He wanted to know the reasons for Lucien’s return to Paris, what he planned, what he lived on.

‘On your knees before your betters, Finot!’ he went on. ‘Lucien is one of us, but he must also be admitted now to that band of strong men to whom the future belongs! Handsome and witty, is he not bound to advance by your quibuscum viis? There he stands in his fine Milan armour, the powerful stiletto half out of its scabbard, pennon raised! ’Sdeath, Lucien, where did you pick up that pretty waistcoat? Stuff like that is only discovered by men in love. Where do we live? At this moment, I need to know my friends’ addresses, I’ve got nowhere to sleep. Finot has pitched me out for the night, under the vulgar pretext of a lady having said yes.’

‘My dear fellow,’ replied Lucien, ‘I have adopted a maxim with which I trust to lead a quiet life: Fuge, late, tace! I leave you.’

‘But I don’t leave you till we’ve squared a sacred debt, eh, that little supper?’ said Blondet, who was excessively fond of good cheer and, when he was short of money, liked to be treated.

‘What supper?’ Lucien rejoined, with a touch of impatience.

‘Don’t you remember? That’s how you can tell when a friend is prosperous: he loses his memory.’

‘He knows what he owes us, I’ll go warrant for his heart,’ commented Finot, taking up the joke.

‘Rastignac,’ said Blondet, taking the young man of fashion by the arm as he came to the top end of the crush-room by the pillar where the self-styled friends were grouped, ‘we’re talking of a supper: you must join us… Unless the gentleman,’ he went on solemnly, indicating Lucien, ‘persists in denying a debt of honour; he may, of course.’

‘Monsieur de Rubempré, I’ll undertake, is quite incapable of it,’ said Rastignac, whose mind was not on practical jokes.

‘There’s Bixiou!’ cried Blondet, ‘he must come, too: nothing’s complete without him. Without him, champagne coats the tongue, and everything becomes insipid, even the spice of an epigram.’

‘My friends,’ said Bixiou, ‘I see you gathered about the wonder of the day. Our dear Lucien has started his own version of Ovid’s metamorphoses. Just as the gods turned themselves into local bigwigs and others to seduce women, he has turned Chardon into a gentleman to seduce – eh? – Charles X! Lucien, dear boy,’ taking him by a button, ‘a journalist promoted lord deserves a great reception. In their place,’ said the pitiless clown, indicating Finot and Vernou, ‘I’d open the pages of my little journal to you; ten columns of fine words should bring them in at least a hundred francs.’

‘Bixiou,’ said Blondet, ‘an amphitryon should always be sacred to us twenty-four hours before and twelve after the feast: our illustrious friend has invited us all to supper.’

‘What, what?’ Bixiou persisted. ‘What more deserving cause could there be than that of preserving a great name from oblivion, than endowing our indigent aristocracy with a man of talent? Lucien, you enjoy the esteem of the Press, whose fairest ornament you were, and we shall uphold you. Finot, a paragraph in all the Paris leaders ! Blondet, a sly rigmarole on your page four! Let us announce the appearance of the greatest book of our time, Charles IX’s Archer! Let us beg Dauriat not to delay giving us Pearls, those divine sonnets by the French Petrarch! Let us raise up our friend on the royal shield of stamped paper which makes and unmakes reputations!’

‘If you want to eat,’ said Lucien to Blondet to be free of this growing mob, ‘you had no need to use hyperbole and parabole with an old friend, as though I were green. Tomorrow evening, then, at Lointier’s,’ he concluded smartly, seeing approach a woman towards whom he hurried.

‘Oh! oh! oh!’ said Bixiou mockingly on three descending notes, evidently recognizing the masker Lucien had advanced to meet, ‘this merits confirmation.’

The Torpedo

AND he followed the handsome couple, overtook it, examined it with a shrewd eye, and returned to satisfy the envious, interested to learn the origin of Lucien’s change of fortune.

‘My friends,’ they heard Bixiou say, ‘the Sire de Rubempré’s fortune is a person long known to you, it is des Lupeaulx’s quondam rat.’

