And Lucien took comfort from the pretty speech, and forgot his woes for a little.

“Glory is not to be had cheaply,” Mme. de Bargeton continued, taking his hand and holding it tightly in her own.  “Endure your woes, my friend, you will be great one day; your pain is the price of your immortality.  If only I had a hard struggle before me!  God preserve you from the enervating life without battles, in which the eagle’s wings have no room to spread themselves.  I envy you; for if you suffer, at least you live.  You will put out your strength, you will feel the hope of victory; your strife will be glorious.  And when you shall come to your kingdom, and reach the imperial sphere where great minds are enthroned, then remember the poor creatures disinherited by fate, whose intellects pine in an oppressive moral atmosphere, who die and have never lived, knowing all the while what life might be; think of the piercing eyes that have seen nothing, the delicate senses that have only known the scent of poison flowers.  Then tell in your song of plants that wither in the depths of the forest, choked by twining growths and rank, greedy vegetation, plants that have never been kissed by the sunlight, and die, never having put forth a blossom.  It would be a terribly gloomy poem, would it not, a fanciful subject?  What a sublime poem might be made of the story of some daughter of the desert transported to some cold, western clime, calling for her beloved sun, dying of a grief that none can understand, overcome with cold and longing.  It would be an allegory; many lives are like that.”

“You would picture the spirit which remembers Heaven,” said the Bishop; “some one surely must have written such a poem in the days of old; I like to think that I see a fragment of it in the Song of Songs.”

“Take that as your subject,” said Laure de Rastignac, expressing her artless belief in Lucien’s powers.

“The great sacred poem of France is still unwritten,” remarked the Bishop.  “Believe me, glory and success await the man of talent who shall work for religion.”

“That task will be his,” said Mme. de Bargeton rhetorically.  “Do you not see the first beginnings of the vision of the poem, like the flame of dawn, in his eyes?”

“Nais is treating us very badly,” said Fifine; “what can she be doing?”

“Don’t you hear?” said Stanislas.  “She is flourishing away, using big words that you cannot make head or tail of.”

Amelie, Fifine, Adrien, and Francis appeared in the doorway with Mme. de Rastignac, who came to look for her daughter.

“Nais,” cried the two ladies, both delighted to break in upon the quiet chat in the boudoir, “it would be very nice of you to come and play something for us.”

“My dear child, M. de Rubempre is just about to recite his Saint John in Patmos, a magnificent biblical poem.”

“Biblical!” echoed Fifine in amazement.