fter all, the project of a
friendship called for mature deliberation. This obscure journalist
appeared to lead an expensive life in which _petits verres_, cups of
coffee, punch-bowls, sight-seeing, and suppers played a part. In the
early days of Lucien's life in the Latin Quarter, he behaved like a
poor child bewildered by his first experience of Paris life; so that
when he had made a study of prices and weighed his purse, he lacked
courage to make advances to Etienne; he was afraid of beginning a
fresh series of blunders of which he was still repenting. And he was
still under the yoke of provincial creeds; his two guardian angels,
Eve and David, rose up before him at the least approach of an evil
thought, putting him in mind of all the hopes that were centered on
him, of the happiness that he owed to the old mother, of all the
promises of his genius.

He spent his mornings in studying history at the Bibliotheque
Sainte-Genevieve. His very first researches made him aware of frightful
errors in the memoirs of _The Archer of Charles IX._ When the library
closed, he went back to his damp, chilly room to correct his work,
cutting out whole chapters and piecing it together anew. And after
dining at Flicoteaux's, he went down to the Passage du Commerce to see
the newspapers at Blosse's reading-room, as well as new books and
magazines and poetry, so as to keep himself informed of the movements
of the day. And when, towards midnight, he returned to his wretched
lodgings, he had used neither fuel nor candle-light. His reading in
those days made such an enormous change in his ideas, that he revised
the volume of flower-sonnets, his beloved _Marguerites_, working them
over to such purpose, that scarce a hundred lines of the original
verses were allowed to stand.

So in the beginning Lucien led the honest, innocent life of the
country lad who never leaves the Latin Quarter; devoting himself
wholly to his work, with thoughts of the future always before him; who
finds Flicoteaux's ordinary luxurious after the simple home-fare; and
strolls for recreation along the alleys of the Luxembourg, the blood
surging back to his heart as he gives timid side glances to the pretty
women. But this could not last. Lucien, with his poetic temperament
and boundless longings, could not withstand the temptations held out
by the play-bills.

The Theatre-Francais, the Vaudeville, the Varietes, the Opera-Comique
relieved him of some sixty francs, alth