stage of his career a student grows eager and excited about all
sorts of follies that seem to him to be of immense importance. He has
his hero, his great man, a professor at the College de France, paid
to talk down to the level of his audience. He adjusts his cravat, and
strikes various attitudes for the benefit of the women in the first
galleries at the Opera-Comique. As he passes through all these
successive initiations, and breaks out of his sheath, the horizons of
life widen around him, and at length he grasps the plan of society with
the different human strata of which it is composed.

If he begins by admiring the procession of carriages on sunny afternoons
in the Champs-Elysees, he soon reaches the further stage of envying
their owners. Unconsciously, Eugene had served his apprenticeship before
he went back to Angouleme for the long vacation after taking his degrees
as bachelor of arts and bachelor of law. The illusions of childhood had
vanished, so also had the ideas he brought with him from the provinces;
he had returned thither with an intelligence developed, with loftier
ambitions, and saw things as they were at home in the old manor house.
His father and mother, his two brothers and two sisters, with an aged
aunt, whose whole fortune consisted in annuities, lived on the little
estate of Rastignac. The whole property brought in about three thousand
francs; and though the amount varied with the season (as must always
be the case in a vine-growing district), they were obliged to spare an
unvarying twelve hundred francs out of their income for him. He saw
how constantly the poverty, which they had generously hidden from him,
weighed upon them; he could not help comparing the sisters, who had
seemed so beautiful to his boyish eyes, with women in Paris, who had
realized the beauty of his dreams. The uncertain future of the whole
family depended upon him. It did not escape his eyes that not a crumb
was wasted in the house, nor that the wine they drank was made from the
second pressing; a multitude of small things, which it is useless to
speak of in detail here, made him burn to distinguish himself, and his
ambition to succeed increased tenfold.

He meant, like all great souls, that his success should be owing
entirely to his merits; but his was pre-eminently a southern
temperament, the execution of his plans was sure to be marred by the
vertigo that seizes on youth when youth sees itself alone in a wide sea,
uncer