Jim’s Reviews > A Harlot High and Low > Status Update

Men like you [Vautrin] should dwell in caves and never come out. You made me live with your giant's life, and I have paid for it with my very existence.

And that is how three men each as strong in his own sphere as Jacques Collin [Vautrin], Peyrade and Corentin came to find themselves at grips von the same ground, and to put their genius into a struggle in which each fought for his own passion or his own interest. It was one of those unknown but terrible battles in which all the strength and talent expend themselves in hatred, petty irritations, ruses.

This Spanish priest's cassock concealed Jacques Collin, one of the celebrities of the convict world, who, ten years before, had been living under the respectable name of Vautrin in the Maison Vauquer, where Rastignac and Bianchon then lodged. Jacques Collin, the chief of gallows-dodgers, known as Dodgedeath, escaping from Rochefort immediately he had been returned there, benefited by the example of [Napoleon]....