Père Goriot
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Le Père 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 criminal-in-hiding named Vautrin and a naive law student named Eugène de Rastignac.
Title page engraving from an 1897 edition of Le Père Goriot, by an unknown artist; published by George Barrie & Son in Philadelphia
French criminal Eugène François Vidocq was the basis for the character Vautrin in Le Père Goriot.
Father Goriot by Daumier (1842).
1901 edition of The Works of Honoré de Balzac, including Father Goriot
Honoré de Balzac
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Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. The novel sequence La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life, is generally viewed as his magnum opus.
Revised detail of daguerreotype taken in 1842
Vendôme Oratory School – engraving by Armand Queyroy
Drawing of Balzac in the mid-1820s, attributed to Achille Devéria
Laure Junot, Duchess of Abrantès