Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) helped to establish the current form of the novel, and was one of the greatest and most prolific novelists and short story writers of all time. Nearly a hundred of his novels and short stories formed
La Comédie humaine, in which some characters occur in several stories.
Ellen Marriage (1865-1946) was an English translator, particularly of Balzac's works, who (according to Wikipedia) put an effort into readability and accuracy that was unusual in translators of her period.
George Saintsbury (1845-1933) was an English writer, literary historian, scholar, critic and wine connoisseur who edited an English edition of
La Comédie humaine translated by Ellen Marriage and published in 1895-98 by J. M. Dent.
Father Goriot, (also known as
Pere Goriot and
Old Goriot,) was published in serial form in 1834, and as a book in 1835. It is set in Paris in 1819, during the Bourbon restoration, and tells of the complex interactions between Eugène de Rastignac, (a penniless but ambitious young provincial aristocrat) Father Goriot, (a old bourgeois man who gave all his fortune to see his two young daughters married into the aristocracy), and several other characters in both classes.
The serial version was divided into seven chapters. The original book version and this ebook version has no chapters, though it has some one line separations.
The text was taken from Wikisource, and checked against the 1898 edition by The Gebbie Publishing Co. in the Internet Archive. I have silently corrected typos, curled quotes, replaced diacritics, set letters off as blockquotes, and made changes to punctuation and hyphenation using oxforddictionaries.com.
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