He had successively knocked with feverish hand at all the doors of Fortune, and none had opened to him, because, though his ambition was great, his capacity was limited.  Subordinate positions, for which alone he was fit, he did not want.  He would have made a good tutor:  he sighed to be a poet.  He would have been a respectable cure in the country:  he pined to be a bishop.  Fitted for an excellent secretary, he aspired to be a minister.  In fine, he wished to be a great man, and consequently was a failure as a little one.

But he made himself a hypocrite; and that he found much easier.  He supported himself on the one hand by the philosophic society to be met at Madame d’Oilly’s; on the other, by the orthodox reunions of Madame de la Roche-Jugan.

By these influences he contrived to secure the secretaryship to the Comte de Camors, who, in his general contempt of the human species, judged Vautrot to be as good as any other.  Now, familiarity with M. de Camors was, morally, fearfully prejudicial to the secretary.  It had, it is true, the effect of stripping off his devout mask, which he seldom put on before his patron; but it terribly increased in venom the depravity which disappointment and wounded pride had secreted in his ulcerated heart.

Of course no one will imagine that M. de Camors had the bad taste to undertake deliberately the demoralization of his secretary; but contact, intimacy, and example sufficed fully to do this.  A secretary is always more or less a confidant.  He divines that which is not revealed to him; and Vautrot could not be long in discovering that his patron’s success did not arise, morally, from too much principle—­in politics, from excess of conviction—­in business, from a mania for scruples!  The intellectual superiority of Camors, refined and insolent as it was, aided to blind Vautrot, showing him evil which was not only prosperous, but was also radiant in grace and prestige.  For these reasons he most profoundly admired his master—­admired, imitated, and execrated him!

Camors professed for him and for his solemn airs an utter contempt, which he did not always take the trouble to conceal; and Vautrot trembled when some burning sarcasm fell from such a height on the old wound of his vanity—­that wound which was ever sore within him.  What he hated most in Camors was his easy and insolent triumph—­his rapid and unmerited fortune—­all those enjoyments which life yielded him without pain, without toil, without conscience—­peacefully tasted!  But what he hated above all, was that this man had thus obtained these things while he had vainly striven for them.

Assuredly, in this Vautrot was not an exception.  The same example presented to a healthier mind would not have been much more salutary, for we must tell those who, like M. de Camors, trample under foot all principles of right, and nevertheless imagine that their secretaries, their servants, their wives and their children, may remain virtuous—­we must tell these that while they wrong others they deceive themselves!  And this was the case with Hippolyte Vautrot.