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 infernal complication. 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 mo