stead of awaking ideas, his
heroes are simply enlarged individualities, who excite only fugitive
sympathies; they are not connected with any of the great interests of
life, and consequently they represent nothing. Nevertheless, Nathan
maintains his ground by the quickness of his mind, by those lucky hits
which billiard-players call a "good stroke." He is the cleverest shot at
ideas on the fly in all Paris. His fecundity is not his own, but that
of his epoch; he lives on chance events, and to control them he distorts
their meaning. In short, he is not _true_; his presentation is false;
in him, as Comte Felix said, is the born juggler. Moreover, his pen gets
its ink in the boudoir of an actress.

Raoul Nathan is a fair type of the Parisian literary youth of the day,
with its false grandeurs and its real misery. He represents that youth
by his incomplete beauties and his headlong falls, by the turbulent
torrent of his existence, with its sudden reverses and its unhoped-for
triumphs. He is truly the child of a century consumed with envy,--a
century with a thousand rivalries lurking under many a system, which
nourish to their own profit that hydra of anarchy which wants wealth
without toil, fame without talent, success without effort, but whose
vices force it, after much rebellion and many skirmishes, to accept the
budget under the powers that be. When so many young ambitions, starting
on foot, give one another rendezvous at the same point, there is always
contention of wills, extreme wretchedness, bitter struggles. In this
dreadful battle, selfishness, the most overbearing or the most adroit
selfishness, gains the victory; and it is envied and applauded in spite,
as Moliere said, of outcries, and we all know it.

When, in his capacity as enemy to the new dynasty, Raoul was introduced
in the salon of Madame de Montcornet, his apparent grandeurs were
flourishing. He was accepted as the political critic of the de Marsays,
the Rastignacs, and the Roche-Hugons, who had stepped into power. Emile
Blondet, the victim of incurable hesitation and of his innate repugnance
to any action that concerned only himself, continued his trade of
scoffer, took sides with no one, and kept well with all. He was friendly
with Raoul, friendly with Rastignac, friendly with Montcornet.

"You are a political triangle," said de Marsay, laughing, when they met
at the Opera. "That geometric form, my dear fellow, belongs only to
the Deity, who has nothi