rs are abolished by law," said
Claude Vignon. "You are making progress hourly," he added, addressing
Finot. "You are a modern order of Jesuits, lacking the creed, the fixed
idea, the discipline, and the union."

They went back to the card-tables; and before long the light of the
candles grew feeble in the dawn.

"Lucien, your friends from the Rue des Quatre-Vents looked as dismal as
criminals going to be hanged," said Coralie.

"They were the judges, not the criminals," replied the poet.

"Judges are more amusing than _that_," said Coralie.

For a month Lucien's whole time was taken up with supper parties, dinner
engagements, breakfasts, and evening parties; he was swept away by an
irresistible current into a vortex of dissipation and easy work. He
no longer thought of the future. The power of calculation amid the
complications of life is the sign of a strong will which poets,
weaklings, and men who live a purely intellectual life can never
counterfeit. Lucien was living from hand to mouth, spending his money
as fast as he made it, like many another journalist; nor did he give
so much as a thought to those periodically recurrent days of reckoning
which chequer the life of the bohemian in Paris so sadly.

In dress and figure he was a rival for the great dandies of the day.
Coralie, like all zealots, loved to adorn her idol. She ruined herself
to give her beloved poet the accoutrements which had so stirred his
envy in the Garden of the Tuileries. Lucien had wonderful canes, and
a charming eyeglass; he had diamond studs, and scarf-rings, and
signet-rings, besides an assortment of waistcoats marvelous to behold,
and in sufficient number to match every color in a variety of costumes.
His transition to the estate of dandy swiftly followed. When he went
to the German Minister's dinner, all the young men regarded him with
suppressed envy; yet de Marsay, Vandenesse, Ajuda-Pinto, Maxime de
Trailles, Rastignac, Beaudenord, Manerville, and the Duc de Maufrigneuse
gave place to none in the kingdom of fashion. Men of fashion are as
jealous among themselves as women, and in the same way. Lucien was
placed between Mme. de Montcornet and Mme. d'Espard, in whose honor the
dinner was given; both ladies overwhelmed him with flatteries.

"Why did you turn your back on society when you would have been so well
received?" asked the Marquise. "Every one was prepared to make much of
you. And I have a quarrel with you too. You owed me