General by the time you are forty, with a chance of becoming a deputy.
Please to observe, my dear boy, that our conscience will have been a
little damaged in the process, and that we shall endure twenty years
of drudgery and hidden poverty, and that our sisters are wearing
Dian's livery. I have the honor to call your attention to another
fact: to wit, that there are but twenty Procureurs Generaux at a time
in all France, while there are some twenty thousand of you young men
who aspire to that elevated position; that there are some mountebanks
among you who would sell their family to screw their fortunes a peg
higher. If this sort of thing sickens you, try another course. The
Baron de Rastignac thinks of becoming an advocate, does he? There's a
nice prospect for you! Ten years of drudgery straight away. You are
obliged to live at the rate of a thousand francs a month; you must
have a library of law books, live in chambers, go into society, go
down on your knees to ask a solicitor for briefs, lick the dust off
the floor of the Palais de Justice. If this kind of business led to
anything, I should not say no; but just give me the names of five
advocates here in Paris who by the time that they are fifty are making
fifty thousand francs a year! Bah! I would sooner turn pirate on the
high seas than have my soul shrivel up inside me like that. How will
you find the capital? There is but one way, marry a woman who has
money. There is no fun in it. Have you a mind to marry? You hang a
stone around your neck; for if you marry for money, what becomes of
our exalted notions of honor and so forth? You might as well fly in
the face of social conventions at once. Is it nothing to crawl like a
serpent before your wife, to lick her mother's feet, to descend to
dirty actions that would sicken swine--faugh!--never mind if you at
least 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,