Pere Goriot (49 page)

French naturalist (1772-1844) whose idea of creation as an organic unity greatly influenced Balzac.

Yellow garment worn by those whom the Spanish Inquisition sent for torture.

Analogies inspired by Balzac's passion for the novels of James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851).

Davin signed the introduction to Balzac's
Etudes de mœurs au XIXe siècle (Studies of Nineteenth-century Manners),
although portions of it were written by Balzac.

Today the rue Tournefort.

Subtitle to
Henry VIII
(1613), attributed to Shakespeare.

That is, the Hôpital des Capucins, also known as the Hôpital des Vénériens, in the nearby rue Saint-Jacques, specializing in venereal diseases. The hospital is named on p. 144.

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Beginning in 1750, Voltaire was forced to live largely in exile, residing first in England, then in Prussia, and finally for twenty years at Ferney on the Swiss border. He returned to Paris in 1778 (not 1777, as Balzac writes), the year of his death.

Les Aventures de Telemaque
(1699), by François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fenelon, recounts the adventures of Telemachus, son of Ulysses.

The French text has “made in Tournai,” a town in Belgium, rather than “of Touraine,” the region around Balzac's birthplace of Tours.

The Zoological Gardens and site of the Museum of Natural History, where Bianchon attends lectures.

one of the liveliest streets in Paris at the time, a meeting point for the dandies and the bohemian crowd.

Reference to Jean de La Fontaine's fable “The Monkey and the Cat,” in which the cat (Raton) pulls chestnuts from the fire for the monkey (Bertrand). From
Fables choisies (Selected Fables;
1668-1694), book 9, fable 17.

A louis was equal to 20 francs.

Pigeon wings.

Expensive snuff imported mostly from Martinique.

The sou was the smallest monetary denomination; there were 20 sous to a franc.

Mock Latin for “cap-wearing”; the suggestion is that Goriot has abandoned the bourgeois hat for a socially more lowly form of headgear.

René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur (1683-1757) invented a thermometer, later modified by Anders Celsius. Balzac made several attempts here to write the word Fahrenheit, but apparently gave up due to difficulty in spelling it.

The Bois de Boulogne; the Bouffons was an alternative name for the Theatre des Italiens, or Opéra-Comique.

The Faubourg Saint-Germain, on the Left Bank, was the favored quarter of the aristocracy; the Chaussée d'Antin, on the Right Bank, was populated by bankers and financiers.

In other words, a carpenter (Joseph's profession in the Bible).

Vautrin cites here the title of a comedy by Michel-Nicolas Balisson de Rougemont (1781-1840).

Mock Latin for “down to my heels.”

From “Consolation à M. Du Périer,” by François de Malherbe (1555-1628).

Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754—1838), statesman for whom Balzac (who met him in 1836) had enormous respect (see also p. 121).

Company founded in 1664 by Louis XIV and Jean-Baptiste Colbert, liquidated by the Convention in 1793.

Famous ship of war built in Brest in 1680; she participated in the campaigns against England, as well as in the American War of Independence.

Paraphrase of Virgil's
Georgics
3.250-251.

Her maiden name.

For the whole story, see Balzac's
Duchesse de Langeais
(1832-1834).

Elsewhere, Rastignac is twenty-one; compare pp. 111, 151, 153.

Literally, “from the same flour.”

Supporter of the Terror, which began in 1793.

Allusion, from Greek mythology, to the thread given by Ariadne to Theseus, which enabled him to find his way back out of the labyrinth after having slain the Minotaur.

“The world's ultimate argument”; variation on
Ultimo ratio regnum
(“the King's ultimate argument”), which Louis XIV had engraved on his cannon.

D'Oliban was a foolish father in a comedy by Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Choudard-Desforges (1746-1806).

Pastiche of Pierre Corneille's tragedy
Cinna
(c. 1641; act 4, scene 4).

To have the inside position.

Charles-Jean Bernadotte, a marshal under Napoleon, in 1818 became king of Sweden as Charles XIV He was born in Pau in southern France.

Vautrin almost reveals his identity as the criminal “Trompe-la-Mort.”

Cellini was a famous Florentine goldsmith (1500-1571); his Memoirs, published in 1728, reveal his enormous resourcefulness and self-confidence.

Dragnets were set across the Seine at Saint-Cloud to catch the drifting bodies of the drowned.

The Code Napoleon, the French civil code enacted in 1804 and still extant (though revised).

Travaux forces
(“hard labor”). In the early nineteenth century, French convicts were branded between the shoulders with these letters; the practice was suspended in 1832.

That is, deliberately counting a vote cast for a left-wing politician (JacquesAntoine Manuel, a left-wing deputy) as one cast for his right-wing rival (the Count of Villèle, Manuel's ultra- Royalist adversary).

That is, are still unmarried. The expression appears in act 2, scene 5 of Shakespeare's
Pericles, Prince of Tyre.
“Dian” refers to Diana, virgin goddess of Roman mythology.

Racecourse in the Bois de Boulogne.

François Aubry (1750-1802), minister of war, opposed Napoleon early in his command; he was later deported and died in exile.

