thrown to the butcher's dog. Bark at thieves, plead the cause of

the rich, send men of heart to the guillotine, that is your work!
Many thanks! If you have no influence, you may rot in your

provincial tribunal. At thirty you will be a Justice with twelve
hundred francs a year (if you have not flung off the gown for

good before then). By the time you are forty you may look to
marry a miller's daughter, an heiress with some six thousand

livres a year. Much obliged! If you have influence, you may
possibly be a Public Prosecutor by the time you are thirty; with

a salary of a thousand crowns, you could look to marry the
mayor's daughter. Some petty piece of political trickery, such as

mistaking Villele for Manuel in a bulletin (the names rhyme, and
that quiets your conscience), and you will probably be a

Procureur General by the time you are forty, with a chance of
becoming a deputy. Please to observe, my dear boy, that our

conscience will have been a little damaged in the process, and
that we shall endure twenty years of drudgery and hiddenpoverty,

and that our sisters are wearing Dian's livery. I have the honor
to call your attention to another fact: to wit, that there are

but twenty Procureurs Generaux at a time in all France, while
there are some twenty thousand of you young men who aspire to

that elevated position; that there are some mountebanks among you
who would sell their family to screw their fortunes a peg higher.

If this sort of thing sickens you, try another course. The Baron
de Rastignac thinks of becoming an advocate, does he? There's a

nice prospect for you! Ten years of drudgery straight away. You
are obliged to live at the rate of a thousand francs a month; you

must have a library of law books, live in chambers, go into
society, go down on your knees to ask a solicitor for briefs,

lick the dust off the floor of the Palais de Justice. If this
kind of business led to anything, I should not say no; but just

give me the names of five advocates here in Paris who by the time
that they are fifty are making fifty thousand francs a year! Bah!

I would sooner turn pirate on the high seas than have my soul
shrivel up inside me like that. How will you find the capital?

There is but one way, marry a woman who has money. There is no
fun in it. Have you a mind to marry? You hang a stone around your

neck; for if you marry for money, what becomes of our exalted
notions of honor and so forth? You might as well fly in the face

of social conventions at once. Is it nothing to crawl like a
serpent before your wife, to lick her mother's feet, to descend

to dirty actions that would sicken swine--faugh!--never mind if
you at least make your fortune. But you will be as doleful as a

dripstone if you marry for money. It is better to wrestle with
men than to wrangle at home with your wife. You are at the

crossway of the roads of life, my boy; choose your way.
"But you have chosen already. You have gone to see your cousin of

Beauseant, and you have had an inkling of luxury; you have been
to Mme. de Restaud's house, and in Father Goriot's daughter you

have seen a glimpse of the Parisienne for the first time. That
day you came back with a word written on your forehead. I knew

it, I could read it--'SUCCESS!' Yes, success at any price.
'Bravo,' said I to myself, 'here is the sort of fellow for me.'

You wanted money. Where was it all to come from? You have drained
your sisters' little hoard (all brothers sponge more or less on

their sisters). Those fifteen hundred francs of yours (got
together, God knows how! in a country where there are more

chestnuts than five-franc pieces) will slip away like soldiers
after pillage. And, then, what will you do? Shall you begin to

work? Work, or what you understand by work at this moment, means,
for a man of Poiret's calibre, an old age in Mamma Vauquer's

lodging-house. There are fifty thousand young men in your
position at this moment, all bent as you are on solving one and

the same problem--how to acquire a fortune rapidly. You are but a
unit in that aggregate. You can guess, therefore, what efforts

you must make, how desperate the struggle is. There are not fifty
thousand good positions for you; you must fight and devour one

another like spiders in a pot. Do you know how a man makes his
way here? By brilliantgenius or by skilful corruption. You must

either cut your way through these masses of men like a cannon
ball, or steal among them like a plague. Honesty is nothing to

the purpose. Men bow before the power of genius; they hate it,
and try to slander it, because genius does not divide the spoil;

but if genius persists, they bow before it. To sum it all up in a
phrase, if they fail to smothergenius in the mud, they fall on

their knees and worship it. Corruption is a great power in the
world, and talent is scarce. So corruption is the weapon of

superfluous mediocrity; you will be made to feel the point of it
everywhere. You will see women who spend more than ten thousand

francs a year on dress, while their husband's salary (his whole
income) is six thousand francs. You will see officials buying

estates on twelve thousand francs a year. You will see women who
sell themselves body and soul to drive in a carriage belonging to

the son of a peer of France, who has a right to drive in the
middle rank at Longchamp. You have seen that poor simpleton of a

Goriot obliged to meet a bill with his daughter's name at the
back of it, though her husband has fifty thousand francs a year.

I defy you to walk a couple of yards anywhere in Paris without
stumbling on some infernalcomplication. I'll bet my head to a

head of that salad that you will stir up a hornet's nest by
taking a fancy to the first young, rich, and pretty woman you

meet. They are all dodging the law, all at loggerheads with their
husbands. If I were to begin to tell you all that vanity or

necessity (virtue is not often mixed up in it, you may be sure),
all that vanity and necessity drive them to do for lovers,

finery, housekeeping, or children, I should never come to an end.
So an honest man is the common enemy.

"But do you know what an honest man is? Here, in Paris, an honest
man is the man who keeps his own counsel, and will not divide the

plunder. I am not speaking now of those poor bond-slaves who do
the work of the world without a reward for their toil--God

Almighty's outcasts, I call them. Among them, I grant you, is
virtue in all the flower of its stupidity, but poverty is no less

their portion. At this moment, I think I see the long faces those
good folk would pull if God played a practical joke on them and

stayed away at the Last Judgment.
"Well, then, if you mean to make a fortune quickly, you must

either be rich to begin with, or make people believe that you are
rich. It is no use playing here except for high stakes; once take

to low play, it is all up with you. If in the scores of
professions that are open to you, there are ten men who rise very

rapidly, people are sure to call them thieves. You can draw your
own conclusions. Such is life. It is no cleaner than a kitchen;

it reeks like a kitchen; and if you mean to cook your dinner, you
must expect to soil your hands; the real art is in getting them

clean again, and therein lies the whole morality of our epoch. If
I take this tone in speaking of the world to you, I have the

right to do so; I know it well. Do you think that I am blaming
it? Far from it; the world has always been as it is now.

Moralists' strictures will never change it. Mankind are not
perfect, but one age is more or less hypocritical than another,

and then simpletons say that its morality is high or low. I do
not think that the rich are any worse than the poor; man is much

the same, high or low, or wherever he is. In a million of these
human cattle there may be half a score of bold spirits who rise

above the rest, above the laws; I am one of them. And you, if you
are cleverer than your fellows, make straight to your end, and

hold your head high. But you must lay your account with envy and
slander and mediocrity, and every man's hand will be against you.

Napoleon met with a Minister of War, Aubry by name, who all but
sent him to the colonies.