Her arguments fell upon fertile soil in the worst of Lucien’s nature, and spread corruption in his heart; for him, when his desires were hot, all means were admissible.  But—­failure is high treason against society; and when the fallen conqueror has run amuck through bourgeois virtues, and pulled down the pillars of society, small wonder that society, finding Marius seated among the ruins, should drive him forth in abhorrence.  All unconsciously Lucien stood with the palm of genius on the one hand and a shameful ending in the hulks upon the other; and, on high upon the Sinai of the prophets, beheld no Dead Sea covering the cities of the plain—­the hideous winding-sheet of Gomorrah.

So well did Louise loosen the swaddling-bands of provincial life that confined the heart and brain of her poet that the said poet determined to try an experiment upon her.  He wished to feel certain that this proud conquest was his without laying himself open to the mortification of a rebuff.  The forthcoming soiree gave him his opportunity.  Ambition blended with his love.  He loved, and he meant to rise, a double desire not unnatural in young men with a heart to satisfy and the battle of life to fight.  Society, summoning all her children to one banquet, arouses ambition in the very morning of life.  Youth is robbed of its charm, and generous thoughts are corrupted by mercenary scheming.  The idealist would fain have it otherwise, but intrusive fact too often gives the lie to the fiction which we should like to believe, making it impossible to paint the young man of the nineteenth century other than he is.  Lucien imagined that his scheming was entirely prompted by good feeling, and persuaded himself that it was done solely for his friend David’s sake.

He wrote a long letter to his Louise; he felt bolder, pen in hand, than face to face.  In a dozen sheets, copied out three several times, he told her of his father’s genius and blighted hopes and of his grinding poverty.  He described his beloved sister as an angel, and David as another Cuvier, a great man of the future, and a father, friend, and brother to him in the present.  He should feel himself unworthy of his Louise’s love (his proudest distinction) if he did not ask her to do for David all that she had done for him.  He would give up everything rather than desert David Sechard; David must witness his success.  It was one of those wild letters in which a young man points a pistol at a refusal, letters full of boyish casuistry and the incoherent reasoning of an idealist; a delicious tissue of words embroidered here and there by the naive utterances that women love so well—­unconscious revelations of the writer’s heart.

Lucien left the letter with the housemaid, went to the office, and spent the day in reading proofs, superintending the execution of orders, and looking after the affairs of the printing-house.  He said not a word to David.  While youth bears a child’s heart, it is capable of sublime reticence.  Perhaps, too, Lucien began to dread the Phocion’s axe which David could wield when he chose, perhaps he was afraid to meet those clear-sighted eyes that read the depths of his soul.  But when he read Chenier’s poems with David, his secret rose from his heart to his lips at the sting of a reproach that he felt as the patient feels the probing of a wound.