my boy; choose your way.

[*] Travaux forces, forced labour.

"But you have chosen already. You have gone to see your cousin of
Beauseant, and you have had an inkling of luxury; you have been to
Mme. de Restaud's house, and in Father Goriot's daughter you have seen
a glimpse of the Parisienne for the first time. That day you came back
with a word written on your forehead. I knew it, I could read
it--'_Success_!' Yes, success at any price. 'Bravo,' said I to myself,
'here is the sort of fellow for me.' You wanted money. Where was it
all to come from? You have drained your sisters' little hoard (all
brothers sponge more or less on their sisters). Those fifteen hundred
francs of yours (got together, God knows how! in a country where there
are more chestnuts than five-franc pieces) will slip away like
soldiers after pillage. And, then, what will you do? Shall you begin
to work? Work, or what you understand by work at this moment, means,
for a man of Poiret's calibre, an old age in Mamma Vauquer's
lodging-house. There are fifty thousand young men in your position at
this moment, all bent as you are on solving one and the same problem
--how to acquire a fortune rapidly. You are but a unit in that
aggregate. You can guess, therefore, what efforts you must make, how
desperate the struggle is. There are not fifty thousand good positions
for you; you must fight and devour one another like spiders in a pot.
Do you know how a man makes his way here? By brilliant genius or by
skilful corruption. You must either cut your way through these masses
of men like a cannon ball, or steal among them like a plague. Honesty
is nothing to the purpose. Men bow before the power of genius; they
hate it, and try to slander it, because genius does not divide the
spoil; but if genius persists, they bow before it. To sum it all up in