Goriot’s locket

Goriot’s locket is a circular gold keepsake holding locks of hair from his daughters, Anastasie and Delphine. It becomes the material focus of his paternal devotion at the point when speech and consciousness are failing: returned to his breast as he lies dying, it stirs a final joy, and at his funeral Eugène ensures that it accompanies him into the grave. The object carries both the tenderness of an earlier family memory and the painful absence of the daughters who do not come to their father’s burial.

Description and Family Memory

The locket contains a plait of faded golden hair, with the name ANASTASIE on one side and DELPHINE on the other. Its fine, soft curls appear to have been taken from the two girls when they were children. The contrast between their childish hair and the names engraved on the grown women’s keepsake gives the object its particular charge: it preserves a trace of the daughters as they were before adult interests and choices altered their relationship with their father.

Goriot has worn the locket close to his breast. The narrator presents it not as mere jewelry but as the emblem of the heart he has given to his daughters. Its physical closeness to him makes an inward attachment visible, while the fading hair registers the passage of time. The small object holds together two stages of the family bond: the innocent childhood recalled by the curls and the painful present in which Goriot’s daughters are largely absent from his bedside.

Returned to the Dying Man

During Goriot’s final illness, Eugène supports him while Bianchon removes his shirt. Goriot makes a movement as if trying to clutch something to his breast and gives a low, inarticulate moan. Bianchon recognizes that he wants the locket and chain, which had been taken off while the men treated him with blisters; the keepsake lies on the chimney-piece, apart from the body it had usually rested against.

Eugène retrieves it and reads the two names. When Goriot feels the locket against him again, his chest rises with a deep sigh of satisfaction, and a delirious joy briefly lights his distorted face. Even as the power of thought fails, the intensity of the response suggests that his attachment to his daughters survives as a bodily and emotional impulse. He cries out their pet names, “Nasie! Fifine!” The locket’s return thus links the physical object to a last, vivid reach toward the daughters whose hair it contains.

The Last Gesture of Affection

As Bianchon and Eugène move Goriot in bed, the dying man gathers what strength remains and gropes for the students’ heads. His fingers catch convulsively at their hair, and he whispers, “Ah! my angels!” Sylvie reads the exclamation as the final elevation of his great love, though it is directed toward the two young men who are caring for him, not toward the daughters whose names and hair the locket preserves. The scene’s tenderness is inseparable from its painful misrecognition: Goriot’s last joy rests on an affection he still gives freely, even as his daughters are not there to receive or return it.

The locket’s meaning therefore extends beyond remembrance. It makes the gap between Goriot’s enduring love and his daughters’ absence tangible without diminishing the sincerity of his devotion. In his final moments, the keepsake supplies a physical point of contact for the family attachment that consciousness can no longer explain or defend.

The Locket at the Funeral

After Goriot’s death, Eugène writes to ask that ornaments be sold so that the old man can be decently buried. The request fails: the note is taken to the Baron de Nucingen, who throws it into the fire. At the lodging house, Eugène sees the locket in Mme. Vauquer’s hands and demands to know why she has taken it. She answers that it is gold and asks whether it is meant to be buried with Goriot.

Eugène insists that it must go with him, so that at least one thing representing his daughters can accompany him into the grave. When the hearse arrives, he has the coffin brought back inside, opens it, and lays the locket reverently on Goriot’s breast. The token recalls Delphine and Anastasie as innocent little girls, before they began, as Goriot had lamented in his agony, “to think for themselves.” This final placement returns the locket to the body from which it had been removed during treatment and gives Eugène a way to honor both the old man’s love and the childhood memory bound up in the hair.

The burial makes the contrast surrounding the locket stark. Only Eugène, Christophe, and the undertaker’s two men follow the coffin; Goriot’s daughters and their husbands are absent. In the chapel, Eugène cannot speak, while Christophe remembers Goriot as a good and worthy man who harmed no one and gave no one trouble. Against that public solitude, the locket is an intimate substitute for the family presence missing at the funeral: it cannot bring the daughters back, but it lets their father be buried with the keepsake he had cherished against his heart.