Paris · 1835 · quotedFather Goriot
Honoré de Balzac
Balzac's Paris of 1819, climbed one address at a time. The shabby Maison Vauquer stands in the poor Latin-Quarter streets behind the Panthéon; from there Rastignac reaches up to Mme de Beauseant's salon in the Faubourg Saint-Germain and the new money of the Chaussee d'Antin, and buries Goriot on the heights of Pere-Lachaise. Balzac maps the whole social ladder onto real streets, and it brings the founder of the realist novel into the atlas.
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