Father Goriot characters

Appears from the start

A young law student from an impoverished but genteel provincial family, newly arrived in Paris and living at Madame Vauquer's boarding house. Ambitious, observant, and initially inexperienced, he is drawn toward fashionable society while remaining close enough to poverty to understand the cost of entering it.

Also known as Père Goriot

Appears from the start

An elderly retired vermicelli maker who occupies an increasingly poor room at Madame Vauquer's. Once prosperous, he is treated as a ridiculous, fallen figure by the other boarders. His furtive meetings with two elegantly dressed young women create gossip and deepen the mystery surrounding his decline.

Appears from the start

The widowed proprietor of a shabby Paris boarding house in the rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève. She measures her residents chiefly by what they can pay, presides over their shared table, and combines petty economy with relentless curiosity about their private affairs.

Appears from the start

A large, genial-seeming middle-aged boarder who calls himself a former merchant. He is worldly, forceful, and unusually well informed about other people's secrets. His cynical advice to Rastignac presents Parisian life as a contest in which wealth and nerve matter more than conventional morality.

Appears from the start

A quiet young woman lodging with Madame Couture. Her wealthy father has disowned her in favor of her brother, leaving her dependent and hoping for reconciliation. She is gentle, devout, and vulnerable to schemes built around her possible inheritance.

Appears from the start

Victorine's older companion and protector at the boarding house. A respectable widow related to Victorine's late mother, she supports the girl's attempts to regain her father's recognition and shields her within the rough social mixture of Madame Vauquer's table.

Appears from the start

A medical student and fellow boarder who becomes Rastignac's reliable friend. Practical and humane, he supplies a professional view of illness and human weakness while remaining less dazzled than Rastignac by aristocratic Paris.

First appears in chapter 2

Rastignac's aristocratic cousin and one of the leading women of Parisian society. She can open doors that remain closed to a poor student, but her own precarious private life shows him that rank and elegance do not protect anyone from humiliation.

First appears in chapter 2

The elder daughter of Goriot, married into the aristocratic Restaud family. Beautiful and intensely concerned with status, she receives Rastignac until his ignorance of the family's arrangements causes an awkward social rupture.

First appears in chapter 2

Goriot's younger daughter, the wife of the wealthy banker Baron de Nucingen. Shut out of the most exclusive aristocratic circle, she wants the recognition her sister enjoys and becomes the object of Rastignac's calculated social courtship.

First appears in chapter 2

An aristocrat married to Anastasie and protective of his household's reputation. He treats Goriot's presence as socially embarrassing and quickly closes his home to Rastignac when the student exposes how little he understands the family's concealed relationships.

First appears in chapter 3

A wealthy Alsatian banker and Delphine's husband. Their marriage is governed by money, status, and mutual distrust rather than affection; his control of her finances makes her apparent luxury far less secure than it looks.