The pivot of La Comédie humaine, Le Père Goriot unfolds largely in the sordid Maison Vauquer, where contrasting destinies cohabit. Old Goriot, a former dealer in flour and grain who made his fortune during the Revolution, has stripped himself of everything to marry off his two daughters, Anastasie de Restaud and Delphine de Nucingen; but they, now a countess and a baroness, disdain him and visit only to wring his last sous from him to sustain their luxury and their lovers. Beside him lives young Eugène de Rastignac, an ambitious provincial student who learns, through contact with the world, the cruel laws of Parisian society; he becomes Delphine's lover and the witness of filial ingratitude. In the boardinghouse also prowls the sinister Vautrin, an escaped convict and cynical tempter, who proposes to Rastignac a criminal shortcut to fortune before being unmasked and arrested. The drama culminates in Goriot's agony: ruined, abandoned by daughters who do not even come to his bedside, the old man dies calling for them — a sublime and grotesque victim of a paternal love pushed to idolatry. Rastignac, having buried him almost alone, contemplates Paris from atop Père-Lachaise and hurls his famous challenge: "It's between the two of us now!" A founding novel, Le Père Goriot systematically inaugurates the device of recurring characters that will unify the entire cycle. Balzac deploys his great themes here: the corruption of society by money, the apprenticeship of ambition, the denaturing of family feeling. The tragedy of paternity, a modern transposition of King Lear, reaches an overwhelming intensity. It is one of the masterworks of French realism.