Week 9
The author who most perfectly reveals the post-Napoleonic France is Balzac. This week we will read one of his best novels, Pere Goriot, which brilliantly recreates the Paris of the 1820's and 1830's. Le Père Goriot ( Old Goriot) is an 1835 novel by French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), included in the Scènes de la vie privée section of his novel sequence La Comédie humaine. Set in Paris in 1819, it follows the intertwined lives of three characters: the elderly doting Goriot; a mysterious figure named Vautrin; and a naive law student named Eugène de Rastignac.
