Vautrin is right

"Vautrin is right, success is virtue!" he said to himself.

Arrived in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve, he rushed up to his room for ten francs wherewith to satisfy the demands of the cabman, and went in to dinner. He glanced round the squalid room, saw the eighteen poverty-stricken creatures about to feed like aattle in their stalls, and the sight filled him with loathing. The transition was too sudden, and the contrast was so violent that it could not but act as a powerful stimulant; his ambition developed and grew beyond all social bounds. On the one hand, he beheld a vision of social life in its most charming and refined forms, of quick-pulsed youth, of fair, impassioned faces invested with all the charm of poetry, framed in a marvelous setting of luxury or art; and, on the other hand, he saw a sombre picture, the miry verge beyond these faces, in which passion was extinct and nothing was left of the drama but the cords and pulleys and bare mechanism. Mme. de Beauseant's counsels, the words uttered in anger by the forsaken lady, her petulant offer, came to his mind, and poverty was a ready expositor. Rastignac determined to open two parallel trenches so as to insure success; he would be a learned doctor of law and a man of fashion. Clearly he was still a child! Those two lines are asymptotes, and will never meet.
"You are very dull, my lord Marquis," said Vautrin, with one of the shrewd glances that seem to read the innermost secrets of another mind.
"I am not in the humor to stand jokes from people who call me 'my lord Marquis,' " answered Eugene. "A marquis here in Paris, if he is not the veriest sham, ought to have a hundred thousand livres a year at least; and a lodger in the Maison Vauquer is not exactly Fortune's favorite."
Vautrin's glance at Rastignac was half-paternal, halfcontemptuous. "Puppy!" it seemed to say; "I should make one mouthful of him!" Then he answered:
"You are in a bad humor; perhaps your visit to the beautiful Comtesse de Restaud was not a success."
"She has shut her door against me because I told her that her father dined at our table," cried Rastignac.
Glances were exchanged all round the room; Father Goriot looked down.
"You have sent some snuff into my eye," he said to his neighbor, turning a little aside to rub his hand over his face.
"Any one who molests Father Goriot will have henceforward to reckon with me," said Eugene, looking at the old man's neighbor; "he is worth all the rest of us put together.--I am not speaking of the ladies," he added, turning in the direction of Mlle. Taillefer.
Eugene's remarks produced a sensation, and his tone silenced the dinner-table. Vautrin alone spoke. "If you are going to champion Father Goriot, and set up for his responsible editor into the bargain, you had need be a crack shot and know how to handle the doils," he said, banteringly.
"So I intend," said Eugene.
"Then you are taking the field today?"
"Perhaps," Rastignac answered. "But I owe no account of myself to any one, especially as I do not try to find out what other people do of a night."