ABSTRACT
Balzac’s novels have long had exemplary status in the history of the French novel. The shadow of the monumental network of the Comédie humaine stretches across the genre in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.2 Le Père Goriot (1835) was written at a time when the project of the Comédie humaine was in its embryonic stage. At this time, the conventions of Balzac’s novels had still to be established, let alone accepted by a contemporary readership. Now considered typical of the first mature phase of Balzac’s writing, Le Père Goriot has gained prototypical status in the French canon as an exemplary text by an exemplary writer.
