young men of the day.

"Though de Marsay was rich when he started in life he was an exception,"
said the host, a parvenu named Finot, ambitious of seeming intimate with
these young men. "Any one but he," added Finot bowing to that personage,
"would have been ruined by it."

"A true remark," said Maxime de Trailles.

"And a true idea," added Rastignac.

"My dear fellow," said de Marsay, gravely, to Savinien; "debts are the
capital stock of experience. A good university education with tutors for
all branches, who don't teach you anything, costs sixty thousand francs.
If the education of the world does cost double, at least it teaches you
to understand life, politics, men,--and sometimes women."

Blondet concluded the lesson by a paraphrase from La Fontaine: "The
world sells dearly what we think it gives."

Instead of laying to heart the sensible advice which the cleverest
pilots of the Parisian archipelago gave him, Savinien took it all as a
joke.

"Take care, my dear fellow," said de Marsay one day. "You have a great
name; if you don't obtain the fortune that name requires you'll end your
days in the uniform of a cavalry-sergeant. 'We have seen the fall of
nobler heads,'" he added, declaiming the line of Corneille as he took
Savinien's arm. "About six years ago," he continued, "a young Comte
d'Esgrignon came among us; but he did not stay two years in the paradise
of the great world. Alas! he lived and moved like a rocket. He rose to
the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse and fell to his native town, where he is
now expiating his faults with a wheezy old father and a game of whist
at two sous a point. Tell Madame de Serizy your situation, candidly,
without shame; she will understand it and be very useful to you.
Whereas, if you play the charade of first love with her she will pose
as a Raffaelle Madonna, practice all the little games of innocence
upon you, and take you journeying at enormous cost through the Land of
Sentiment."

Savinien, still too young and too pure in honor, dared not confess his
position as to money to Madame de Serizy. At a moment when he knew not
which way to turn he had written his mother an appealing letter, to
which she replied by sending him the sum of twenty thousand francs,
which was all she possessed. This assistance brought him to the close
of the first year. During the second, being harnessed to the chariot of
Madame de Serizy, who was seriously taken with him, and who was, as the
saying is