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.
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