“If she should like me as much as I like her, we might abridge the romance,” said Lucien, addressing de Marsay and Rastignac.
“You both of you write romances too well to care to live them,” returned Rastignac. “Can men and women who write ever fall in love with each other? A time is sure to come when they begin to make little cutting remarks.”
“It would not be a bad dream for you,” laughed de Marsay. “The charming young lady is thirty years old, it is true, but she has an income of eighty thousand livres. She is adorably capricious, and her style of beauty wears well. Coralie is a silly little fool, my dear boy, well enough for a start, for a young spark must have a mistress; but unless you make some great conquest in the great world, an actress will do you harm in the long run. Now, my boy, go and cut out Conti. Here he is, just about to sing with Camille Maupin. Poetry has taken precedence of music ever since time began.”
But when Lucien heard Mlle. des Touches’ voice blending with Conti’s, his hopes fled.
“Conti sings too well,” he told des Lupeaulx; and he went back to Mme. de Bargeton, who carried him off to Mme. d’Espard in another room.
“Well, will you not interest yourself in him?” asked Mme. de Bargeton.
The Marquise spoke with an air half kindly, half insolent. “Let M. Chardon first put himself in such a position that he will not compromise those who take an interest in him,” she said. “If he wishes to drop his patronymic and to bear his mother’s name, he should at any rate be on the right side, should he not?”
“In less than two months I will arrange everything,” said Lucien.
“Very well,” returned Mme. d’Espard. “I will speak to my father and uncle; they are in waiting, they will speak to the Chancellor for you.”
The diplomatist and the two women had very soon discovered Lucien’s weak side. The poet’s head was turned by the glory of the aristocracy; every man who entered the rooms bore a sounding name mounted in a glittering title, and he himself was plain Chardon. Unspeakable mortification filled him at the sound of it. Wherever he had been during the last few days, that pang had been constantly present with him. He felt, moreover, a sensation quite as unpleasant when he went back to his desk after an evening spent in the great world, in which he made a tolerable figure, thanks to Coralie’s carriage and Coralie’s servants.
He learned to ride, in order to escort Mme. d’Espard, Mlle. des Touches, and the Comtesse de Montcornet when they drove in the Bois, a privilege which he had envied other young men so greatly when he first came to Paris. Finot was delighted to give his right-hand man an order for the Opéra, so Lucien wasted many an evening there, and thenceforward he was among the exquisites of the day.
The poet asked Rastignac and his new associates to a breakfast, and made the blunder of giving it in Coralie’s rooms in the Rue de Vendôme; he was too young, too much of a poet, too self-confident, to discern certain shades and distinctions in conduct; and how should an actress, a good-hearted but uneducated girl, teach him life? His guests were anything but charitably disposed towards him; it was clearly proven to their minds that Lucien the critic and the actress were in collusion for their mutual interests, and all of the young men were jealous of an arrangement which all of them stigmatized. The most pitiless of those who laughed that evening at Lucien’s expense was Rastignac himself. Rastignac had made and held his position by very similar means; but so careful had he been of appearances, that he could afford to treat scandal as slander.
Lucien proved an apt pupil at whist. Play became a passion with him; and so far from disapproving, Coralie encouraged his extravagance with the peculiar shortsightedness of an all-absorbing love, which sees nothing beyond the moment, and is ready to sacrifice anything, even the future, to the present enjoyment. Coralie looked on cards as a safeguard against rivals. A great love has much in common with childhood—a child’s heedless, careless, spendthrift ways, a child’s laughter and tears.
In those days there lived and flourished a set of young men, some of them rich, some poor, and all of them idle, called “free-livers” (viveurs); and, indeed, they lived with incredible insolence—unabashed and unproductive consumers, and yet more intrepid drinkers. These spendthrifts mingled the roughest practical jokes with a life not so much reckless as suicidal; they drew back from no impossibility, and gloried in pranks which, nevertheless, were confined within certain limits; and as they showed the most original wit in their escapades, it was impossible not to pardon them.
No sign of the times more plainly discovered the helotism to which the Restoration had condemned the young manhood of the epoch. The younger men, being at a loss to know what to do with themselves, were compelled to find other outlets for their superabundant energy besides journalism, or conspiracy, or art, or letters. They squandered their strength in the wildest excesses, such sap and luxuriant power was there in young France. The hard workers among these gilded youths wanted power and pleasure; the artists wished for money; the idle sought to stimulate their appetites or wished for excitement; one and all of them wanted a place, and one and all were shut out from politics and public life. Nearly all the “free-livers” were men of unusual mental powers; some held out against the enervating life, others were ruined by it. The most celebrated and the cleverest among them was Eugène Rastignac, who entered, with de Marsay’s help, upon a political career, in which he has since distinguished himself. The practical jokes, in which the set indulged became so
