Old Man Goriot

Set in Paris in the early 1820s, this novel centres on a shabby boarding house run by Madame Vauquer. Among its lodgers are the ambitious young law student Eugène de Rastignac, the mysterious Vautrin, and the elderly former pasta maker Goriot, who has given nearly everything to his two married daughters. Rastignac is drawn toward fashionable society and begins to learn what it demands. The book is a study of fatherly love, social climbing and the power of money, and it is one of the best entry points to Balzac's larger Human Comedy.