your
career. If I have no children--which will probably be the
case, for I have no
anxiety to raise slips of myself here--you
shall
inherit my fortune. That is what you may call
standing by a
man; but I myself have a
liking for you. I have a mania, too, for
devoting myself to some one else. I have done it before. You see,
my boy, I live in a loftier
sphere than other men do; I look on
all actions as means to an end, and the end is all that I look
at. What is a man's life to me? Not THAT," he said, and he
snapped his thumb-nail against his teeth. "A man, in short, is
everything to me, or just nothing at all. Less than nothing if
his name happens to be Poiret; you can crush him like a bug, he
is flat and he is
offensive. But a man is a god when he is like
you; he is not a machine covered with a skin, but a theatre in
which the greatest sentiments are displayed--great thoughts and
feelings--and for these, and these only, I live. A sentiment--
what is that but the whole world in a thought? Look at Father
Goriot. For him, his two girls are the whole
universe; they are
the clue by which he finds his way through
creation. Well, for my
own part, I have fathomed the depths of life, there is only one
real sentiment--comradeship between man and man. Pierre and
Jaffier, that is my
passion. I knew Venice Preserved by heart.
Have you met many men plucky enough when a comrade says, 'Let us
bury a dead body!' to go and do it without a word or plaguing him
by
taking a high moral tone? I have done it myself. I should not
talk like this to just everybody, but you are not like an
ordinary man; one can talk to you, you can understand things. You
will not dabble about much longer among the tadpoles in these
swamps. Well, then, it is all settled. You will marry. Both of us
carry our point. Mine is made of iron, and will never
soften, he!
he!"
Vautrin went out. He would not wait to hear the student's
repudiation, he wished to put Eugene at his ease. He seemed to
understand the secret springs of the faint
resistance still made
by the younger man; the struggles in which men seek to preserve
their self-respect by justifying their blameworthy actions to
themselves.
"He may do as he likes; I shall not marry Mlle. Taillefer, that
is certain," said Eugene to himself.
He regarded this man with abhorrence, and yet the very cynicism
of Vautrin's ideas, and the audacious way in which he used other
men for his own ends, raised him in the student's eyes; but the
thought of a
compact threw Eugene into a fever of apprehension,
and not until he had recovered somewhat did he dress, call for a
cab, and go to Mme. de Restaud's.
For some days the Countess had paid more and more attention to a
young man whose every step seemed a
triumphal progress in the
great world; it seemed to her that he might be a
formidable power
before long. He paid Messieurs de Trailles and d'Ajuda, played at
whist for part of the evening, and made good his losses. Most men
who have their way to make are more or less of fatalists, and
Eugene was
superstitious; he chose to consider that his luck was
heaven's
reward for his
perseverance in the right way. As soon as
possible on the following morning he asked Vautrin whether the
bill he had given was still in the other's possession; and on
receiving a reply in the affirmative, he repaid the three
thousand francs with a not
unnatural relief.
"Everything is going on well," said Vautrin.
"But I am not your accomplice," said Eugene.
"I know, I know," Vautrin broke in. "You are still
acting like a
child. You are making mountains out of molehills at the outset."
Two days later, Poiret and Mlle. Michonneau were sitting together
on a bench in the sun. They had chosen a little frequented alley
in the Jardin des Plantes, and a gentleman was chatting with
them, the same person, as a matter of fact, about whom the
medical student had, not without good reason, his own suspicions.
"Mademoiselle," this M. Gondureau was
saying, "I do not see any
cause for your scruples. His Excellency, Monseigneur the Minister
of Police----"
"Yes, his Excellency is
taking a personal interest in the
matter," said Gondureau.
Who would think it
probable that Poiret, a
retired clerk,
doubtless possessed of some notions of civic
virtue, though there
might be nothing else in his head--who would think it likely that