I have found, with very few exceptions, that you cannot judge novelists by their short stories. One exception would be Kate Chopin, but she only wrote two novels and a great many short stories. And so it is with Honoré de Balzac. Before this book, the only work I'd read by him was The Unknown Masterpiece and Other Stories, also published by Dover but now out of print in paperback, but Dover has an eBook version available. Ditto for this one. Why? I can never figure out why they discontinue items. But DO NOT pay Dover for an eBook. EVER.
    I was delighted to find that Project Gutenberg carries 154 works by Balzac, all FREE of course, and most are in English. I had read the story collection back in 2014, before I discovered the joys of Nook and Kindle and Project Gutenberg—FREE joy, so I never thought to check if his works had been digitized. Well, they have, and I have downloaded the novels and stories on the whole first page, out of seven. Often foreign-language works are not readily available in digitized form, mostly because they have not been translated, although that is changing. I finally found the last remaining Dostoyevsky novels in eBook form, so I can complete my goal of reading all his fictional works. The only other French author I know of that has so many works available at Project Gutenberg is Jules Verne, but I believe just about all his works have been translated into English. He was so well known. Plus, Project Gutenberg continues to add more and more works to their library—it's a non-stop venture, so a great many more books that I seek can be found there. Anyways, this novel, Balzac's best known, is available there.
    And I am excited to read more of his novels. I loved this one—couldn't put it down. It seems he was even more ambitious than Verne, with his lifetime project of 54 Voyages Extraordinaires. With Balzac, however, his series is La Comédie humaine, written from 1829 to 1848, and consists of about 91 complete works—novels, stories and analytical essays, plus 46 unfinished works. Wikipedia says, it is Balzac's "multi-volume collection of interlinked novels and stories depicting French society in the period of the Restoration (1815-30) and the July Monarchy (1830-48)." Their page is very informative about this huge series, which Balzac meticulously divided into themes. Wikipedia says it is believed he derived the title from Dante's Divine Comedy, which is not "funny," but "comedy" because it was written in the "vulgar" language spoken by Italians, rather than Latin. And one more point: many of the characters appear in more than one novel in this series. I like that. Verne did it, too, and so did Joseph Conrad.
    Honoré de Balzac was born in 1799 in Tours, France, and died in Paris in 1850 at age 51. Of him, Wikipedia says:

   An enthusiastic reader and independent thinker as a child, Balzac had trouble adapting to the teaching style of his grammar school. His willful nature caused trouble throughout his life and frustrated his ambitions to succeed in the world of business. When he finished school, Balzac was apprenticed in a law office, but he turned his back on the study of law after wearying of its inhumanity and banal routine. Before and during his career as a writer, he attempted to be a publisher, printer, businessman, critic, and politician; he failed in all of these efforts. La Comédie Humaine reflects his real-life difficulties, and includes scenes from his own experience.

    They say a lot more, too, as it is a very lengthy article. You will be hearing more about Balzac on these pages, as he will eventually get his own Index Page. But for now, let us move on to the book at hand. It is a portrait of Paris set in 1819, (but written in 1835), and it's not a very pretty picture, either. It is a tragedy, certainly, but it must have been written partly as satire, too. I certainly found it darkly humorous, the same way Dostoyevsky, amidst the most horrible tragedy, is also funny. I think it's because of the exaggerated characters, and the ridiculous things they do, and the most dreadful choices they make. That would absolutely apply to this novel, too.
    The Good Readers at Goodreads had quite a bit to say about this book, but only one, Adam Dalva, said it was "REALLY funny." Thank you, Adam. And by the way, this novel is not divided into chapters, which was mildly annoying at first, because chapters provide good stopping places when you need to put the book down to do other things.
    Wikipedia sums up Balzac's writing style in these three sentences: "Owing to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is renowned for his multi-faceted characters; even his lesser characters are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. Inanimate objects are imbued with character as well; the city of Paris, a backdrop for much of his writing, takes on many human qualities."
    Balzac certainly uses his gift of detail in this novel, beginning with an intense description of the boarding house where much of the action takes place—almost all of it at the beginning until the aristocratic characters are introduced. The description even includes the smell of it—oh, my. At that point I had no doubt that the picture being created in my mind was Balzac's intention! Wikipedia says:

   The novel opens with an extended description of the Maison Vauquer, a boarding house in Paris' rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève covered with vines, owned by the widow Madame Vauquer. The residents include the law student Eugéne de Rastignac, a mysterious agitator named Vautrin, and an elderly retired vermicelli-maker named Jean-Joachim Goriot. The old man is ridiculed frequently by the other boarders, who soon learn that he has bankrupted himself to support his two well-married daughters.

