“You should go over to the Royalists,” said the Duke.  “You have proved yourself a man of ability; now show your good sense.  The one way of obtaining a patent of nobility and the right to bear the title of your mother’s family, is by asking for it in return for services to be rendered to the Court.  The Liberals will never make a count of you.  The Restoration will get the better of the press, you see, in the long run, and the press is the only formidable power.  They have borne with it too long as it is; the press is sure to be muzzled.  Take advantage of the last moments of liberty to make yourself formidable, and you will have everything—­intellect, nobility, and good looks; nothing will be out of your reach.  So if you are a Liberal, let it be simply for the moment, so that you can make a better bargain for your Royalism.”

With that the Duke entreated Lucien to accept an invitation to dinner, which the German Minister (of Florine’s supper-party) was about to send.  Lucien fell under the charm of the noble peer’s arguments; the salons from which he had been exiled for ever, as he thought, but a few months ago, would shortly open their doors for him!  He was delighted.  He marveled at the power of the press; Intellect and the Press, these then were the real powers in society.  Another thought shaped itself in his mind—­Was Etienne Lousteau sorry that he had opened the gate of the temple to a newcomer?  Even now he (Lucien) felt on his own account that it was strongly advisable to put difficulties in the way of eager and ambitious recruits from the provinces.  If a poet should come to him as he had flung himself into Etienne’s arms, he dared not think of the reception that he would give him.

The youthful Duke meanwhile saw that Lucien was deep in thought, and made a pretty good guess at the matter of his meditations.  He himself had opened out wide horizons of public life before an ambitious poet, with a vacillating will, it is true, but not without aspirations; and the journalists had already shown the neophyte, from a pinnacle of the temple, all the kingdoms of the world of letters and its riches.

Lucien himself had no suspicion of a little plot that was being woven, nor did he imagine that M. de Rhetore had a hand in it.  M. de Rhetore had spoken of Lucien’s cleverness, and Mme. d’Espard’s set had taken alarm.  Mme. de Bargeton had commissioned the Duke to sound Lucien, and with that object in view, the noble youth had come to the Ambigu-Comique.

Do not believe in stories of elaborate treachery.  Neither the great world nor the world of journalists laid any deep schemes; definite plans are not made by either; their Machiavelism lives from hand to mouth, so to speak, and consists, for the most part, in being always on the spot, always on the alert to turn everything to account, always on the watch for the moment when a man’s ruling passion shall deliver him into the hands of his enemies.  The young Duke had seen through Lucien at Florine’s supper-party; he had just touched his vain susceptibilities; and now he was trying his first efforts in diplomacy upon the living subject.