The two young men judged society by the more lofty standard because their social position was at the lowest end of the scale, for unrecognized power is apt to avenge itself for lowly station by viewing the world from a lofty standpoint.  Yet it is, nevertheless, true that they grew but the more bitter and hopeless after these swift soaring flights to the upper regions of thought, their world by right.  Lucien had read much and compared; David had thought much and deeply.  In spite of the young printer’s look of robust, country-bred health, his turn of mind was melancholy and somewhat morbid—­he lacked confidence in himself; but Lucien, on the other hand, with a boldness little to be expected from his feminine, almost effeminate, figure, graceful though it was, Lucien possessed the Gascon temperament to the highest degree—­rash, brave, and adventurous, prone to make the most of the bright side, and as little as possible of the dark; his was the nature that sticks at no crime if there is anything to be gained by it, and laughs at the vice which serves as a stepping-stone.  Just now these tendencies of ambition were held in check, partly by the fair illusions of youth, partly by the enthusiasm which led him to prefer the nobler methods, which every man in love with glory tries first of all.  Lucien was struggling as yet with himself and his own desires, and not with the difficulties of life; at strife with his own power, and not with the baseness of other men, that fatal exemplar for impressionable minds.  The brilliancy of his intellect had a keen attraction for David.  David admired his friend, while he kept him out of the scrapes into which he was led by the furie francaise.

David, with his well-balanced mind and timid nature at variance with a strong constitution, was by no means wanting in the persistence of the Northern temper; and if he saw all the difficulties before him, none the less he vowed to himself to conquer, never to give way.  In him the unswerving virtue of an apostle was softened by pity that sprang from inexhaustible indulgence.  In the friendship grown old already, one was the worshiper, and that one was David; Lucien ruled him like a woman sure of love, and David loved to give way.  He felt that his friend’s physical beauty implied a real superiority, which he accepted, looking upon himself as one made of coarser and commoner human clay.

“The ox for patient labor in the fields, the free life for the bird,” he thought to himself.  “I will be the ox, and Lucien shall be the eagle.”

So for three years these friends had mingled the destinies bright with such glorious promise.  Together they read the great works that appeared above the horizon of literature and science since the Peace —­the poems of Schiller, Goethe, and Byron, the prose writings of Scott, Jean-Paul, Berzelius, Davy, Cuvier, Lamartine, and many more.  They warmed themselves beside these great hearthfires; they tried their powers in abortive creations, in work laid aside and taken up again with new glow of enthusiasm.  Incessantly they worked with the unwearied vitality of youth; comrades in poverty, comrades in the consuming love of art and science, till they forgot the hard life of the present, for their minds were wholly bent on laying the foundations of future fame.