Bravo, old
chap!" and Blondet released Finot to put his arm affectionately around
Lucien and press him to his heart.

Andoche Finot was the proprietor of a review on which Lucien had
worked for almost nothing, and to which Blondet gave the benefit of his
collaboration, of the wisdom of his suggestions and the depth of
his views. Finot and Blondet embodied Bertrand and Raton, with this
difference--that la Fontaine's cat at last showed that he knew himself
to be duped, while Blondet, though he knew that he was being fleeced,
still did all he could for Finot. This brilliant condottiere of the pen
was, in fact, long to remain a slave. Finot hid a brutal strength of
will under a heavy exterior, under polish of wit, as a laborer rubs
his bread with garlic. He knew how to garner what he gleaned, ideas
and crown-pieces alike, in the fields of the dissolute life led by men
engaged in letters or in politics.

Blondet, for his sins, had placed his powers at the service of Finot's
vices and idleness. Always at war with necessity, he was one of the
race of poverty-stricken and superior men who can do everything for the
fortune of others and nothing for their own, Aladdins who let other men
borrow their lamp. These excellent advisers have a clear and penetrating
judgment so long as it is not distracted by personal interest. In them
it is the head and not the arm that acts. Hence the looseness of their
morality, and hence the reproach heaped upon them by inferior minds.
Blondet would share his purse with a comrade he had affronted the day
before; he would dine, drink, and sleep with one whom he would demolish
on the morrow. His amusing paradoxes excused everything. Accepting the
whole world as a jest, he did not want to be taken seriously; young,
beloved, almost famous and contented, he did not devote himself, like
Finot, to acquiring the fortune an old man needs.

The most difficult form of courage, perhaps, is that which Lucien needed
at this moment to get rid of Blondet as he had just got rid of Madame
d'Espard and Chatelet. In him, unfortunately, the joys of vanity
hindered the exercise of pride--the basis, beyond doubt, of many great
things. His vanity had triumphed in the previous encounter; he had
shown himself as a rich man, happy and scornful, to two persons who had
scorned him when he was poor and wretched. But how could a poet, like
an old diplomate, run the gauntlet with two self-styled friends, who had
welcomed him in