It Repeats Like Last Night’s Dinner

Early in the first chapter of Honoré de Balzac’s novel Le Père Goriot, the story’s narrator asks a surprising question. “Will it [i.e., the story about to be told us] be understood outside Paris?” [Balzac, Honoré de. Old Man Goriot (Penguin Classics, Olivia McCannon (Translator)) (p. 3).] 

Why is the question asked? Is an answer expected, or is the question rhetorical? Obviously, everyone reading the book is asked the question. It is not asked only of French readers in the first half of the 19th century. It is asked of all readers of all time, including me, an American-Israeli reading the book in an English translation in the first half of the 21st century in Beersheba, Israel.

The narrator tells us there is room to doubt that the story can be understood outside of Paris. At this point, I must confess that I had difficulty suppressing a powerful urge to close the book and start a different one.

Is the narrator simply trying to make a point, a common use of rhetorical questions? But then, the answer is usually an obvious one. If I ask my spouse if she loves me, that is a genuine question. If she replies by asking me if the sky is blue, that is a rhetorical question. If the answer to the narrator’s question is supposed to be known, I must apologize, for I don’t know what it is. Is it, for example, “Of course, the story will not be understood by people living outside Paris.” Or, is the assumed answer, “Of course, people living outside Paris will understand the story.” Not knowing which of these two possible answers is implied, if either, suggests the question may not be simply rhetorical but that there is something to be learned by exploring it. But what?

We get some idea of what we are to learn by looking at what the narrator says regarding doubts about the story being understood outside Paris. These doubts fall into two categories: an unfamiliar ambiance and a general lack of the requisite personal experience. Let’s begin with the story’s ambiance. 

When thinking about ambiance, think about sense perception, sensory data, that is, information coming into our senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. The narrator claims that at least some of the sensory data required to understand the story is available only in Paris. 

The peculiarities of this scene packed with commentary and local colour may only be appreciated between the hills of Montmartre and the heights of Montrouge, in that illustrious valley of endlessly crumbling stucco and black, mud-clogged gutters. [Ibid, p. 3].

“Packed with…local colour.” “Local” is the keyword. The idea is that certain sights, sounds, smells, textures, and colors are available only in Paris, specifically between “the hills of Montmartre and the heights of Montrouge.” Here is an example. It describes the location of the boarding house, Maison Vauquer.

The building stands at the foot of the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, just where the ground shelves into the Rue de l’Arbalète so sharply and inconveniently that horses rarely go up or down it. This circumstance contributes to the silence which prevails in these streets wedged between the domes of the Val-de-Grâce and the Panthéon, two monuments which modify the atmospheric conditions, giving the light a jaundiced tinge, while the harsh shadows cast by their cupolas make everything gloomy. [Ibid, p. 4].

Notice these words: silence, atmospheric conditions, jaundiced tinge, harsh shadows, gloomy. All appeal directly to our senses. 

A reader’s unfamiliarity with the story’s Parisian ambiance is one problem they face in understanding the story. The second one is a lack of the required personal experience. The story takes place in:

A valley full of genuine suffering and frequently counterfeit joy, where life is so frantically hectic that only the most freakish anomaly will produce any lasting sensation. [Ibid].

I don’t know about where you are, but this does not describe where I live. Balzac’s story takes place among people for whom only a “freakish” aberration can get their attention and make an impression on them. The narrator is suggesting that we may not be able to understand the story because of a gap, an experiential chasm, that separates us in our experience from the lives of those in the story. Here is a description of a potential reader that occurs later in the book. The phrase “much the same way” refers to the tendency to quickly lose the impact of what one has just read.

You will react in much the same way, you who are holding this book in your white hand, you who are sinking into a soft-cushioned chair saying to yourself: ‘Perhaps this will entertain me.’ After reading about old man Goriot’s secret woes, you will dine heartily, blaming your insensitivity firmly on the author, accusing him of exaggeration, pointing the finger at his feverish imagination. [Ibid, p. 6].

So what are we to do? The narrator does not want us to leave the book unread and illustrates two ways to read it productively and overcome the fact that we do not live in Paris nor have the necessary life experience.

Ambiance: Balzac is a master of description.Here is the description of an odor found in the Maison Vauquer’s drawing room.

Our language has no name for the odour given off by this first room, which ought to be called ‘essence of boarding house’. It smells of all that is stale, mildewy, rancid; it chills you, makes your nose run, clings to your clothes; it repeats like last night’s dinner; it reeks of the scullery, the pantry, the poorhouse. If a method were invented for measuring the foul and fundamental particles contributed by the catarrhal conditions specific to each boarder, young and old, perhaps it really could be described. [Ibid, p. 8].

“Repeats like last night’s dinner.” Given this description, I do not need, nor indeed want, to smell the room in question. We can safely rely upon Balzac to place us in Paris no matter where we live.

Lack of Personal Experience: The particulars of the story undergird universals in human experience, tapping into our common humanity.

Let me tell you that this drama is neither fiction nor romance. All is true, so true that we may each recognize elements of it close to home, perhaps even in our hearts. [Ibid, p. 4].

Storytellers tap into their listeners’ primal emotions, which we all share. Balzac is a veteran teller of tales. We can count on him to move us.

If you are thinking about reading Le Père Goriot in English, I suggest the Penguin Classics edition, translated by Olivia McCannon. It is available in print or on Kindle. McCannon’s notes alone are worth the price of the book. There is also a good translation by Ellen Marriage in the public domain, but it is, alas, without notes.

All the best,
Gershon