Father Goriot

Old Goriot's room at the Maison Vauquer reeks of boiled cabbage and threadbare gentility, and among its shabby lodgers he sits nightly, once a vermicelli merchant, now selling off his silver plate to keep his daughters in silk. Anastasie and Delphine married into a Paris that despises their father's trade; he loves them anyway, with a devotion so total it looks less like tenderness than a wound reopening itself daily. Watching from the next room is Eugène de Rastignac, a law student with an empty purse and a hunger to rise, caught between Goriot's ruinous love and the escaped convict Vautrin's offer of a shortcut paved with someone else's blood. Balzac built Paris as a machine that runs on devotion, and Goriot is the fuel: he dies delirious, calling for the daughters he ruined himself loving; their answer is two empty carriages bearing only the family crest. Rastignac buries him almost alone, then turns to look down at the glittering city and squares himself to take from it exactly what it just taught him to want.