    I will provide a synopsis of the story, and it is rather complicated, along with some quotes. Of course, I must first include a little about the house, whose description takes up several pages. That also includes how it is situated on the street, in a dismal part of the city, the "garden" with its walls. Let's start with the smell.

   The first room exhales an odor for which there is no name in the language, and which should be called the odeur de pension. The damp atmosphere sends a chill through you as you breathe it; it has a stuffy, musty, and rancid quality; it permeates your clothing; after-dinner scents seem to be mingled in it with smells from the kitchen and scullery and the reek of a hospital. It might be possible to describe it if some one should discover a process by which to distil from the atmosphere all the nauseating elements with which it is charged by the catarrhal exhalations of every individual lodger, young or old. Yet, in spite of these stale horrors, the sitting-room is as charming and as delicately perfumed as a boudoir, when compared with the adjoining dining-room.

    We first meet the colorful boarders at Madame Vauquer's dingy establishment that reeks of poverty. She is a portly widow, dumpy, like the house, and unchanged, likewise, for a very long time.

   Mme. Vauquer at the age of fifty is like all women who "have seen a deal of trouble." She has the glassy eyes and innocent air of a trafficker in flesh and blood, who will wax virtuously indignant to obtain a higher price for her services, but who is quite ready to betray a Georges or a Pichegru, if a Georges or a Pichegru were in hiding and still to be betrayed, or for any other expedient that may alleviate her lot. Still, "she is a good woman at bottom," said the lodgers who believed that the widow was wholly dependent upon the money that they paid her, and sympathized when they heard her cough and groan like one of themselves.
   What had M. Vauquer been? The lady was never very explicit on this head. How had she lost her money? "Through trouble," was her answer. He had treated her badly, had left her nothing but her eyes to cry over his cruelty, the house she lived in, and the privilege of pitying nobody, because, so she was wont to say, she herself had been through every possible misfortune.

