law installed so quietly, and, to
all appearance, safely, in the _pension_, where Madame Vauquer, the
traipsing widow, lords it serenely, attentive only to her profits.

Of these subsidiary characters, two, Vautrin and Rastignac, furnish a
second interest in the story parallel to that of Goriot and his
daughters, and constituting a foil. Under the influence of Paris
surroundings and experience, Rastignac passes from his naive illusions
to a state of worldly wisdom, which he reaches all the more speedily
as Vautrin is at his elbow, commenting with Mephistophelian shrewdness
on his fellow-men and the society they form. Himself a man of
education, who has sunk from high to low and is branded with the
convict's mark, Vautrin is yet capable of affection of a certain kind;
but, in the mind and heart of the youth he would fain advantage, he is
capable only of inculcating the law of tooth and claw. "A rapid
fortune is the problem that fifty thousand young men are at present
trying to solve who find themselves in your position," he says to
Rastignac. "You are a single one among this number. Judge of the
efforts you have to make and of the desperateness of the struggle. You
must devour each other like spiders in a pot, seeing there are not
fifty thousand good places. Do you know how one gets on here? By the
brilliance of genius or the adroitness of corruption one must enter
the mass of men like a cannon-ball, or slip into it like the plague.
Honesty is of no use." Having a tempter about him of Vautrin's
calibre, strong, undauntable, as humorous as Dickens' Jingle, but
infinitely more unscrupulous and dangerous, Rastignac is gained over,
in spite of his first repulsion. The nursing and burying of Pere
Goriot are his last acts of charity accorded to the claims of his
higher nature, and even these are sullied by his relations with one of
Goriot's daughters. Standing on the cemetery heights, and looking down
towards the Seine and the Vendome column, he flings a defiance to the
society spread beneath him, the society he despises but still wishes
to conquer.

In this novel many social grades are gathered together, and the
reciprocal actions of their representative members are rendered with
effective contrast and a good deal of dramatic quickness. The chief
theme, though so painful, is developed with less strain and monotony
than in some other of the novelist's works by reason of a larger
application, conscious or unconscious, of Shak