, he thought, he would lead the conversation on rather
more personal topics, and make some effort to gain a friend so likely
to be useful to a beginner. The journalist stayed away for a fortnight.
Lucien did not know that Etienne only dined at Flicoteaux's when he
was hard up, and hence his gloomy air of disenchantment and the chilly
manner, which Lucien met with gracious smiles and amiable remarks. But,
after 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