    At the time the story begins, there are seven regular lodgers at the establishment. The best rooms on the first floor went to Mme. Couture, the widow of a commissary-general in the service of the Republic, and a young lady "to whom she filled the place of mother." Her wealthy father refused to recognize her as his own, and disowned her mother also, who had since died, leaving Victorine Taillefer nearly destitute. Despite her attempt to reconcile with her father and to make him believe the truth, her brother stood in the way of any inheritance, and her father refused communication.
    The rooms on the second floor are occupied "by an old man named Poiret and a man of forty or thereabouts, the wearer of a black wig and dyed whiskers, who gave out that he was a retired merchant, and was addressed as M. Vautrin. Two of the four rooms on the third floor were also let—one to an elderly spinster, a Mlle. Michonneau, and the other to a retired manufacturer of vermicelli, Italian paste and starch, who allowed the others to address him as "Father Goriot." At the time, another of the four rooms was occupied by a poor law student named Eugène de Rastignac, from the south of France, whose struggling noble family had scrimped and saved to send him to Paris to study. He was to be the savior of the family finances. And he is one of the few people in the cast of characters that has a sense of moral integrity. Paris tempts him, but much of his goodness remains.
    Madame Vauquer also has two employees, Christophe and Sylvie. She treats her tenants justly, or so believes. Those who pay most get the most attention. Goriot and the elderly spinster she would rather be rid of. But it wasn't always like that. When Goriot first arrived, he was wealthy, bringing along fine clothing and valuables. Madame Vauquer set her eyes on him. At the same time, she welcomed another boarder, Mme. la Comtesse de l'Ambermesnil, a thirty-six-year-old widow awaiting settlement of her pension. The two became friends, and Madame Vauquer, now becoming frustrated because she was getting nowhere with Goriot, requested the intervention of the Comtesse, who herself had her eyes on him. He wanted neither, preferring the memory of his beloved late wife. The Comtesse left in a rage, stiffing Madame Vauquer of what she owed. The blame went all on Goriot, and she vowed vengeance.
    But meanwhile, Goriot's living standards began to severely decline. He no longer wore nice clothing and his beautiful objects and valuables slowly disappeared. Taking hints from Madame Vauquer, he became the butt of everyone's joke. Cruel would be the word for it, but his mind had grown so despondent that he barely noticed.
    The other character of importance is the man who went by the name Vautrin. Though he appeared to be jovial and friendly to everyone, no one actually trusted him. He knew everyone's business, and would freely offer loans of money, but nobody dared not paying him back.
    So here is where we enter Eugène de Rastignac, because he is different. He has a heart and seeks the truth. The mockery of Goriot continues to worsen, and to add to his mystery, two beautiful young ladies sometimes come to see him. Madame Vauquer begins the rumor that they are his "kept" women, though he always explains that they are his daughters, He seems a stupid dolt to everyone, so no one believes him.
    Except Eugène. As it turns out, his aunt back home is related to the Vicomtesse de Beauseant in Paris, who has agreed to help her cousin, Eugène. But before he goes to see her, he discovers that in fact the two beautiful ladies who come to see old Goriot not only are his daughters, but one is the Comtesse Mme. de Restaud, and the other is Madame la Baronne de Nucingen. And so innocent Eugène gets swept up into the lives of the despicable Parisian aristocracy.
    And as for Goriot? His two wealthy daughters have drained him dry. In his working days, he had been a wealthy merchant of vermicelli, and knew business, especially his business very well. He put away a fortune for himself and his utterly spoiled daughters. They now have husbands who keep them from their own money and treat them abusively. In order to move around in this utterly materialistic and phony society, which is required for everyone with a title in Paris, they sold their souls to the devil—all of them. No one was sleeping with the person they were married to, causing more disasters, both emotional and financial. And somehow Eugène gets sucked in.
    But there is something else going on even more sinister. M. Vautrin, becomes involved in what is none of his business, though he seems to know everyone's business. He and Eugène quarrel, and Eugène wants a duel. But instead, Vautrin, who claims he is a pro, does not want to fight, but to help Eugène get the "right" woman. And she is Victorine Taillefer. He has a plan to get her brother killed in a duel, and her father's millions would then go to her. Eugène is appalled, and not only that, but he has fallen in love with the Baroness Delphine, old Goriot's daughter.
    In the meantime, he has become a friend and protector to the old man, and will not allow anyone to insult him any more. It is he who tells the whole household that Goriot speaks the truth—the two ladies indeed are his daughters, and are members of the aristocracy. He now becomes obsessed with moving into the highest society. He needs clothes to match. He quits attending law school, and is determined to marry into wealth. He writes to his poor family, requesting a large sum. They sell off the last of their precious keepsakes for him. But he does pay them back. The deeper he gets sucked into this society of phoniness, the more he goes into debt. They are mostly all in debt, in fact. That's why the two daughters have drained their poor father dry. He barely has enough to live on, even in his squalid conditions. We seem to get one jolt after another as we see what these people are made of. And yet Eugène still manages to retain his sense of integrity and morals.
    The moral theme of the story, of course, is about peoples' obsession not only with wealth, but to be the most attractive in society—the most sought after from the opposite sex, the most envied, which could easily become the most gossiped about, when things went wrong. So, we might expect this from shallow people who have no worthy goals in life, nor any clue about responsibility and service to others.
    But it is old Goriot who is the epitome of ridiculousness concerning money. What finally does him in is his daughter, so upset because she can't afford the dress she wants for the latest social event, and her father literally sells the only thing he has left to please her. In the end, he finally "gets it," that he has raised spoiled brats who care only for themselves and have used him and abused him right to the grave.
    And I want to add that there are lots of other things going on here, too. If this is what Paris was, or still is, or London or New York, or whatever, I cannot imagine what draws people to such a life. Here are some random quotes that I jotted down as I read. The first describes Vautrin, who plays a major part in the cast of characters, but his doings are under the table.

