“And how did you fellows get out of the scrape?” said Savinien one day after breakfast to some young men of fashion with whom he was intimate, as even at this day young men become intimate when their pretensions in all respects tend to the same ends, and when they proclaim an impossible equality. “You are no richer than I; you live on without a care, you support yourselves, and I am already in debt.”
“We all began in the same way,” they replied, with a laugh—Rastignac, Lucien de Rubempré, Maxime de Trailles, Émile Blondet, the dandies of that day.
“If de Marsay was rich at beginning life, it was a mere chance!” said their host, a parvenu named Finot, who tried to rub elbows with these young men. “And if he had been anyone else,” he added, bowing to de Marsay, “his fortune might have been his ruin.”
“You have hit the word,” said Maxime de Trailles.
“And the idea too,” replied Rastignac.
“My dear boy,” said de Marsay gravely to Savinien, “debts are the sleeping partners of experience. A good college education, with masters for the ornamental and the useful, from which you learn nothing, costs sixty thousand francs. If the education the world gives you costs double, it teaches you life, business, and politics; to know men, and sometimes women.”
Blondet capped the lecture by a parody on a line of La Fontaine’s:
“The world sells us dear what we fancy it gives!”
But instead of reflecting on the good sense in what the most skilled pilots of the Paris shoals had said, Savinien took it all as a jest.
“Take care, my dear fellow,” said de Marsay, “you have a fine name, and if you cannot acquire the fortune your name demands, you may end your days as quartermaster to a cavalry regiment,
“For nobler heads than thine have had a fall,”
he added, quoting Corneille, and taking Savinien’s arm. “It is about six years,” he went on, “since a certain young Comte d’Esgrignon came among us, who did not live more than two years in the paradise of fashion! Alas, his career was as that of the skyrocket. He rose as high as the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, and he fell into his native town, where he is now expiating his sins between a snuffling old father and rubbers of whist at two sous a point. Go, then, and frankly explain your position to Madame de Sérizy; do not be ashamed; she will be of great use to you; whereas, if you play a charade of first love, she will pose as a Raphael Madonna, play innocent games, and send you a most expensive excursion round the ‘Pays du Tendre.’ ”
Savinien, still too young and too sensitive to a gentleman’s honor, dared not confess the state of his fortunes to Madame de Sérizy. Madame de Portenduère, at a moment when her son knew not which way to turn, sent him twenty thousand francs, all she had, in answer to a letter in which Savinien, taught by his companions the tactics of assault by sons on their parents’ strongboxes, hinted at bills to meet, and the disgrace of dishonoring his endorsements. With this help, he got on to the end of the first year. During the second year, as a captive at the wheels of Madame de Sérizy’s car—for she had taken a serious fancy to him, and was teaching him his paces—he availed himself of the perilous aid of moneylenders. A deputy, named des Lupeaulx, who was his friend, and a friend of his cousin de Portenduère, introduced him one miserable day to Gobseck, to Gigonnet, and to Palma, who, being duly and fully informed as to the value of his mother’s property, made things easy for him. The moneylenders, by the delusive aid of renewals, gave him a happy life for about eighteen months more. Without daring to neglect Madame de Sérizy, the hapless boy fell desperately in love with the young Comtesse de Kergarouët, a prude, as all young women are who are waiting for the death of an old husband, and who are clever enough to save up their virtue for a second marriage. Savinien, unable to understand that virtue based on reasons is invincible, paid his court to Emilie de Kergarouët with all the display of a rich man; he was never missing from a ball or a theatre if she was to be there.
“My boy, you have not enough powder to blow up that rock!” de Marsay said to him one evening, with a laugh.
This young prince of Paris fashion vainly attempted, out of commiseration, to make the lad understand Emilie de Fontaine’s character; only the gloomy light of disaster and the darkness of a prison could enlighten Savinien. A bill of exchange, rashly assigned to a jeweler in collusion with the moneylenders, who did not choose to take the odium of arresting him, led to Savinien de Portenduère’s being consigned to Sainte-Pélagie, unknown to his friends. As soon as the news was known to Rastignac, de Marsay, and Lucien de Rubempré, they all three went to see Savinien, and, finding him absolutely destitute, each offered him a note for a thousand francs. His own servant, bribed by two creditors, had led them to the apartment where Savinien lodged in secret, and everything had been seized but the clothes and a few trinkets he had on him.
The three young men, fortified by a capital dinner, while they drank some sherry that de Marsay had brought with him, catechized Savinien as to the state of
