In Père Goriot, the lives of a young law student, Rastignac, and an elderly neighbor in his boarding house, Goriot, intertwine in 19th-century Paris. Neither of these men has much money—Rastignac was born on a struggling country estate, and Goriot is a retired pasta-maker—yet they both end up ensnared by a society that values wealth above all else. The naïve Rastignac, once introduced to Goriot’s wealthy daughters, begins to desire their lifestyle, and despite warnings that it’s not everything it seems, he gets drawn into their way of life. Meanwhile, Goriot impoverishes himself in order to ensure that his daughters can maintain their lifestyle despite chronic financial problems. Through these men’s lives, Balzac argues that his society’s obsession with money distorts and consumes everyone who is caught up in it, twisting people’s sense of reality and never delivering the security they crave.
Wealthy people inhabit a different, more outwardly enchanting society from the one poorer people know. After visiting his housemate Goriot’s richly married daughters and seeing their extravagant homes, Rastignac observes that wealthy people have a completely different lifestyle and worldview: “His imagination [soared] into the upper reaches of Parisian society, […] while broadening his mind and his conscience. He saw the world as it is: laws and morality unavailing with the rich […] 'Vautrin is right, wealth is virtue,' he said to himself.” To put it a different way, wealth even creates its own system of morality, in that people who possess wealth aren’t bound by the same laws that govern the rest of society. Rastignac finds such a world mysteriously appealing. When Rastignac returns home from visiting his new wealthy friends, he is shocked by the difference between their lifestyle and the shabbiness of his boarding house: “He was revolted at the sight of such wretchedness […] The transition was too abrupt, the contrast too complete, not to arouse in him cravings of boundless ambition. On the one hand the fresh and charming images of the most elegant society […] on the other, […] faces on which passions had left behind only their strings and mechanism.” Now that Rastignac has seen wealth firsthand, he covets it for himself—life in the boarding house, which was tolerable before, no longer seems acceptable to him. Rastignac idealizes the wealthy world to which he’s been introduced, and in light of it, a modest lifestyle seems more deprived than it really is.
The novel also highlights how outward wealth masks a more complex reality, as a wealthy lifestyle demands a constant scrambling to maintain itself. Goriot’s daughter Delphine explains to Rastignac, “That is how half the women in Paris live; outward luxury, within—the cruellest worries. I know poor creatures even more wretched than myself. Some women are obliged to get their tradesmen to draw up false accounts. Others are forced to cheat their husbands. […] There are some poor women who make their children go hungry and have to scrounge to get a dress.” Wealth comes with a cost: once someone attains a certain position in society, one must constantly fight to maintain that position, or at least the appearance of that position, even at great cost to one’s integrity and happiness. A wealthy lifestyle thus tends to overwhelm one’s sense of self. Rastignac eventually succumbs to the appeal of the life of Parisian luxury, especially after being set up in a luxurious apartment when Delphine becomes his mistress: “his remaining scruples had disappeared […] By enjoying the material advantages of wealth, […] 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. […] he saw himself so far removed from the Rastignac who had come to Paris the year before, that, […] he asked himself if at that moment there was any resemblance between his two selves.” Now that Rastignac has access to the rewards of the wealthy class, loyalty to his poorer, provincial upbringing—which he’d once imagined to be essential to his identity—is set aside. This suggests that a lifestyle created by wealth, once one gets a taste of it, has a distorting effect on a person’s identity.
Money can entrap well-intended people in other ways, too. As Père Goriot assures his daughters regarding the financial straits that he willingly endures for the sake of their comfort, “The knowledge that you were comfortable and happy as far as money was concerned relieved all my pains and soothed my woes. Money is life. Cash can do anything.” Goriot sees money as a guarantee of his happiness, in that it has the power to remove worries and create happiness for those he loves most. But in the meantime, Goriot becomes increasingly impoverished, and he never asks whether the happiness secured by money is genuine and lasting. After Goriot’s death, Rastignac and his medical student friend, Bianchon, have to scrape together the funds to have the old man buried, since his wealthy sons-in-law refuse to contribute: “They had to gauge the last respects due to the old man by the limited sum of money they had available.” In this way, money becomes the measure of a person’s life. In particular, Goriot’s poverty in death shows what was most important to him—his daughters’ material comfort—but it consumed his own comfort as a consequence. By this time in the novel, Rastignac, too, has become more cynical about the way money consumes people’s lives and distorts their moral compasses. Though his care for the dying Goriot suggests that he isn’t totally corrupted by it, Rastignac also doesn’t know how to extricate himself from the wealth-driven system he has chosen to enter.
Related Themes from Other Texts
The False Allure of Wealth ThemeTracker
The False Allure of Wealth Quotes in Père Goriot
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.
‘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…’
The moment money slips into a student's pocket, […] [h]is aspirations are as boundless as his ability to achieve them. He desires everything and anything, he is gay, generous and expansive. In short the bird which only yesterday had no wings has now spread them in full flight. The penniless student snaps up a crumb of pleasure like a dog snatching a bone amid countless perils […] the young man who for a fleeting moment has a few gold coins to jingle in his pocket savours his pleasures, counts them one by one, revels in them, sails through the air, has forgotten the meaning of the word 'poverty’. Paris is all his.
‘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.’
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.
‘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.
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.
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.
Rastignac left at about five o'clock, after seeing Madame de Beauséant into her travelling-coach and receiving her tearful farewell […] It was cold and damp as Eugène walked back to the Maison Vauquer. His education was almost complete.
‘I shan't be able to save poor Père Goriot,’ Bianchon said to him as Rastignac came into his neighbour's room.
‘My friend,’ said Eugène, after a look at the sleeping old man, ‘stay on the path that leads to the modest goal you have been content to set yourself. As for me, I am in hell, and must stay there.’
‘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.’
