w laws an moral judgements are without power among the rich, and found in success the ultima ratio mundi (Balzac 105).
Thus does EugFne accept Vautrin's idea that success is virtue--especially in the brief moment that, after his mansion apertu, he passes briefly through another apertu in the "nauseating" maison: "This lamentable room with its poverty-stricken inmates was hateful to him. The transition was too abrupt, the contrast too complete, not to act as a powerful stimulant, to force the growth of his ambition beyond measure" (Balzac 106).
A fateful attraction to trappings of mansion luxury and space instead of the cramped quarters of the maison thus comes to dominate his life, although he becomes devoted to the well-being of Goriot as well. It is for those reasons that EugFne marks his experience of Paris in terms of desperate need for money and comfort in what turns out to be the studied superficiality of Paris society. His method is to abandon school and "sail the Parisian ocean and devote all his energies to fishing fortune from it, or to the ch
...