we must tell these that while they wrong others they deceive themselves!
And this was the case with Hippolyte Vautrot.

He was about forty years of age--a period of life when men often become
very vicious, even when they have been passably virtuous up to that time.
He affected an austere and puritanical air; was the great man of the cafe
he frequented; and there passed judgment on his contemporaries and
pronounced them all inferior. He was difficult to please--in point of
virtue demanding heroism; in talent, genius; in art, perfection.

His political opinions were those of Erostratus, with this difference--
always in favor of the ancient--that Vautrot, after setting fire to the
temple, would have robbed it also. In short, he was a fool, but a
vicious fool as well.

If M. de Camors, at the moment of leaving his luxurious study that
evening, had had the bad taste to turn and apply his eye to the keyhole,
he would have seen something greatly to astonish even him.

He would have seen this "honorable man" approach a beautiful Italian
cabinet inlaid with ivory, turn over the papers in the drawers, and
finally open in the most natural manner a very complicated lock, the
key of which the Count at that moment had in his pocket.

It was after this search that M. Vautrot repaired with his volume of
Faust to the boudoir of the young Countess, at whose feet we have already
left him too long.