Madame Vauquer, a sixty-year-old widow, has run a bourgeois boarding house on Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève in Paris for forty years.
The narrative, set in 1819, is presented as a true drama of Parisian life, unfolding in a desolate quarter between the Latin Quarter and Faubourg Saint-Marceau, an area synonymous with silence, decaying architecture, and pervasive hardship.
The Maison Vauquer itself is a picture of decrepitude: its yellow-washed façade, a neglected garden with sparse, sickly plants, and a warped, faded sign. Inside, the salon is furnished with worn horsehair chairs and features faded wallpaper depicting classical scenes from Telemachus, which the impoverished boarders mock to assert a semblance of superiority. A unique, unnamed "pension smell" permeates the room – a blend of stale, mouldy, and rancid odours. The adjoining dining room is even more dismal, covered in layers of grime, with sticky sideboards, chipped glassware, and battered, nearly indestructible furniture, embodying a stark, economical misery.
Madame Vauquer's physical appearance mirrors her establishment's decay. Plump and shrewd, with a distinctive 'parrot-beak' nose and calculating eyes, she presents herself as a woman who has endured great misfortune, often lamenting her late husband’s alleged financial misdeeds while cannily managing her business. Her faded attire, from her ill-fitting tulle bonnet to her threadbare skirts, perfectly complements the squalid environment.
The boarding house is home to seven internal residents. On the first floor, Madame Vauquer occupies one apartment, while the other is rented by Madame Couture, a commissioner's widow, who resides with Victorine Taillefer, a young girl under her care. The second floor accommodates Monsieur Poiret, an elderly man, and Monsieur Vautrin, a mysterious forty-year-old with dyed sideburns who claims to be a former merchant. The third floor houses Mademoiselle Michonneau and Père Goriot, a retired vermicelli manufacturer. One of the two remaining attic rooms, typically reserved for transient students, is currently occupied by Eugène de Rastignac, a young law student from Angoulême whose family makes immense sacrifices for his education. Christophe, the manservant, and Sylvie, the cook, also reside in the attic.
The boarders are generally depicted as dilapidated, their worn clothes reflecting bodies hardened by life's hardships and faces marked by misfortune. Mademoiselle Michonneau is a skeletal old maid, her angular frame and cold gaze hinting at a past ravaged by vice, grief, or avarice; she now lives on a contested annuity. Monsieur Poiret is a mechanical, shadowy figure whose obscure past might involve some insignificant bureaucratic role.
In contrast to these older figures are Victorine Taillefer and Eugène de Rastignac. Victorine is a sickly, melancholic young woman with a gentle, resigned demeanour. Disowned by her wealthy father, who provides her with a meagre allowance while leaving his fortune to her brother, she lives under Madame Couture's care, maintaining a pious and forgiving attitude towards her cruel father. Eugène de Rastignac, a young man from a noble but struggling family, possesses a keen intellect and ambition, destined to observe and perhaps uncover the hidden dramas within the boarding house. Vautrin acts as a transitional character, a formidable man with a powerful physique and an obliging yet hard manner, knowledgeable about many things and having lent money to several residents, thus wielding a certain influence. The narrative portrays the Maison Vauquer as a "curious monstrosity" within the unfathomable depths of Parisian life, where suffering and hidden dramas continually unfold.