The hero of this novel is an old man, whose consuming passion is to deprive himself of everything for the sake of his two ungrateful daughters Mme. deNucingen and Mme. deRestaud. The two daughters are married to wealthy men of position, but both, though ashamed of the bourgeois manners of their vemicelli-manufacturing father, expect him to extricate them from financial difficulties. Goriot living in a state of shabbiness in a cheap boardinghouse dies of apoplexy, after he has sacrificed his last silver plate. The two daughters reward him by sending empty carriages to the funeral.