hidden by the clumsy boots which he had brought from Angouleme? What
young man could envy him his graceful figure, disguised by the
shapeless blue sack which hitherto he had mistakenly believed to be a
coat? What bewitching studs he saw on those dazzling white shirt
fronts, his own looked dingy by comparison; and how marvelously all
these elegant persons were gloved, his own gloves were only fit for a
policeman! Yonder was a youth toying with a cane exquisitely mounted;
there, another with dainty gold studs in his wristbands. Yet another
was twisting a charming riding-whip while he talked with a woman;
there were specks of mud on the ample folds of his white trousers, he
wore clanking spurs and a tight-fitting jacket, evidently he was about
to mount one of the two horses held by a hop-o'-my-thumb of a tiger. A
young man who went past drew a watch no thicker than a five-franc
piece from his pocket, and looked at it with the air of a person who
is either too early or too late for an appointment.

Lucien, seeing these petty trifles, hitherto unimagined, became aware
of a whole world of indispensable superfluities, and shuddered to
think of the enormous capital needed by a professional pretty fellow!
The more he admired these gay and careless beings, the more conscious
he grew of his own outlandishness; he knew that he looked like a man
who has no idea of the direction of the streets, who stands close to
the Palais Royal and cannot find it, and asks his way to the Louvre of
a passer-by, who tells him, "Here you are." Lucien saw a great gulf
fixed between him and this new world, and asked himself how he might
cross over, for he meant to be one of these delicate, slim youths of
Paris, these young patricians who bowed before women divinely dressed
and divinely fair. For one kiss from one of these, Lucien was ready to
be cut in pieces like Count Philip of Konigsmark. Louise's face rose
up somewhere in the shadowy background of memory--compared with these
queens, she looked like an old woman. He saw women whose names will
appear in the history of the nineteenth century, women no less famous
than the queens of past times for their wit, their beauty, or their
lovers; one who passed was the heroine Mlle. des Touches, so well
known as Camille Maupin, the great woman of letters, great by her
intellect, great no less by her beauty. He overheard the name
pronounced by those who went by.

"Ah!" he thought to himself, "she is Poetry."