In _Père Goriot_ it widens. Here it is not an out-of-the-way provincial nook, but the great city of Paris which is studied, and which is unrolled, like a panorama, before our eyes. And there is no generalising and symbolising, as in _La Peau de Chagrin_; each class of society and each character in each class is provided with its own characteristic features. I have spoken of _King Lear_; but the story of the two cold-hearted daughters and their father, full of deep meaning and feeling as it is, is only in an external sense the theme of the book. The real theme is the comparatively uncorrupted provincial youth's introduction to the world of Paris, his gradual discovery of the real nature of that world, his horror at the discovery, his refusal to do what others do, his temptations, and his gradual, yet rapidly completed, education for the life that is being lived around him. Nothing more profound than this study of the development of Rastignac's character has been produced by Balzac, or indeed by any modern novelist. He shows with marvellous art how on every side, except where men's words are dictated by hypocrisy or extreme naïveté, the young man meets with the same conception of society and receives the same advice. His relative and protectress, the charming and distinguished Madame de Beauséant, says to him: "The more coldly you calculate, the higher you will rise. Think of men and women simply as post-horses to be left behind you, broken-winded, at each stage of your journey.... If you have any real feeling, hide it; never let it be suspected, or you are lost.... If you can manage to make women think you clever, men will soon believe that you are, unless you destroy their illusion too rudely.... You will find out what society is--a company of dupes and rogues. Be neither the one nor the other." And the escaped galley-slave Vautrin says to him: "One must either force a way for one's self into the heart of that crowd as a cannon-ball does, or sneak in like the plague. Honesty is of no use. Men bend and submit to the power of genius; they hate it, they try to calumniate it, because it takes without sharing; but they yield if it persists; they adore it on their bended knees if they have not succeeded in burying it in the mud.... I defy you to take two steps in Paris without stumbling on infernal machinations. Hence the honest man is the common enemy. But who do you suppose is the honest man? In Paris he is the man who keeps silence and refuses to share."