of him, and fit to take office under government.  Such connections are not made in a day nor yet in a year.  By this time Rastignac had been so thoroughly entangled by Nucingen, that being, like the Prince de la Paix, equally beloved by the King and Queen of Spain, he fancied that he (Rastignac) had secured a very valuable dupe in Nucingen!  For a long while he had laughed at a man whose capacities he was unable to estimate; he ended in a sober, serious, and devout admiration of Nucingen, owning that Nucingen really had the power which he thought he himself alone possessed.

“From Rastignac’s introduction to society in Paris, he had been led to contemn it utterly.  From the year 1820 he thought, like the Baron, that honesty was a question of appearances; he looked upon the world as a mixture of corruption and rascality of every sort.  If he admitted exceptions, he condemned the mass; he put no belief in any virtue—­men did right or wrong, as circumstances decided.  His worldly wisdom was the work of a moment; he learned his lesson at the summit of Pere Lachaise one day when he buried a poor, good man there; it was his Delphine’s father, who died deserted by his daughters and their husbands, a dupe of our society and of the truest affection.  Rastignac then and there resolved to exploit this world, to wear full dress of virtue, honesty, and fine manners.  He was empanoplied in selfishness.  When the young scion of nobility discovered that Nucingen wore the same armor, he respected him much as some knight mounted upon a barb and arrayed in damascened steel would have respected an adversary equally well horsed and equipped at a tournament in the Middle Ages.  But for the time he had grown effeminate amid the delights of Capua.  The friendship of such a woman as the Baronne de Nucingen is of a kind that sets a man abjuring egoism in all its forms.

“Delphine had been deceived once already; in her first venture of the affections she came across a piece of Birmingham manufacture, in the shape of the late lamented de Marsay; and therefore she could not but feel a limitless affection for a young provincial’s articles of faith.  Her tenderness reacted upon Rastignac.  So by the time that Nucingen had put his wife’s friend into the harness in which the exploiter always gets the exploited, he had reached the precise juncture when he (the Baron) meditated a third suspension of payment.  To Rastignac he confided his position; he pointed out to Rastignac a means of making ‘reparation.’  As a consequence of his intimacy, he was expected to play the part of confederate.  The Baron judged it unsafe to communicate the whole of his plot to his conjugal collaborator.  Rastignac quite believed in impending disaster; and the Baron allowed him to believe further that he (Rastignac) saved the shop.