Gobseck
novella by French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac
Gobseck is an 1830 novella by French author Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) which is in the Scènes de la vie privée section of his novel sequence La Comédie humaine.
Gobseck first appeared in outline form in La Mode in March 1830 under the title l'Usurier (The Usurer), and then in August 1830 in the periodical Le Voleur. The actual novella appeared in a volume published by Mame-Delaunay under the title Les Dangers de l'inconduite. This novella would appear in 1835 under the title of Papa Gobseck in a volume published by Madame Charles-Béchet. The definitive title of Gobseck originated in 1842 in the Furne edition of La Comédie humaine.
Plot
The plot of Gobseck, set during the French Restoration period of 1815 to 1830, is framed within a conversation between lawyer Maître Derville and the Vicomtesse de Grandlieu. Derville tells a story which focuses on Anastasie de Restaud, née Goriot. Anastasie, the daughter of a rich bourgeois who has married into the aristocracy, is bored by her marriage, which is loveless and passionless.
Anastasie de Restaud has an affair with Maxime de Trailles, and spends her fortune on de Trailles. She turns to the usurer Jean-Esther van Gobseck for financial assistance.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q776551. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1830, 1799, 1850 and 1835.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gobseck” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.