g the world of books and
the living world about him--thought and fact. His friends were learned
naturalists, young doctors of medicine, political writers and artists, a
number of earnest students full of promise.

D'Arthez earned a living by conscientious and ill-paid work; he wrote
articles for encyclopaedias, dictionaries of biography and natural
science, doing just enough to enable him to live while he followed his
own bent, and neither more nor less. He had a piece of imaginative work
on hand, undertaken solely for the sake of studying the resources of
language, an important psychological study in the form of a novel,
unfinished as yet, for d'Arthez took it up or laid it down as the humor
took him, and kept it for days of great distress. D'Arthez's revelations
of himself were made very simply, but to Lucien he seemed like
an intellectual giant; and by eleven o'clock, when they left the
restaurant, he began to feel a sudden, warm friendship for this nature,
unconscious of its loftiness, this unostentatious worth.

Lucien took d'Arthez's advice unquestioningly, and followed it out to
the letter. The most magnificent palaces of fancy had been suddenly
flung open to him by a nobly-gifted mind, matured already by thought
and critical examinations undertaken for their own sake, not for
publication, but for the solitary thinker's own satisfaction. The
burning coal had been laid on the lips of the poet of Angouleme, a word
uttered by a hard student in Paris had fallen upon ground prepared to
receive it in the provincial. Lucien set about recasting his work.

In his gladness at finding in the wilderness of Paris a nature abounding
in generous and sympathetic feeling, the distinguished provincial
did, as all young creatures hungering for affection are wont to do;
he fastened, like a chronic disease, upon this one friend that he had
found. He called for D'Arthez on his way to the Bibliotheque, walked
with him on fine days in the Luxembourg Gardens, and went with his
friend every evening as far as the door of his lodging-house after
sitting next to him at Flicoteaux's. He pressed close to his friend's
side as a soldier might keep by a comrade on the frozen Russian plains.

During those early days of his acquaintance, he noticed, not without
chagrin, that his presence imposed a certain restraint on the circle of
Daniel's intimates. The talk of those superior beings of whom d'Arthez
spoke to him with such concentrated enthusia