ted. Subordinate positions, for which alone
he was fit, he did not want. He would have made a good tutor: he sighed
to be a poet. He would have been a respectable cure in the country: he
pined to be a bishop. Fitted for an excellent secretary, he aspired to
be a minister. In fine, he wished to be a great man, and consequently
was a failure as a little one.

But he made himself a hypocrite; and that he found much easier. He
supported himself on the one hand by the philosophic society to be met
at Madame d'Oilly's; on the other, by the orthodox reunions of Madame de
la Roche-Jugan.

By these influences he contrived to secure the secretaryship to the
Comte de Camors, who, in his general contempt of the human species,
judged Vautrot to be as good as any other. Now, familiarity with M. de
Camors was, morally, fearfully prejudicial to the secretary. It had, it
is true, the effect of stripping off his devout mask, which he seldom
put on before his patron; but it terribly increased in venom the
depravity which disappointment and wounded pride had secreted in his
ulcerated heart.

Of course no one will imagine that M. de Camors had the bad taste to
undertake deliberately the demoralization of his secretary; but contact,
intimacy, and example sufficed fully to do this. A secretary is always
more or less a confidant. He divines that which is not revealed to him;
and Vautrot could not be long in discovering that his patron's success
did not arise, morally, from too much principle--in politics, from
excess of conviction--in business, from a mania for scruples! The
intellectual superiority of Camors, refined and insolent as it was,
aided to blind Vautrot, showing him evil which was not only prosperous,
but was also radiant in grace and prestige. For these reasons he most
profoundly admired his master--admired, imitated, and execrated him!

Camors professed for him and for his solemn airs an utter contempt,
which he did not always take the trouble to conceal; and Vautrot
trembled when some burning sarcasm fell from such a height on the old
wound of his vanity--that wound which was ever sore within him. What he
hated most in Camors was his easy and insolent triumph--his rapid and
unmerited fortune--all those enjoyments which life yielded him without
pain, without toil, without conscience--peacefully tasted! But what he
hated above all, was that this man had thus obtained these things while
he had vainly striven for them.

Assured