 In the summer of 1834 Balzac began to work on a tragic story about a father who is rejected by his daughters . His journal records several undated lines about the plot : " Subject of Old Goriot – A good man – middle @-@ class lodging @-@ house – 600 fr. income – having stripped himself bare for his daughters who both have 50 @,@ 000 fr. income – dying like a dog . " He wrote the first draft of Le Père Goriot in forty autumn days ; it was published as a serial in the Revue de Paris between December and February . It was released as a novel in March 1835 by the publishing house of Werdet , who also published the second edition in May . A much @-@ revised third edition was published in 1839 by Charpentier . As was his custom , Balzac made copious notes and changes on proofs he received from publishers , so that the later editions of his novels were often significantly different from the earliest . In the case of Le Père Goriot , he changed a number of the characters into persons from other novels he had written , and added new paragraphs filled with detail . 