Restaurant on the boulevard du Temple.

Popular theater on the boulevard Saint-Martin.

MarieJoseph, marquis de La Fayette (1757-1834), French statesman and military general, hero of the American War of Independence.

That is, Talleyrand (see note p. 61); he was created Prince de Benevento in 1806.

Jean-Francois de Pérusse, duc de Cars (sometimes spelled Descars or D'Escars) (1747-1822), master of the royal household, whose sole duty was to devise dishes to please Louis XVIII. He died of indigestion.

Theater on the boulevard Montmartre, known for comedies.

The Duchess of Berri (or Berry), widow of King Charles X's second son, Charles Ferdinand (1778-1820). The Duchess of Carigliano is a fictional character.

Page to Countess Almaviva in Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais's comic play
Marriage of Figaro
(1784).

Alceste is a reference to the protagonist of
Le Misanthrope
(1666), by Molière (pen name of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) and to the uncompromisingly puritanical protagonists of The Heart of Midlothian (1818), by Sir Walter Scott (translated into French that same year).

The Hôpital des Capucins (see the footnote on p. 11).

The King's intimate circle.

The Comte de Mirabeau (1749-1791), orator of the Revolution, known for his excessive lifestyle.

The French writer Jean de la Bruyère (1645-1696) paints a verbal portrait of an absentminded man (“Le Distrait”) in his best-known work,
Caractères
(1688), even if the particular trait to which Balzac alludes is not to be found there.

Patron saint of hunters.

Marshall Turenne (1611-1675), a military leader who served under Louis XIV; during the Thirty Years' War he may have enlisted the help of mercenaries.

Pierre and Jaffier are two inseparable male characters in Thomas Otway's dramatic tragedy
Venice Preserv'd
( 1682) .

Former site of the headquarters of the Paris police.

In
Le Calife de Bagdad
(1800), a one-act comic opera by François-Adrien Boieldieu, the calif Isaoun goes by the magical name of II Bondocani as he roams the streets of the city at night incognito.

Pierre Coignard was an escaped convict who evaded arrest for more than a decade by joining the army under the pseudonym Comte de Sainte-Hélène; he was rearrested in 1818 by François-Eugène Vidocq, chief of police of all of France.

Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) was a zoologist who taught at the Museum of Natural History at the Jardin des Plantes. Balzac attended his lectures in 1819.

In 1812 the widow Morin, Jeanne-Marie-Victorine Tarin, attempted to murder the Parisian lawyer Jean-Antoine Ragoulleau, and was sentenced to twenty years' hard labor for it.

The shepherd Argus of Roman mythology had 100 eyes.

See the footnote on p. 94.

Abraham-Louis Bréguet (1747-1823) was a Swiss watchmaker who pioneered the slim watches we know today, which would have been very expensive at the time. He is also mentioned in Balzac's
Eugenie Grandet
(1833).

Conflation of the name of the premier Bordeaux wine producer (Château Lafite) with that of the financier and prime minister under Louis-Philippe, Jacques Laffitte.

Various cries of Paris street vendors.

Jean-Baptiste Marty (1779-1863) acted in popular melodramas. Le Mont Sauvage is one such play, by René Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt (1773-1844), based on the hugely popular sentimental novel Le Solitaire, by Charles-Victor Prévôt, vicomte d'Arlincourt (1789-1856).

Madame Vauquer not only mistakes Chateaubriand for the author of
Le Solitaire
but also gives as his first name that of one of his most famous characters, Atala.

Sentimental novel published in 1787; Bernardin de Saint-Pierre was a disciple of philosopher and writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778).

Where public executions were held; later renamed Place de l'Hôtel de Ville.

That is, the Jardin des Plantes.

The Theatre de la Gaîté on the boulevard du Temple, where Madame Vauquer has seen Le Mont Sauvage.

In time (Italian).

Nickname (meaning “silk thread”) for Sélérier, who reappears in
Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (A Harlot High and Loru,
1847), in prison along with Vautrin.

References to the faded beauty of Mademoiselle Michonneau. Ninon de Lenclos (1620-1705) was a famous courtesan; Madame de Pompadour (1721-1764) was the mistress of Louis XIV.

Headquarters of the French crime squad.

Reference to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract (1762).

Cheap restaurant frequented by students and also by Lucien de Rubempré, hero of Balzac's
Illusions perdues (Lost Illusions,
1843).

His own kind of pleasure lures each one (Latin); from Virgil, Eclogues 2.65.

Expensive restaurant on the boulevard des Italiens.

Today the rue Laffitte.

King of Lydia (now part of Turkey), renowned for his riches.

Caius Marius (155-86 B.C.) was a Roman general who, after many military successes, was defeated by Lucius Cornelius Sulla (138-'78 B.C.) and fled to Africa.

Reference to
The Lament of Tasso,
by George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), which describes the tribulations of the great sixteenth-century Italian poet Torquato Tasso; it was translated into French in 1830.

He was beheaded.

Having come back from Elba, Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo.

Actually two years in the original, but as Stéphane Vachon points out in
Mémoire de la critique,
Eugène has known Delphine for only two months.