   His bass voice was by no means unpleasant, and was in keeping with his boisterous laughter. He was always obliging, always in good spirits; if anything went wrong with one of the locks, he would soon unscrew it, take it to pieces, file it, oil and clean and set it in order, and put it back in its place again; "I am an old hand at it," he used to say. Not only so, he knew all about ships, the sea, France, foreign countries, men, business, law, great houses and prisons,—there was nothing that he did not know. If any one complained rather more than usual, he would offer his services at once. He had several times lent money to Mme. Vauquer, or to the boarders; but, somehow, those whom he obliged felt that they would sooner face death than fail to repay him; a certain resolute look, sometimes seen on his face, inspired fear of him, for all his appearance of easy good-nature.

    This next one is from the first meeting between Eugène and his relative, the Vicomtesse, and quite expresses the theme of the story in a few words. She is coaching Eugène on what he must do to really succeed, which includes setting Goriot's two daughters against each other, which will be easy.

   "Well, then, M. de Rastignac, deal with the world as it deserves. You are determined to succeed? I will help you. You shall sound the depths of corruption in woman; you shall measure the extent of man's pitiful vanity. Deeply as I am versed in such learning, there were pages in the book of life that I had not read. Now I know all. The more cold-blooded your calculations, the further you will go. Strike ruthlessly; you will be feared. Men and women for you must be nothing more than post-horses; take a fresh relay, and leave the last to drop by the roadside; in this way you will reach the goal of your ambition. You will be nothing here, you see, unless a woman interests herself in you; and she must be young and wealthy, and a woman of the world. Yet, if you have a heart, lock it carefully away like a treasure; do not let any one suspect it, or you will be lost; you would cease to be the executioner, you would take the victim's place. And if ever you should love, never let your secret escape you! Trust no one until you are very sure of the heart to which you open your heart. Learn to mistrust every one; take every precaution for the sake of the love which does not exist as yet. Listen, Miguel"—the name slipped from her so naturally that she did not notice her mistake—"there is something still more appalling than the ingratitude of daughters who have cast off their old father and wish that he were dead, and that is a rivalry between two sisters. Restaud comes of a good family, his wife has been received into their circle; she has been presented at court; and her sister, her wealthy sister, Mme. Delphine de Nucingen, the wife of a great capitalist, is consumed with envy, and ready to die of spleen. There is gulf set between the sisters—indeed, they are sisters no longer—the two women who refuse to acknowledge their father do not acknowledge each other. So Mme. de Nucingen would lap up all the mud that lies between the Rue Saint-Lazare and the Rue de Grenelle to gain admittance to my salon. She fancied that she should gain her end through de Marsay; she has made herself de Marsay's slave, and she bores him. De Marsay cares very little about her. If you will introduce her to me, you will be her darling, her Benjamin; she will idolize you. If, after that, you can love her, do so; if not, make her useful. I will ask her to come once or twice to one of my great crushes, but I will never receive her here in the morning. I will bow to her when I see her, and that will be quite sufficient. You have shut the Comtesse de Restaud's door against you by mentioning Father Goriot's name. Yes, my good friend, you may call at her house twenty times, and every time out of the twenty you will find that she is not at home. The servants have their orders, and will not admit you. Very well, then, now let Father Goriot gain the right of entry into her sister's house for you. The beautiful Mme. de Nucingen will give the signal for a battle. As soon as she singles you out, other women will begin to lose their heads about you, and her enemies and rivals and intimate friends will all try to take you from her. There are women who will fall in love with a man because another woman has chosen him; like the city madams, poor things, who copy our millinery, and hope thereby to acquire our manners. You will have a success, and in Paris success is everything; it is the key of power. If the women credit you with wit and talent, the men will follow suit so long as you do not undeceive them yourself. There will be nothing you may not aspire to; you will go everywhere, and you will find out what the world is—an assemblage of fools and knaves. But you must be neither the one nor the other. I am giving you my name like Ariadne's clue of thread to take with you into the labyrinth; make no unworthy use of it," she said, with a queenly glance and curve of her throat; "give it back to me unsullied. And now, go; leave me. We women also have our battles to fight."

    And here's one that confirms Balzac meant to be humorous. It is spoken by Mme. de Langeais, the best friend of the Vicomtesse, who visits her while Eugène is there, to inform her that her Portuguese lover is about to marry someone else. In this paragraph, she is speaking of Goriot, but calls him five different names and never once gets it right!

