I should not have made you such a handsome
offer. A hundred francs per month! Think of it! After all, a romance in
a drawer is not eating its head off like a horse in a stable, nor will
it find you in victuals either, and that's a fact."

Lucien snatched up his manuscript and dashed it on the floor.

"I would rather burn it, sir!" he exclaimed.

"You have a poet's head," returned his senior.

Lucien devoured his bread and supped his bowl of milk, then he went
downstairs. His room was not large enough for him; he was turning round
and round in it like a lion in a cage at the Jardin des Plantes.

At the Bibliotheque Saint-Genevieve, whither Lucien was going, he had
come to know a stranger by sight; a young man of five-and-twenty or
thereabouts, working with the sustained industry which nothing can
disturb nor distract, the sign by which your genuine literary worker is
known. Evidently the young man had been reading there for some time,
for the librarian and attendants all knew him and paid him special
attention; the librarian would even allow him to take away books, with
which Lucien saw him return in the morning. In the stranger student he
recognized a brother in penury and hope.

Pale-faced and slight and thin, with a fine forehead hidden by masses
of black, tolerably unkempt hair, there was something about him that
attracted indifferent eyes: it was a vague resemblance which he bore
to portraits of the young Bonaparte, engraved from Robert Lefebvre's
picture. That engraving is a poem of melancholy intensity, of suppressed
ambition, of power working below the surface. Study the face carefully,
and you will discover genius in it and discretion, and all the subtlety
and greatness of the man. The portrait has speaking eyes like a woman's;
they look out, greedy of space, craving difficulties to vanquish. Even
if the name of Bonaparte were not written beneath it, you would gaze
long at that face.

Lucien's young student, the incarnation of this picture, usually wore
footed trousers, shoes with thick soles to them, an overcoat of coarse
cloth, a black cravat, a waistcoat of some gray-and-white material
buttoned to the chin, and a cheap hat. Contempt for superfluity in
dress was visible in his whole person. Lucien also discovered that the
mysterious stranger with that unmistakable stamp which genius sets
upon the forehead of its slaves was one of Flicoteaux's most regular
customers; he ate to live, careless of the fare