aken. Just then Rastignac was overwhelmed by the words,
"You have shut the Countess' door against you."

"I shall call!" he said to himself, "and if Mme. de Beauseant is right,
if I never find her at home--I... well, Mme. de Restaud shall meet me
in every salon in Paris. I will learn to fence and have some pistol
practice, and kill that Maxime of hers!"

"And money?" cried an inward monitor. "How about money, where is that
to come from?" And all at once the wealth displayed in the Countess de
Restaud's drawing-room rose before his eyes. That was the luxury which
Goriot's daughter had loved too well, the gilding, the ostentatious
splendor, the unintelligent luxury of the parvenu, the riotous
extravagance of a courtesan. Then the attractive vision suddenly went
under an eclipse as he remembered the stately grandeur of the Hotel de
Beauseant. As his fancy wandered among these lofty regions in the great
world of Paris, innumerable dark thoughts gathered in his heart; his
ideas widened, and his conscience grew more elastic. He saw the world as
it is; saw how the rich lived beyond the jurisdiction of law and public
opinion, and found in success the _ultima ratio mundi_.

"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.
Clearly he was st