Monsieur Goriot is one of a select group of lodgers at Madame Vauquer’s Parisian boarding house. At first his wealth inspires respect, but as his circumstances are reduced he is shunned by those around him, and soon his only remaining visitors are two beautiful, mysterious young women. Goriot claims that they are his daughters, but his fellow boarders, including master criminal Vautrin, have other ideas. And when Eugene Rastignac, a poor but ambitious law student, learns the truth, he decides to turn it to his advantage. Old Goriot is one of the key novels of Balzac’s Comedie Humaine series, and a compelling examination of two obsessions, love and money. Witty and brilliantly detailed, it is a superb study of the bourgeoisie in the years following the French Revolution.

Old Goriot is one of Balzac’s finest novels, revealing all his virtues and showing few of his faults - he had both on a grand scale. The work is quite complete in itself, and requires for its enjoyment no knowledge of any other volume of the Comeddie humaine, the great series to which it belongs. At the same time, the immense fertility of the author’s mind, the breadth of his sympathies, and the range and multiplicity of his interests that sought an oudet in the whole vast undertaking are reflected in this small part of it; so that it gains by being part of a major plan. That plan envisaged nothing less than the writing of the whole history of Balzac’s age in living speech and dramatic action.