ried
the family to a second generation, was already balked by events.
The d'Aiglemonts were ruined, and one of the daughters, Helene, had
disappeared, and the mystery of her disappearance was never solved.

The weariness of a life without atmosphere, without prospects, without
action, without other nourishment than the love of a son for his mother,
so worked upon Savinien that he burst his chains, gentle as they were,
and swore that he would never live in the provinces--comprehending,
rather late, that his future fate was not to be in the Rue des
Bourgeois. At twenty-one years of age he left his mother's house to make
acquaintance with his relations, and try his luck in Paris. The contrast
between life in Paris and life in Nemours was likely to be fatal to a
young man of twenty-one, free, with no one to say him nay, naturally
eager for pleasure, and for whom his name and his connections opened the
doors of all the salons. Quite convinced that his mother had the savings
of many years in her strong-box, Savinien soon spent the six thousand
francs which she had given him to see Paris. That sum did not defray his
expenses for six months, and he soon owed double that sum to his hotel,
his tailor, his boot maker, to the man from whom he hired his
carriages and horses, to a jeweler,--in short, to all those traders and
shopkeepers who contribute to the luxury of young men.

He had only just succeeded in making himself known, and had scarcely
learned how to converse, how to present himself in a salon, how to
wear his waistcoats and choose them and to order his coats and tie his
cravat, before he found himself in debt for over thirty thousand francs,
while still seeking the right phrases in which to declare his love for
the sister of the Marquis de Ronquerolles, the elegant Madame de Serizy,
whose youth had been at its climax during the Empire.

"How is that you all manage?" asked Savinien one day, at the end of a
gay breakfast with a knot of young dandies, with whom he was intimate
as the young men of the present day are intimate with each other, all
aiming for the same thing and all claiming an impossible equality.
"You were no richer than I and yet you get along without anxiety; you
contrive to maintain yourselves, while as for me I make nothing but
debts."

"We all began that way," answered Rastignac, laughing, and the laugh
was echoed by Lucien de Rubempre, Maxime de Trailles, Emile Blondet, and
others of the fashionable