“Success at any price”

“Success at any price” is the governing ambition Eugène de Rastignac recognizes as he enters Parisian society: a desire sharpened by his family’s sacrifices and challenged by Vautrin’s claim that advancement requires either exceptional talent or calculated corruption. The expression captures both a personal turning point and a wider social logic in which money and position threaten to make every relationship and moral choice instrumental.

Recognition and Family Sacrifice

After reading a letter from his sister Laure, Eugène privately embraces success at all costs. Laure’s devotion makes him feel that riches could not repay what his family has given him, and he wishes he could bring them every kind of happiness. Yet the practical sum immediately before him is fifteen hundred and fifty francs; he resolves that every expenditure must serve its purpose. Laure’s ingenuity is presented as an act of care: guileless when her own interests are at stake, she becomes resourceful on her brother’s behalf. Eugène reads this devotion as almost angelic, a contrast to the compromises he is beginning to contemplate. His ambition therefore begins not as simple indifference to his family, but under the pressure of gratitude and a wish to reward them. His entry into society has material costs. A tailor has been summoned and persuaded to provide what Eugène needs, and the narrative stresses how clothing can shape a young man’s prospects. The tailor is portrayed as a potential enemy or friend whose invoice binds the relationship; Eugène later turns the observation into an epigram about a pair of trousers securing an income of twenty thousand livres a year. Even dress becomes part of the machinery of advancement.

Vautrin’s Diagnosis of Paris

Vautrin interprets Eugène’s choices as evidence that he has already selected his course. He points to the young man’s visit to his cousin, Claire de Beauséant, his glimpse of luxury at Anastasie de Restaud’s house, and his discovery of the Parisian world through Jean-Joachim Goriot’s daughter. Vautrin says he could read “Success!” on Eugène’s forehead and recognizes in him a recruit for the struggle he describes. The resources Eugène has received from his sisters, Vautrin argues, will soon disappear. The fifteen hundred francs painstakingly assembled in the provinces cannot sustain a young man seeking a fortune in Paris. Ordinary work, in Vautrin’s deliberately discouraging account, leads only to the old age of Poiret in Mme. Vauquer’s lodging-house. Eugène is one among fifty thousand young men pursuing the same rapid solution, while the number of desirable positions is far smaller. Vautrin reduces the competition to two routes: brilliant genius or skilful corruption. A young man must, in his image, cut through the crowd like a cannonball or slip among it like a plague. Talent is scarce and may eventually command worship if it survives attempts to bury it; corruption, meanwhile, is a ready weapon for mediocrity. His counsel turns ambition into a choice between difficult distinction and morally compromised expediency.

Social Evidence and Moral Stakes

To support his diagnosis, Vautrin points to discrepancies between income and display. He describes women spending more than ten thousand francs a year on dress while their husbands earn six thousand, and officials buying estates on salaries of twelve thousand. He also evokes women who surrender themselves to secure the use of a carriage belonging to a peer’s son, and invokes Goriot’s need to meet a bill bearing his daughter’s name despite her husband’s annual income of fifty thousand francs. In this account, wealth and status are not merely rewards: they exert power over conduct and expose the disorder beneath respectable appearances. The expression’s force lies in the contrast between Laure’s generosity and Vautrin’s cynical arithmetic. Eugène wants to repay his family, but the social world offers advancement through resources that are already limited and relationships that may be turned into instruments. “Success at any price” thus frames an unresolved temptation rather than a completed achievement: Eugène’s ambition has awakened, while the cost—and the means by which he will pursue it—remain at issue.