His partners, Massol the lawyer, and du Tillet the
banker, had intended from the first to harness his ardor to the
chariot of their own importance and get rid of him as soon as he was
out of condition to feed the paper, or else to deprive him of his
power, arbitrarily, whenever it suited their purpose to take it. To
them Nathan represented a certain amount of talent to use up, a
literary force of the motive power of ten pens to employ. Massol, one
of those lawyers who mistake the faculty of endless speech for
eloquence, who possess the art of boring by diffusiveness, the torment
of all meetings and assemblies where they belittle everything, and who
desire to become personages at any cost,--Massol no longer wanted the
place as Keeper of the Seals; he had seen some five or six different
men go through that office in four years, and the robes disgusted him.
In exchange, his mind was now set on obtaining a chair on the Board of
Education and a place in the Council of State; the whole adorned with
the cross of the Legion of honor. Du Tillet and Nucingen had
guaranteed the cross to him, and the office of Master of Petitions
provided he obeyed them blindly.
The better to deceive Raoul, these men allowed him to manage the paper
without control. Du Tillet used it only for his stock-gambling, about
which Nathan understood next to nothing; but he had given, through
Nucingen, an assurance to Rastignac that the paper would be tacitly
obliging to the government on the sole condition of supporting his
candidacy for Monsieur de Nucingen's place as soon as he was nominated
peer of France.
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