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.

[*] Travaux forces, forced labour.

"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 brilliant genius 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 smother genius 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