Gobseck draws the portrait of a usurer raised into a philosopher of gold and power. Jean-Esther van Gobseck, an impassive old man without family or apparent passion, lends at high interest and holds in his hands, through debt, a portion of Parisian high society. To his eyes money is not merely wealth: it is the secret mainspring of everything, the measure of souls and the lever of the world; his ascetic life as a moneylender gives him the spectacle of human passions reduced to their financial needs, and he takes a cynical sage's pleasure in this knowledge of men. The tale, told by the attorney Derville in the course of a drawing-room conversation, connects Gobseck with the Restaud family: the Comtesse Anastasie de Restaud, daughter of Old Goriot, ruins her household through passion for the seductive Maxime de Trailles and finds herself at the usurer's mercy. Around the dissipation of the Restaud fortune and the protection of the children's inheritance, Balzac ties an intrigue that reveals at once greed, blind love, and cold rapacity. At the end, Gobseck dies alone, in a contradictory destitution: he has amassed immense riches but also heaps of goods and pledged objects that he has let rot out of avarice — a striking image of the sterility of hoarding. The tale, linked to Le Père Goriot through the figure of Anastasie, is a meditation on the power of money in modern society and on the figure of the usurer as a lucid, glacial observer of human weakness. Gobseck, at once sage and monster, remains one of the great types of La Comédie humaine, an incarnation of the spirit of capital.