Vesna’s Reviews > Old Man Goriot > Status Update

“He was unable to resist the lure of his new rooms. Whereas the night before he had had to leave Delphine at one in the morning, this time it was Delphine who, at around two, left him to go home.”

Well, well, Monsieur Balzac ... nicely veiled from the censors. :-)

... by a kind of inevitability, the slightest events in his life were conspiring to drive him in a direction, which ... would lead him, as on a battlefield, to kill or be killed, to deceive or be deceived; to leave his heart, his conscience at the gate, to wear a mask, to dupe other men mercilessly, and ... to win his laurels by stealthily seizing his chance.
Eerie echo of what I just watched in The Apprentice film.