only to nod your head, it won't compromise you in any
way, and you hesitate. 'Tis an effeminate age."

Eugene accepted the draft, and received the banknotes in exchange for
it.

"Well, well. Come, now, let us talk rationally," Vautrin continued. "I
mean to leave this country in a few months' time for America, and set
about planting tobacco. I will send you the cigars of friendship. If
I make money at it, I will help you in your career. If I have no
children--which will probably be the case, for I have no anxiety to
raise slips of myself here--you shall inherit my fortune. That is what
you may call standing by a man; but I myself have a liking for you. I
have a mania, too, for devoting myself to some one else. I have done it
before. You see, my boy, I live in a loftier sphere than other men do;
I look on all actions as means to an end, and the end is all that I look
at. What is a man's life to me? Not _that_," he said, and he snapped his
thumb-nail against his teeth. "A man, in short, is everything to me, or
just nothing at all. Less than nothing if his name happens to be Poiret;
you can crush him like a bug, he is flat and he is offensive. But a man
is a god when he is like you; he is not a machine covered with a skin,
but a theatre in which the greatest sentiments are displayed--great
thoughts and feelings--and for these, and these only, I live. A
sentiment--what is that but the whole world in a thought? Look at Father
Goriot. For him, his two girls are the whole universe; they are the clue
by which he finds his way through creation. Well, for my own part,
I have fathomed the depths of life, there is only one real
sentiment--comradeship between man and man. Pierre and Jaffier, that is
my passion. I knew _Venice Preserved_ by heart. Have you met many men
plucky enough when a comrade says, 'Let us bury a dead body!' to go and
do it without a word or plaguing him by taking a high moral tone? I have
done it myself. I should not talk like this to just everybody, but you
are not like an ordinary man; one can talk to you, you can understand
things. You will not dabble about much longer among the tadpoles in
these swamps. Well, then, it is all settled. You will marry. Both of us
carry our point. Mine is made of iron, and will never soften, he! he!"

Vautrin went out. He would not wait to hear the student's repudiation,
he wished to put Eugene at his ease. He seemed to understand the secret
springs of the faint resistance st