   "Yes, that Moriot was once President of his Section during the Revolution. He was in the secret of the famous scarcity of grain, and laid the foundation of his fortune in those days by selling flour for ten times its cost. He had as much flour as he wanted. My grandmother's steward sold him immense quantities. No doubt Noriot shared the plunder with the Committee of Public Salvation, as that sort of person always did. I recollect the steward telling my grandmother that she might live at Grandvilliers in complete security, because her corn was as good as a certificate of civism. Well, then, this Loriot, who sold corn to those butchers, has never had but one passion, they say—he idolizes his daughters. He settled one of them under Restaud's roof, and grafted the other into the Nucingen family tree, the Baron de Nucingen being a rich banker who had turned Royalist. You can quite understand that so long as Bonaparte was Emperor, the two sons-in-law could manage to put up with the old Ninety-three; but after the restoration of the Bourbons, M. de Restaud felt bored by the old man's society, and the banker was still more tired of it. His daughters were still fond of him; they wanted 'to keep the goat and the cabbage,' so they used to see Joriot whenever there was no one there, under pretence of affection. 'Come to-day, papa, we shall have you all to ourselves, and that will be much nicer!' and all that sort of thing. As for me, dear, I believe that love has second-sight: poor Ninety-three; his heart must have bled. He saw that his daughters were ashamed of him, that if they loved their husbands his visits must make mischief. So he immolated himself. He made the sacrifice because he was a father; he went into voluntary exile. His daughters were satisfied, so he thought that he had done the best thing he could; but it was a family crime, and father and daughters were accomplices. You see this sort of thing everywhere. What could this old Doriot have been but a splash of mud in his daughters' drawing-rooms? He would only have been in the way, and bored other people, besides being bored himself. And this that happened between father and daughters may happen to the prettiest woman in Paris and the man she loves the best; if her love grows tiresome, he will go; he will descend to the basest trickery to leave her. It is the same with all love and friendship. Our heart is a treasury; if you pour out all its wealth at once, you are bankrupt. We show no more mercy to the affection that reveals its utmost extent than we do to another kind of prodigal who has not a penny left. Their father had given them all he had. For twenty years he had given his whole heart to them; then, one day, he gave them all his fortune too. The lemon was squeezed; the girls left the rest in the gutter."

    And here is one last quote, spoken by Delphine after she asked Eugène to gamble for her to win the money she desperately needs, but her husband will not give her. He does win.

   "You do not know how I suffered today when Nucingen refused to give me six thousand francs; he spends as much as that every month on his mistress, an opera dancer! I thought of killing myself. The wildest thoughts came into my head. There have been moments in my life when I have envied my servants, and would have changed places with my maid. It was madness to think of going to our father, Anastasie and I have bled him dry; our poor father would have sold himself if he could have raised six thousand francs that way. I should have driven him frantic to no purpose. You have saved me from shame and death; I was beside myself with anguish. Ah! monsieur, I owed you this explanation after my mad ravings. When you left me just now, as soon as you were out of sight, I longed to escape, to run away. . . where, I did not know. Half the women in Paris lead such lives as mine; they live in apparent luxury, and in their souls are tormented by anxiety. I know of poor creatures even more miserable than I; there are women who are driven to ask their tradespeople to make out false bills, women who rob their husbands. Some men believe that an Indian shawl worth a thousand louis only cost five hundred francs, others that a shawl costing five hundred francs is worth a hundred louis. There are women, too, with narrow incomes, who scrape and save and starve their children to pay for a dress. I am innocent of these base meannesses. But this is the last extremity of my torture. Some women will sell themselves to their husbands, and so obtain their way, but I, at any rate, am free. If I chose, Nucingen would cover me with gold, but I would rather weep on the breast of a man whom I can respect. Ah! tonight, M. de Marsay will no longer have a right to think of me as a woman whom he has paid." She tried to conceal her tears from him, hiding her face in her hands; Eugène drew them away and looked at her; she seemed to him sublime at that moment.

    There is so much more I could say here, but I won't, other than highly recommending this book for your reading pleasure. It is not difficult at all, the translation is excellent, and it's one you won't want to put down.

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