Père Goriot belonged to this vast group, dying as he did abandoned by his daughters and in abject poverty: his landlady, Madame Vauquer, dunned Rastignac for what the old man owed her, and he also had to pay the cost of burial, which exceeded the value of the deceased’s meager personal effects. Roughly half of all French people in the nineteenth century died in similar circumstances, without any wealth to convey to heirs, or with only negative net wealth, and this proportion barely budged in the twentieth century.
