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Updated: June 16, 2025
He thought of it impatiently the next morning, while trying a horse on the Champs Elysees when he suddenly found himself face to face with his former secretary, Vautrot. He had never seen this person since the day he had thought proper to give himself his own dismissal. The Champs Elysees was deserted at this hour.
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.
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!
She secured him by some immediate advantages and by promises; she made him believe the General would recompense him largely. Vautrot, smarting still from the cut of Camors's whip on his shoulder, and ready to kill him with his own hand had he dared, hardly required the additional stimulus of gain to aid his protectress in her vengeance by acting as her instrument.
Besides, he had lost the only interest he could desire to subserve, for he knew M. Vautrot had done him the compliment of courting his Wife. And he really esteemed him a little less low, after discovering this gentlemanly taste!
Vautrot could not avoid, as he had probably done more than once, encountering Camors. Seeing himself recognized he saluted him and stopped, with an uneasy smile on his lips. His worn black coat and doubtful linen showed a poverty unacknowledged but profound.
M. Hippolyte Vautrot was a handsome man and knew it perfectly. He even flattered himself on a certain resemblance to his patron, the Comte de Camors. Partly from nature and partly from continual imitation, this idea had some foundation; for he resembled the Count as much as a vulgar man can resemble one of the highest polish.
It was after this search that M. Vautrot repaired with his volume of Faust to the boudoir of the young Countess, at whose feet we have already left him too long. Madame de Camors had closed her eyes to conceal her tears. She opened them at the instant Vautrot seized her hand and called her "Poor angel!"
Camors himself, three fourths of the time, would bring him in before going out in the evening. "I bring you Vautrot, my dear," he would say, "and Shakespeare. You can read him together." Vautrot read well; and though his heavy declamatory style frequently annoyed the Countess, she thus managed to kill many a long evening, while waiting the expected visit of Madame de Tecle.
And this was the case with Hippolyte Vautrot. He was about forty years of age a period of life when men often become very vicious, even when they have been passably virtuous up to that time. He affected an austere and puritanical air; was the great man of the cafe he frequented; and there passed judgment on his contemporaries and pronounced them all inferior.
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