In the beginning of Balzac’s Père Goriot, the character Eugene Rastignac is shown to be something of a country bumpkin, stumbling his way through Parisian society like a newborn fawn just learning how to use its legs.  He has grand ambitions for himself, but few means to achieve them.  After his first taste of the Parisian Woman, in this case Mme. de Restaud, Eugene becomes all but obsessed with staking his claim in society, with meeting and wooing one of these insatiably wealthy angels upon whose pedestal he would more than love to stand.  It is as a result of this near-obsession that he becomes torn between the influence of two father figures and their respective moral platforms:  on the one hand, Père Goriot, who, according to Peter Brooks, represents Virtue, and on the other, Vautrin, who represents Vice (Norton 322).  Throughout the story, Eugene is able to walk the tightrope between these two moral extremes and emerge all the better and more prepared for it in the end; he adapts, as Brooks notes, an “avoidance of true choice (Norton 322).”  As we will see, many of Eugene’s actions and decisions are hardly a testament to his moral fiber, and yet we still see some occasional glimpses of that honest and caring side that would constitute a man of pure motives.  The end result is that, although the man is hardly a scoundrel (as Vautrin turns out to be), he is certainly not of the type that could be considered sympathetic, much less a hero.

At the start, Eugene is nothing more than a starry-eyed law student, just having his first taste of the complex stew that is society in Paris, and just beginning to see that he will not be able to even think about realizing his goals without coming upon large sums of both wealth and prestige:  “‘…To make one of these Parisian women even look at you, do you absolutely have to have dashing horses, and servants in uniforms, and tons of gold?’  The demon of luxury gnawed at his heart, the fever of moneymaking seized him, the thirst for gold dried out his throat (Norton 54).”  After his first meeting with the Vicomtesse de Beuséant, he truly realizes the extent of power that the simple possession of money grants one in Parisian society:  “He could see the world as it really was: neither law nor morality had any effect on the rich, and he understood that money is the ultima ratio mundi, the world’s final authority.  ‘Vautrin is right,’ he said to himself.  ‘Money is virtue!’ (Norton 64)”  It is here that we first see young Eugene begin to adapt some of Vautrin’s worldviews, and even as he begins to take up the defense of Pére Goriot out of pure sympathy for the old man, it soon becomes clear that Eugene’s actions are of the questionable ethical repute attributed to one who has become selfishly fixated on the immediate attainment of wealth.

Possibly the most shocking of these actions is Eugene’s request to his family members for money.  At this point, he has now set his sights on Goriot’s daughter Delphine, after already having been rejected by Anastasie, and is in need of cash in order to fashion new clothes for himself and to start him on his way to becoming a man of society.  We have already been told that his family, while generously providing for him, is doing so on a low income (“The tiny Rastignac estate… was worth perhaps three thousand francs a year, not allowing for the instabilities inherent in the wine trade, but somehow they managed to squeeze out twelve hundred francs a year for him (Norton 26).”), but he still finds it in his heart to manipulate his mother and sisters into sending him extra money, almost more than they could afford to.  In the letter to his mother, he writes, “I need twelve hundred francs, and I’ve got to have it, without fail.  … if I don’t get this money I’ll be so despairing I’ll blow my brains out.  …Our entire future depends on this money, which I need so I can start my campaign: life here in Paris is indeed perpetual warfare (Norton 66).”  Clearly, he is attempting to convince his mother that this money, the loss of which will cause even more struggle and hardship for his family, will allow him to pay them back tenfold in the long run.  This, of course, is not his real intention; after writing again to his two sisters, remarks to himself that “Theirs would be sacrifices of an incredible voluptuousness!  …These noble emotions [his family’s], these dreadful sacrifices, would help spur him toward Delphine de Nucingen.  How he wept—tears that formed the final incense he would throw on the sacred altar of the family (Norton 67).”  He is obviously upset with himself for wringing his family out so, but he mails the letters the next day, with his mind set only on the lofty goals he has set for himself.  He is obsessed, but he knows what he is doing, and he is willing to risk anything, even his family’s welfare, in order to further his ambitions.

