Father Goriot

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.

Father Goriot

The Maison Vauquer, Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve

The Maison Vauquer · 1% through the novel

It is still standing in the lower end of the Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve, just where the road slopes so sharply down to the Rue de l'Arbalete, that wheeled traffic seldom passes that way, because it is so stony and steep.

The whole novel starts in this cheap boarding house on a stony, steep back street, where the retired vermicelli-maker Goriot rents the meanest room and Rastignac the garret above him. Balzac opens by insisting the address is real, the poorest quarter of the city, framed between the domes of the Panthéon and the Val-de-Grace.

inspired by The boarding house is invented, but Balzac plants it on a real street: the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve, renamed the Rue Tournefort in 1864, in the 5th arrondissement behind the Panthéon. Balzac's topographers (Hillairet, Boisseau) place the pension at what is now 30 Rue Tournefort; the pin marks the street.

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