A perversity now forgotten, but common enough in the early years of the century, was the luxury known as a rat. The word, already outmoded, was applied to a child of ten or eleven, a supernumerary at some theatre, generally the Opera, formed by some rake for infamy and vice. A rat was a kind of infernal page, a female urchin to whom everything was forgiven. A rat could take whatever it pleased; it was best distrusted as a dangerous animal, it introduced an element of gaiety into life, like the Scapins, Sganarelles and Frontins of the old comedy. A rat was a costly indulgence: it brought neither honour, nor profit, nor pleasure; the fashion for rats faded so completely that few people today knew this intimate detail of the life of elegance before the Restoration until it was taken up as a new subject by one or two writers.

‘What, after having Coralie shot under him, is Lucien now to steal the Torpedo from us?’ said Blondet.

Hearing this name, the powerfully built masker made a brief movement which, though he controlled it, Rastignac observed.

‘It isn’t possible!’ rejoined Finot. ‘The Torpedo hasn’t a farthing to give away, she’s borrowed, Nathan told me, a thousand francs from Florine.’

‘Gentlemen, please!…’ said Rastignac, wishing to defend Lucien against such odious imputations.

‘Why,’ cried Vernou, once kept by Coralie, ‘is he then such a prude?…’

‘That thousand francs itself,’ said Bixiou, ‘is evidence of the fact that Lucien is living with the Torpedo.’

‘What an irreparable loss,’ said Blondet, ‘to the world of literature, science, art and politics! The Torpedo is the one common whore with the makings of a true hetaira; she hadn’t been spoilt by education, she can neither read nor write: she’d have understood us. We should have bestowed on our time one of those magnificent Aspasian figures without which no age can be great. Think how well Dubarry became the eighteenth century, Ninon de Lenclos the seventeenth, Marion de Lorme the sixteenth, Imperia the fifteenth, Flora the Roman republic, which she made her heir, and which in consequence was able to pay the public debt! What would Horace be without Lydia, Tibullus without Delia, Catullus without Lesbia, Propertius without Cynthia, Demetrius without the Lamia upon whom to this day his reputation rests?’

‘Blondet, talking about Demetrius in the crush-room at the Opera,’ Bixiou whispered to his neighbour, ‘strikes me as a little too Journal des débats.’

‘And without all those queens,’ Blondet went on, ‘what would the empire of the Caesars have been? Laïs, Rhodope are Greece and Egypt. The poetry of the centuries in which they all lived is theirs. This poetry, which Napoleon lacked, for his Grande Armée’s widow is a barrack-room joke, was not lacking at the Revolution, which had Madame Tallien! In France now, where thrones are in fashion, one, certainly, is vacant! For my part, I’d have given the Torpedo an aunt, for her mother died all too authentically on the field of dishonour; du Tillet would have bought her a town house, Lousteau a coach, Rastignac lackeys, des Lupeaulx a cook, Finot providing hats (Finot could not repress his reaction as this epigram went home), Vernou would have advertised her, Bixiou would have supplied her witticisms! The aristocracy would come to Ninon’s for its amusement, and artists would have been summoned under pain of mortiferous articles. Ninon II’s rudeness would have been magnificent, her luxuriousness overwhelming. She would have had opinions. One would have read at her house some banned theatrical masterpiece which might at need have been written for the occasion. She would not have been a liberal, a courtesan is always a monarchist. Ah, what a loss! she should have embraced a whole century, and is in love with a commonplace young man! Lucien will make a gun-dog of her!’

‘None of the feminine powers you name ever picked pockets,’ said Finot, ‘and this pretty rat paddled in the mud.’

‘Like the seed of a lily in leaf-mould,’ Vernou replied, ‘she took up nourishment there, it brought her into bloom. Whence her superiority. Mustn’t one have known all to be able to give laughter and joy to all?’

‘He’s right,’ said Lousteau who till that moment had stood by without speaking, ‘the Torpedo knows how to laugh and how to make others laugh. This skill of great authors and great actors belongs to those who have penetrated to the depths of society. At eighteen, this girl had already known the highest wealth, total destitution, men at all levels. She holds a magic wand with which she unlooses the brutish appetites so violently curbed in men not without heart who are occupied in politics or science, literature or art.