Balzac Honoré de - Old Man Goriot

Translation and Notes by OLIVIA McCANNON

Introduction by GRAHAM ROBB

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First published in French as Le Pre Goriot 1835

This translation first published in Penguin Classics 2011

Translation and notes copyright Olivia McCannon, 2011

Introduction copyright Graham Robb, 2011

All rights reserved

The moral right of the translator and author of the introduction has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN : 978-0-14-196857-5

PENGUIN CLASSICS

OLD MAN GORIOT

HONOR DE BALZAC was born at Tours in 1799, the son of a civil servant. He spent nearly six years as a boarder in a Vendme school, then went to live in Paris, working as a lawyers clerk, then as a hack writer. Between 1820 and 1824 he wrote a number of novels under various pseudonyms, many of them in collaboration, after which he unsuccessfully tried his luck at publishing, printing and type-founding. At the age of thirty, heavily in debt, he returned to literature with a dedicated fury and wrote the first novel to appear under his own name, The Chouans. During the next twenty years he wrote about ninety novels and shorter stories, among them many masterpieces, to which he gave the comprehensive title The Human Comedy. As Balzac himself put it: What he [Napoleon] was unable to finish with the sword, I shall accomplish with the pen. He died in 1850, a few months after his marriage to Eveline Hanska, the Polish countess with whom he had maintained amorous relations for eighteen years.

OLIVIA M c CANNON is a literary translator and writer based in London and Paris. She studied at the Queens College, Oxford (French/German), then at the Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III), on an Entente Cordiale scholarship. Her translation work includes nineteenth- and twentieth-century French poetry and contemporary Francophone plays (Royal Court theatre). She has received various awards, including a Hawthornden Fellowship (2005). Her writing has been broadcast on BBC Radios 3 and 4 and her poetry collection Exactly my own Length is published by Carcanet/Oxford Poets (2011).

GRAHAM ROBB studied French and German at Oxford and took his doctorate at Vanderbilt University. His books include Balzac (1994), Unlocking Mallarm (1996), Victor Hugo (1997), Rimbaud (2000) and Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century (2003). The Discovery of France (2007), based in part on 14,000 miles cycling in France, won both the Duff Cooper Prize and the 2008 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris came out in 2010.

My most grateful acknowledgements are due to the impressive scholarship of the many reference works I consulted at the British Library and the Bibliothque Nationale de France, and above all to that of the Pliade edition and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

Im extremely grateful to Mrs Drue Heinz for the opportunity to work on the translation without interruption at Hawthornden Castle, and to the Centre National du Livre, for enabling me to do the same in Paris.

I owe a particular debt to Graham Robb, for his inspiration, generous guidance and expert scrutiny; and to Sasha Dugdale, and David and Helen Constantine, for their skilful advice on both my translation and the art and craft of translation itself.

Ive been very lucky to be supported by such a talented team at Penguin and am especially grateful to Laura Barber, for commissioning the translation; Monica Schmoller, for her sensitive copyediting; and Anna Herv and Jessica Harrison, for putting the book to bed.

My warmest personal thanks are due to Mike Bradshaw, Juan Yermo and Rhianwen Bailey, for sharing their expertise; and to my parents, Dominic and Judith McCannon, for all their encouragement.

Finally, Id like to thank my husband, Jamie Glazebrook, for his endless open-hearted support at every level.

This translation is dedicated to my father, Dominic, to my husband, Jamie, and to my son, Arthur.

179920 May: Born at Tours, and put out to nurse until the age of four. His father is a civil servant, of peasant stock; his mother from a family of wealthy Parisian drapers.

Napoleon Bonaparte overthrows the Directory and becomes First Consul of France.

Hlderlin, Hyperion.

1804 First Empire: Napoleon becomes Emperor of France and starts conquering Europe.

Schiller, William Tell.

1805 Nelson defeats the French and Spanish fleet in the naval battle of Trafalgar. Napoleon defeats Austro-Russian troops at Austerlitz and then the Prussians at Jena.

Chateaubriand, Ren.

1807 Sent to the Oratorian college in Vendme, where he boards for the next six years. Birth of his half-brother Henry. (Already has two younger sisters: Laure, Laurence.)

1812 Napoleon is defeated in his catastrophic Moscow campaign against Tsar Alexander I.

Byron, Childe Harolds Pilgrimage.

1814 Family move to Paris, where Balzac continues his education.

Allied troops enter Paris. Napoleon abdicates, and becomes King of Elba. First restoration: Accession of Louis XVIII to the French throne.

Austen, Mansfield Park. Goya, The Second and Third of May 1808.

1815 Napoleon returns in triumph to Paris and rules for 100 days before defeat at Waterloo. Second restoration: Louis XVIII is reinstated on the French throne.

181619 Begins his legal training, attending lectures at the Sorbonne; articled to a solicitor, Matre Guillonnet-Merville, then a notary, Matre Passez.

1819 Determined to make a career from writing, moves into a garret in Rue Lesdiguires.

Scott, Ivanhoe. Gricault, The Raft of the Medusa.

1820 Finishes a verse drama, Cromwell, which is judged to be a failure by family and friends.

Shelley, Prometheus Unbound. Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn.

1821 Publishes novels of Gothic inspiration, many produced collaboratively, under the pseudonyms Lord Rhoone and Horace de St Aubin. Writes poems and plays.