"Vautrin is right, success is virtue!" he said to himself.
Arrived in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve, he rushed up to his room
for ten francs wherewith to satisfy the demands of the cabman, and
went in to dinner. He glanced round the squalid room, saw the eighteen
poverty-stricken creatures about to feed like cattle in their stalls,
and the sight filled him with loathing. The transition was too sudden,
and the contrast was so violent that it could not but act as a
powerful stimulant; his ambition developed and grew beyond all social
bounds. On the one hand, he beheld a vision of social life in its most
charming and refined forms, of quick-pulsed youth, of fair,
impassioned faces invested with all the charm of poetry, framed in a
marvelous setting of luxury or art; and, on the other hand, he saw a
sombre picture, the miry verge beyond these faces, in which passion
was extinct and nothing was left of the drama but the cords and
pulleys and bare mechanism. Mme. de Beauseant's counsels, the words
uttered in anger by the forsaken lady, her petulant offer, came to his
mind, and poverty was a ready expositor. Rastignac determined to open
two parallel trenches so as to insure success; he would be a learned
doctor of law and a man of fashion.
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