a surer and more useful ally than
Lucien, had taken up the Baron's cause. So, some few days after the
meeting of the Petrarch and Laura of Angouleme, Rastignac brought about
the reconciliation between the poet and the elderly beau at a sumptuous
supper given at the _Rocher de Cancale_. Lucien never returned home till
morning, and rose in the middle of the day; Coralie was always at his
side, he could not forego a single pleasure. Sometimes he saw his real
position, and made good resolutions, but they came to nothing in
his idle, easy life; and the mainspring of will grew slack, and only
responded to the heaviest pressure of necessity.

Coralie had been glad that Lucien should amuse himself; she had
encouraged him in this reckless expenditure, because she thought
that the cravings which she fostered would bind her lover to her. But
tender-hearted and loving as she was, she found courage to advise Lucien
not to forget his work, and once or twice was obliged to remind him that
he had earned very little during the month. Their debts were growing
frightfully fast. The fifteen hundred francs which remained from the
purchase-money of the _Marguerites_ had been swallowed up at once,
together with Lucien's first five hundred livres. In three months he had
only made a thousand francs, yet he felt as though he had been working
tremendously hard. But by this time Lucien had adopted the "free-livers"
pleasant theory of debts.

Debts are becoming to a young man, but after the age of five-and-twenty
they are inexcusable. It should be observed that there are certain
natures in which a really poetic temper is united with a weakened will;
and these while absorbed in feeling, that they may transmute personal
experience, sensation, or impression into some permanent form are
essentially deficient in the moral sense which should accompany all
observation. Poets prefer rather to receive their own impressions
than to enter into the souls of others to study the mechanism of their
feelings and thoughts. So Lucien neither asked his associates what
became of those who disappeared from among them, nor looked into the
futures of his so-called friends. Some of them were heirs to property,
others had definite expectations; yet others either possessed names that
were known in the world, or a most robust belief in their destiny and
a fixed resolution to circumvent the law. Lucien, too, believed in
his future on the strength of various profound axiomati