and banquets and triumph and applause. Very well, be
Tasso without his folly. Perhaps the world and its pleasures tempt
you? Stay with us. Carry all the cravings of vanity into the world
of imagination. Transpose folly. Keep virtue for daily wear, and let
imagination run riot, instead of doing, as d'Arthez says, thinking high
thoughts and living beneath them."

Lucien hung his head. His friends were right.

"I confess that you are stronger than I," he said, with a charming
glance at them. "My back and shoulders are not made to bear the burden
of Paris life; I cannot struggle bravely. We are born with different
temperaments and faculties, and you know better than I that faults and
virtues have their reverse side. I am tired already, I confess."

"We will stand by you," said d'Arthez; "it is just in these ways that a
faithful friendship is of use."

"The help that I have just received is precarious, and every one of us
is just as poor as another; want will soon overtake me again. Chrestien,
at the service of the first that hires him, can do nothing with the
publishers; Bianchon is quite out of it; d'Arthez's booksellers only
deal in scientific and technical books--they have no connection with
publishers of new literature; and as for Horace and Fulgence Ridal and
Bridau, their work lies miles away from the booksellers. There is no
help for it; I must make up my mind one way or another."

"Stick by us, and make up your mind to it," said Bianchon. "Bear up
bravely, and trust in hard work."

"But what is hardship for you is death for me," Lucien put in quickly.

"Before the cock crows thrice," smiled Leon Giraud, "this man will
betray the cause of work for an idle life and the vices of Paris."

"Where has work brought you?" asked Lucien, laughing.

"When you start out from Paris for Italy, you don't find Rome half-way,"
said Joseph Bridau. "You want your pease to grow ready buttered for
you."

The conversation ended in a joke, and they changed the subject. Lucien's
friends, with their perspicacity and delicacy of heart, tried to efface
the memory of the little quarrel; but Lucien knew thenceforward that it
was no easy matter to deceive them. He soon fell into despair, which he
was careful to hide from such stern mentors as he imagined them to be;
and the Southern temper that runs so easily through the whole gamut of
mental dispositions, set him making the most contradictory resolutions.

Again and again he talked