Old Goriot: Introduction by Donald Adamson

Balzac's great theme was money, and he explored its uses and abuses with all the particularity of the masterful poet he was. Old Goriot, betrayed by rapacious daughters, and Rastignac, an ambitious provincial youth alive to his opportunities, form the twin foci around which the grasping Parisian society of the 1820s revolves, in this, his most economical and universally loved novel.