At the beginning, he “found that the happiness that he deserved by virtue of his sensitive soul was slow in coming” (p. 6); at the end, “he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart” (p. 469). In the concluding words of the book, Frédéric and Deslauriers evoke, in 1869, the memory of a visit they took as boys to a Nogent bordello in 1837, three years before the start of the story, which at the time proved a fiasco and a scandal: “That was the best we ever got!” (p. 479). Ultimately, the “best” amounts to a miserable episode the account of which appears only as an afterthought in the novel.

The problem is not just that time has passed, but that the two comrades are older and disenchanted: Time has constantly slipped out of their grasp. Their conversation in the epilogue offers a sobering echo of their optimistic exchanges at the outset of their existences and of the book.

Deslauriers longed for riches, as a means for gaining power over men. He was anxious to possess an influence over a vast number of people, to create a great stir, to have three secretaries under his command, and to give a big political dinner once a week. Frédéric would have furnished for himself a palace in the Moorish fashion, to spend his life reclining on cashmere divans, to the murmur of a fountain, attended by negro pages (p. 62).

The dynamism of the former and the musing of the latter will prove equally useless. Deslauriers, the social climber with leftist leanings, petit-bourgeois manners, naive arrogance, and little money, will not live up to the “laurels” (lauriers) promised by his name; he will not rise “by a series of actions deducing themselves from one another” (p. 90), as occurs in the hyperactive universe of The Human Comedy; he will never launch one of those newspapers that, as Balzac in Lost Illusions and later Maupassant in Bel-Ami (1885) have shown, constitute a new and unstoppable force in bourgeois society. Frédéric, for his part, hesitates between professions, artistic pursuits, and opinions. He studies without motivation and makes a living through an inherited income. When he considers presenting himself as a candidate for the legislative elections, it is too late. When, like Goethe’s Werther, Chateaubriand’s René, and even Madame Bovary, he attempts suicide, the bridge parapet proves too wide. His dream-already somewhat out of fashion in the 1840s—was to become the French Walter Scott. But the narrative relating “How Messire Brokars de Fenestranges and the Bishop of Troyes attacked Messire Eustache d’Ambrecicourt” (p. 477) is forever torn between the past (the Middles Ages inspired by the fourteenth-century chronicler Jean Froissart) and the future (the perpetual postponement of the task of writing). Unlike Lucien de Rubempré in Lost Illusions, Frédéric does not produce a historical novel. And the romance he envisions—a series of wonderful adventures set in Venice, which would transpose his great love—discourages him by its triteness.

In their youth, Charles Deslauriers, a little older than his friend and a bit imperious by nature, poses as Frédéric’s master. He ends up being more like his double, a double oscillating between sensual intimacy, economic parasitism, and erotic rivalry. Frédéric imagines that “a man of this sort was worth all the women in the world” (p. 50). Deslauriers is sensitive to his comrade’s “quasi-feminine charm,” and they plan to share their existence. But their social status stands in the way: Deslauriers lives off his roommate, while the latter prefers to pay Arnoux’s debts rather than help found a newspaper. Competition prevails in relation to women: Deslauriers becomes an adviser to Madame Dambreuse, tries to seduce Madame Arnoux, tastes Rosanette’s charms, and finally supplants Frédéric in marrying Louise Roque in Nogent. Yet friendship—an important element in Flaubert’s own life—survives the two characters’ rifts and their long separation. When they are reunited in the last pages, Frédéric has squandered most of his fortune and lives as a petit-bourgeois; whatever wisdom this “man prone to every foible” (p. 336) has gleaned is negative: to not trust people, to not believe in ideas, to stay away from politics.