is ready to sacrifice anything, even the future,
to the present enjoyment. Coralie looked on cards as a safe-guard
against rivals. A great love has much in common with childhood--a
child's heedless, careless, spendthrift ways, a child's laughter and
tears.

In those days there lived and flourished a set of young men,
some of them rich, some poor, and all of them idle, called
"free-livers" (_viveurs_); and, indeed, they lived with incredible
insolence--unabashed and unproductive consumers, and yet more intrepid
drinkers. These spendthrifts mingled the roughest practical jokes with
a life not so much reckless as suicidal; they drew back from no
impossibility, and gloried in pranks which, nevertheless, were confined
within certain limits; and as they showed the most original wit in their
escapades, it was impossible not to pardon them.

No sign of the times more plainly discovered the helotism to which the
Restoration had condemned the young manhood of the epoch. The younger
men, being at a loss to know what to do with themselves, were compelled
to find other outlets for their superabundant energy besides journalism,
or conspiracy, or art, or letters. They squandered their strength in
the wildest excesses, such sap and luxuriant power was there in young
France. The hard workers among these gilded youths wanted power and
pleasure; the artists wished for money; the idle sought to stimulate
their appetites or wished for excitement; one and all of them wanted
a place, and one and all were shut out from politics and public life.
Nearly all the "free-livers" were men of unusual mental powers; some
held out against the enervating life, others were ruined by it. The
most celebrated and the cleverest among them was Eugene Rastignac, who
entered, with de Marsay's help, upon a political career, in which he
has since distinguished himself. The practical jokes, in which the set
indulged became so famous, that not a few vaudevilles have been founded
upon them.

Blondet introduced Lucien to this society of prodigals, of which he
became a brilliant ornament, ranking next to Bixiou, one of the most
mischievous and untiring scoffing wits of his time. All through that
winter Lucien's life was one long fit of intoxication, with intervals of
easy work. He continued his series of sketches of contemporary life,
and very occasionally made great efforts to write a few pages of serious
criticism, on which he brought his utmost power of thought t