“Love, you stupid old Paul, is a belief like that in the immaculate conception of the Virgin. You have it, or you have it not. Of what avail are rivers of blood, or the mines of Potosi, or the greatest glory, to produce an involuntary and inexplicable feeling? Young men like you, who look for love to balance their outlay, seem to me base usurers. Our legal wives owe us children and virtue; but they do not owe love. Love is the consciousness of happiness given and received, and the certainty of giving and getting it; it is an ever-living attraction, constantly satisfied, and yet insatiable. On the day when Vandenesse stirred in your wife’s heart the chord you had left untouched and virginal, your amorous flourishes, your outpouring of soul, and of money, ceased even to be remembered. Your nights of happiness strewn with roses—fudge! Your devotion—an offering of remorse. Yourself—a victim to be slain on the altar! Your previous life—a blank! One impulse of love annihilated your treasures of passion, which were now but old iron. He, Félix, has had her beauty, her devotion—for no return perhaps; but, in love, belief is as good as reality.
“Your mother-in-law was naturally on the side of the lover against the husband; secretly or confessedly she shut her eyes—or she opened them; I do not know what she did, but she took her daughter’s part against you. For fifteen years I have observed society, and I never knew a mother who, under such circumstances, deserted her daughter. Such indulgence is hereditary, from woman to woman. And what man can blame them? Some lawyer, perhaps, responsible for the Civil Code, which saw only formulas where feelings were at stake.—The extravagance into which you were dragged by the career of a fashionable wife, the tendencies of an easy nature, and your vanity too, perhaps, supplied her with the opportunity of getting rid of you by an ingenious scheme of ruin.
“From all this you will conclude, my good friend, that the charge you put upon me, and which I should have fulfilled all the more gloriously because it would have amused me, is, so to speak, null and void. The evil I was to have hindered is done—consummatum est.—Forgive me for writing à la de Marsay, as you say, on matters which to you are so serious. Far be it from me to cut capers on a friend’s grave, as heirs do on that of an uncle. But you write to me that you mean henceforth to be a man, and I take you at your word; I treat you as a politician, and not as a lover.
“Has not this mishap been to you like the brand on his shoulder that determines a convict on a systematic antagonism to society, and a revolt against it? You are hereby released from one care—marriage was your master, now it is your servant. Paul, I am your friend in the fullest meaning of the word. If your brain had been bound in a circlet of brass, if you had earlier had the energy that has come to you too late, I could have proved my friendship by telling you things that would have enabled you to walk over human beings as on a carpet. But whenever we talked over the combinations to which I owed the faculty of amusing myself with a few friends in the heart of Parisian civilization, like a bull in a china shop; whenever I told you, under romantic disguises, some true adventure of my youth, you always regarded them as romances, and did not see their bearing. Hence, I could only think of you as a case of unrequited passion. Well, on my word of honor, in the existing circumstances, you have played the nobler part, and you have lost nothing, as you might imagine, in my opinion. Though I admire a great scoundrel, I esteem and like those who are taken in.
“Apropos to the doctor who came to such a bad end, brought to the scaffold by his love for his mistress, I remember telling you the far more beautiful story of the unhappy lawyer who is still living on the hulks, I know not where, branded as a forger because he wanted to give his wife—again, an adored wife—thirty thousand francs a year, and the wife gave him up to justice in order to get rid of him and live with another gentleman. You cried shame, you and some others too who were supping with us. Well, my dear fellow, you are that lawyer—minus the hulks.
“Your friends do not spare you the discredit which, in our sphere of life, is equivalent to a sentence pronounced by the Bench. The Marquise de Listomère, the sister of the two Vandenesses, and all her following, in which little Rastignac is now enlisted—a young rascal who is coming to the front; Madame d’Aiglemont and all her set, among whom Charles de Vandenesse is regnant; the Lenoncourts, the Comtesse Féraud, Madame d’Espard, the Nucingens, the Spanish Embassy; in short, a whole section of the fashionable world, very cleverly prompted, heap mud upon your name. ‘You are a dissipated wretch, a gambler, a debauchee, and have made away with your money in the stupidest way. Your wife—an angel of virtue!—after paying your debts several times, has just paid off a hundred thousand francs to redeem bills you had drawn, though her fortune is apart from yours. Happily, you have pronounced sentence on yourself by getting out of the way. If you had gone on so, you would have reduced her to beggary, and she would have been a martyr to conjugal devotion!’ When a man rises to power, he has as many virtues as will furnish an epitaph; if he falls into poverty, he has more vices
