Do you ask the reason of this devotion?
All right; I will tell you that some of these days. A word or two in your ear will explain it.
I have begun by shocking you, by showing you the way to ring the changes, and giving you a sight of the mechanism of the social machine; but your first fright will go off like a conscript’s terror on the battlefield. You will grow used to regarding men as common soldiers who have made up their minds to lose their lives for some self-constituted king.
Times have altered strangely.
Once you could say to a bravo,
‘Here are a hundred crowns; go and kill Monsieur So-and-so for me,’ and you could sup quietly after turning some one off into the dark for the least thing in the world.
But nowadays I propose to put you in the way of a handsome fortune; you have only to nod your head, it won’t compromise you in any way, and you hesitate. ’Tis an effeminate age.”
Eugene accepted the draft, and received the banknotes in exchange for it.
“Well, well.
Come, now, let us talk rationally,” Vautrin continued.
“I mean to leave this country in a few months’ time for America, and set about planting tobacco.
I will send you the cigars of friendship.
If I make money at it, I will help you in your career.
If I have no children — which will probably be the case, for I have no anxiety to raise slips of myself here — you shall inherit my fortune.
That is what you may call standing by a man; but I myself have a liking for you.
I have a mania, too, for devoting myself to some one else.
I have done it before.
You see, my boy, I live in a loftier sphere than other men do; I look on all actions as means to an end, and the end is all that I look at.
What is a man’s life to me?
Not that,” he said, and he snapped his thumb-nail against his teeth.
“A man, in short, is everything to me, or just nothing at all.
Less than nothing if his name happens to be Poiret; you can crush him like a bug, he is flat and he is offensive.
But a man is a god when he is like you; he is not a machine covered with a skin, but a theatre in which the greatest sentiments are displayed — great thoughts and feelings — and for these, and these only, I live.
A sentiment — what is that but the whole world in a thought?
Look at Father Goriot. For him, his two girls are the whole universe; they are the clue by which he finds his way through creation.
Well, for my own part, I have fathomed the depths of life, there is only one real sentiment — comradeship between man and man.
Pierre and Jaffier, that is my passion.
I knew Venice Preserved by heart.
Have you met many men plucky enough when a comrade says,
‘Let us bury a dead body!’ to go and do it without a word or plaguing him by taking a high moral tone?
I have done it myself.
I should not talk like this to just everybody, but you are not like an ordinary man; one can talk to you, you can understand things.
You will not dabble about much longer among the tadpoles in these swamps.
Well, then, it is all settled.
You will marry.
Both of us carry our point.
Mine is made of iron, and will never soften, he! he!”
Vautrin went out. He would not wait to hear the student’s repudiation, he wished to put Eugene at his ease.
He seemed to understand the secret springs of the faint resistance still made by the younger man; the struggles in which men seek to preserve their self-respect by justifying their blameworthy actions to themselves.
“He may do as he likes; I shall not marry Mlle. Taillefer, that is certain,” said Eugene to himself.
He regarded this man with abhorrence, and yet the very cynicism of Vautrin’s ideas, and the audacious way in which he used other men for his own ends, raised him in the student’s eyes; but the thought of a compact threw Eugene into a fever of apprehension, and not until he had recovered somewhat did he dress, call for a cab, and go to Mme. de Restaud’s.
For some days the Countess had paid more and more attention to a young man whose every step seemed a triumphal progress in the great world; it seemed to her that he might be a formidable power before long.
He paid Messieurs de Trailles and d’Ajuda, played at whist for part of the evening, and made good his losses.
Most men who have their way to make are more or less of fatalists, and Eugene was superstitious; he chose to consider that his luck was heaven’s reward for his perseverance in the right way.
As soon as possible on the following morning he asked Vautrin whether the bill he had given was still in the other’s possession; and on receiving a reply in the affirmative, he repaid the three thousand francs with a not unnatural relief.
“Everything is going on well,” said Vautrin.
“But I am not your accomplice,” said Eugene.
“I know, I know,” Vautrin broke in.
“You are still acting like a child. You are making mountains out of molehills at the outset.”
Two days later, Poiret and Mlle. Michonneau were sitting together on a bench in the sun. They had chosen a little frequented alley in the Jardin des Plantes, and a gentleman was chatting with them, the same person, as a matter of fact, about whom the medical student had, not without good reason, his own suspicions.