"Yes, mamma has been drained dry," said Vautrin, "and now you can have
your fling, go into society, and fish for heiresses, and dance with
countesses who have peach blossom in their hair. But take my advice,
young man, and don't neglect your pistol practice."

Vautrin struck an attitude, as if he were facing an antagonist.
Rastignac, meaning to give the porter a tip, felt in his pockets and
found nothing. Vautrin flung down a franc piece on the table.

"Your credit is good," he remarked, eyeing the student, and Rastignac
was forced to thank him, though, since the sharp encounter of wits at
dinner that day, after Eugene came in from calling on Mme. de
Beauseant, he had made up his mind that Vautrin was insufferable. For
a week, in fact, they had both kept silence in each other's presence,
and watched each other. The student tried in vain to account to
himself for this attitude.

An idea, of course, gains in force by the energy with which it is
expressed; it strikes where the brain sends it, by a law as
mathematically exact as the law that determines the course of a shell
from a mortar. The amount of impression it makes is not to be
determined so exactly. Sometimes, in an impressible nature, the idea
works havoc, but there are, no less, natures so robustly protected,
that this sort of projectile falls flat and harmless on skulls of
triple brass, as cannon-shot against solid masonry; then there are
flaccid and spongy-fibred natures into which ideas from without sink
like spent bullets into the earthworks of a redoubt. Rastignac's head
was something of the powder-magazine order; the least shock sufficed
to bring about an explosion. He was too quick, too young, not to be
readily accessible to ideas; and open to that subtle influence of