To compare the Paris portrayed in Balzac's Old Goriot with the one portrayed in Zola's L'Assommoir is to engage in a multigenerational project. Zola's text appeared roughly a generation after Balzac's death and nearly two generations after the earlier novel. To read the two texts together is to recover a premodern Paris and to appreciate the double effect of the emergence of the modern city. In Paris both old and new, however, it is plain that the urban environment takes sides with the powerful and against the powerless, and the powerless have little opportunity to redress their situations.
Balzac's Paris is a city of the main chance, at least for those of ambition such as the venal and selfish Mme. Vauquer. Undoubtedly Old Goriot presents a class-stratified environment, with the heartless aristocracy/bourgeoisie at one level and the declining old man in the rooming house at quite another. The social standing of the characters is established by the options they have with respect to the spaces that they inhabit. For example, in Maison Vauquer, which is a metaphorical crossroads for its tenants, EugFne is a young man on a budget who from time to time splurges. Victorine, with whom he falls in love, has been shunted to the house because her wealthy family has disowned her. Only Vautrin, who turns out to be a branded criminal, has the run of the house, being endowed with a key (Balzac 39-40) and thus the freedom to roam the city at will and to come and go entirely at his convenience. Old Goriot inhabits space at the house according as his circumstances change--each time moving up a floor and down a room size so as to accommodate his dwindling finances, hence his life options in general. Goriot's daughters, meanwhile, move freely from the house, at their option, to their fine bourgeois homes, leaving behind both literally and figuratively the father whom they do not acknowledge.
EugFne's experience of Paris is linked to his increasing...