Balzac: Tough to get BIGFED in Second Empire France
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Date: August 26th, 2014 8:38 PM Author: useless mother
If you have no patronage you will rot in a provincial court. At thirty you will be a magistrate on 1,200 francs a year...at forty you will marry some miller's daughter with about 6,000 livres in rent. Thank you. If you have a patron you will become a procureur du roi at thirty, with 1,000 écus salary and you will marry the mayor's daughter. If you make one or two political gestures...you might be a procureur général at forty, and a deputy.
But I should inform you that there are only twenty procureurs généraux in France and 20,000 competitors for the post.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2657578&forum_id=2#26212924) |
Date: April 18th, 2015 10:56 PM Author: thirsty menage
Lulz, I've been reading Balzac myself the last few weeks. I actually just finished Father Goriot today. It reminded me of Crime and Punishment and Great Expectations.
Speaking to a law student:
"And, then, what will you do? Shall you begin to work? Work, or what you understand by work at this moment, means, for a man of Poiret’s calibre, an old age in Mamma Vauquer’s lodging-house. There are fifty thousand young men in your position at this moment, all bent as you are on solving one and the same problem — how to acquire a fortune rapidly. You are but a unit in that aggregate. You can guess, therefore, what efforts you must make, how desperate the struggle is. There are not fifty thousand good positions for you; you must fight and devour one another like spiders in a pot. Do you know how a man makes his way here? By brilliant genius or by skilful corruption. You must either cut your way through these masses of men like a cannon ball, or steal among them like a plague. Honesty is nothing to the purpose. Men bow before the power of genius; they hate it, and try to slander it, because genius does not divide the spoil; but if genius persists, they bow before it. To sum it all up in a phrase, if they fail to smother genius in the mud, they fall on their knees and worship it. Corruption is a great power in the world, and talent is scarce. So corruption is the weapon of superfluous mediocrity; you will be made to feel the point of it everywhere."
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2657578&forum_id=2#27715739) |
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