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Updated: June 23, 2025
Now, do you know how much you will want at the pace you are going? A million; and promptly, too, or that little head of ours will be swaying to and fro in the drag-nets at Saint-Cloud, while we are gone to find out whether or no there is a Supreme Being. I will put you in the way of that million." He stopped for a moment and looked at Eugene. "Aha! you do not look so sourly at papa Vautrin now!
The Director of the Beaux-Arts, Cave, went out, they tell me, full of esteem and admiration. Balzac became very ill with fever and brain neuralgia the day after the performance of "Vautrin," and Madame Surville took him to her house and nursed him. When he left his bed it was, of course to find his affairs in a worse condition than ever, and he was, as he described himself, "a stag at bay."
Nevertheless, he sweated hard over Vautrin, La Marâtre, Les Ressources de Quinola and Mercadet; none of them helped substantially to pay off the debts, nor can any be rated equally with the poorest of his novels. Mercadet, certainly, has one brilliant scene of comedy in it, and under the name of A Game of Speculation proved a trump-card with Charles Mathews.
"There's another " And they talked for half an hour of the Baron Nucingen, and Rastignac, and Hulot, and Bixiou, and Lousteau, and Gobsec, and Gaudissart, and Vautrin, and many another vivid personage in the human comedy. "That man could have gone on writing for a hundred years," cried Paul, "and he could have exhausted all the possibilities of human life." Colonel Winwood smiled courteously.
Alas! if the representations went beyond the single one of Vautrin, they did not exceed twenty; and his share of profits was insignificant. The play is not dull to read, with its flavour of Moliere's comedies, and the keenness of Balzac's observation. But its colour and poesy do not compensate for the diffuseness of the plot and the undramatic conclusion.
"'Oh woman, persecuted and injured innocent!" exclaimed Vautrin, breaking in upon her. "So that is how you are, is it? In a few days' time I will look into your affairs, and it will be all right, you shall see."
But the reader's enthusiasm rapidly died out as he discovered how little impression he was making and noted the coldness or the consternation on the faces before him. I was one of those who shared in the consternation. What I suffered during that reading was a foretaste of the terrors I was destined to experience at the opening performances of Vautrin and Quinola.
Vautrin could put the evil eye on her neighbours' cows and stop their milk, on their churns and stop their butter, on their kettles and stop their boiling.
If you mean to cut a figure in Paris, my young friend," Vautrin continued, with half-paternal jocularity, "you must have three horses, a tilbury for the mornings, and a closed carriage for the evening; you should spend altogether about nine thousand francs on your stables.
He held both the bags in his hand, and had risen to go up to his room. Vautrin made as if he were going out through the sitting-room, and the student turned to go through the second door that opened into the square lobby at the foot of the staircase. "Do you know, Monsieur le Marquis de Rastignacorama, that what you were saying just now was not exactly polite?"
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