, which he was beginning to regard as almost his own, he saw himself so far removed from the Rastignac who had come to Paris the year before, that, looking closely at that person through some trick of mental vision, he asked himself if at that moment there was any resemblance between his two selves.
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.’
