ribunal. At thirty you will
be a Justice with twelve hundred francs a year (if you have not flung
off the gown for good before then). By the time you are forty you may
look to marry a miller's daughter, an heiress with some six thousand
livres a year. Much obliged! If you have influence, you may possibly
be a Public Prosecutor by the time you are thirty; with a salary of
a thousand crowns, you could look to marry the mayor's daughter. Some
petty piece of political trickery, such as mistaking Villele for Manuel
in a bulletin (the names rhyme, and that quiets your conscience), and
you will probably be a Procureur 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