It is not hard, therefore, to see how Eugene at first bought into Vautrin’s scheme, even with his reservations over the fact that it involved, for all intents and purposes, murder.  Of course, the promise of Victorine’s massive dowry (resulting from the death of her brother) is enough to, for a time, rope Eugene in and allow him the excuse to manipulate Victorine into believing that he was as in love with her as she was with him:  “…Eugene… was struggling against his conscience, knowing he was doing wrong and wanting to do wrong, assuring himself that a woman’s good fortune would redeem this venial sin (Norton 133)…”  Eugene’s conscience eventually gets the better of him, and he resolves to warn Victorine’s father that his son will soon be killed.  Although Vautrin drugs him to prevent him from doing so, and the plan still goes through, Vautrin’s capture and arrest as the criminal Jaques Collin removes the bad influence of one “father figure” from Eugene’s psyche.  Eugene remains much more well-versed in the ways of Parisian life than he was before Vautrin’s informal tutoring (Brooks:  “If he has managed to avoid commitment to Vautrin’s ethics, he has achieved and allied himself with Vautrin’s perception (Norton 324).”).  However, all of the objects of temptation that were slowly guiding him towards that negative moral pole (including Victorine; innocent as she was in the plan, Peter Brooks nevertheless notes that she was “chosen by Vautrin as the vehicle of his scheme (Norton 322)”) are now gone, allowing the more virtuous influence of Pére Goriot to insert itself in his mind and draw him back towards that happy medium of non-choice between the two moral extremes.

In the fourth and final part of the book, The Old Man’s Death, we see Eugene return to his ever-more-successful courtship of Delphine de Nucingen.  He has devoted his love exclusively to her now, without any outside forces pulling it in other directions.  However, this love may not be as pure as one would like to imagine it:  “…for the delights of the flesh he had brought her as his dowry, and for those she had showered upon him, he adored this woman, just as Delphine loved him the way Tantalus would have loved an angel, coming to satisfy his hunger or quench the thirsting of his parched throat (Norton 193).  It would seem that their love is not so much love in the pure, emotional sense as it is love for one another’s bodies, and, as I have surmised, Eugene’s love for Delphine’s money.

Nevertheless, Eugene’s selfishness is overshadowed throughout most of this chapter by the amount of compassion displayed by him towards Pére Goriot.  The first (and possibly best) example of this is when he overhears Anastasie begging her father for twelve thousand francs (to help her lover Maxime pay his debts) and rushes into the room with an I.O.U. note that he has just written out for that amount.  This is the most selfless act by far that he commits throughout the entirety of Pére Goriot, but not the last.  Upon Goriot’s death, Eugene pays the funeral expenses out of his own pocket (as his daughters have not made themselves available to contribute anything to their own father’s burial).  And finally, he sheds “the last youthful tear he would ever shed—a tear tugged out of him by the pious emotions of a pure heart, and one of those tears that, the moment it falls to the ground, goes flying straight up to Heaven (Norton 217).”

And then, Eugene reverts to his more familiar, ambitious self.  As soon as Goriot is gone, he has no influence pulling him towards either end of the moral spectrum, and so he again drifts back into that region of non-choice between the two extremes.  The last line of the book exemplifies this:  “And then, for the first challenge he hurled at Society, Rastignac went to have dinner with Madame de Nucingen (Norton 217).”  If his battle, his entire struggle against the entire Parisian societal machine, is comprised merely of dinner dates, can we really consider him a modern-day hero?  What exactly is he striving against?  And what does he hope to obtain?  It has been made quite clear throughout the story that Eugene’s ultimate goal is social advancement for himself.  It is not even implied (at least not in this book) how he plans to pay his family back for the money he “borrowed” from them.  While Eugene may at heart have the necessary compassion and kindness that befits any human individual, he does not demonstrate that he is deserving of any sort of sympathy from the reader, or indeed of that coveted title, “Modern-Day Hero.”

Works Cited

Balzac, Honoré de.  Père Goriot: A Norton Critical Edition.  New York:  W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1994.