when his belief in himself is shaken. 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,