Thirty guests were assembled that evening in Coralie’s rooms, her dining room would not hold more.  Lucien had asked Dauriat and the manager of the Panorama-Dramatique, Matifat and Florine, Camusot, Lousteau, Finot, Nathan, Hector Merlin and Mme. du Val-Noble, Felicien Vernou, Blondet, Vignon, Philippe Bridau, Mariette, Giroudeau, Cardot and Florentine, and Bixiou.  He had also asked all his friends of the Rue des Quatre-Vents.  Tullia the dancer, who was not unkind, said gossip, to du Bruel, had come without her duke.  The proprietors of the newspapers, for whom most of the journalists wrote, were also of the party.

At eight o’clock, when the lights of the candles in the chandeliers shone over the furniture, the hangings, and the flowers, the rooms wore the festal air that gives to Parisian luxury the appearance of a dream; and Lucien felt indefinable stirrings of hope and gratified vanity and pleasure at the thought that he was the master of the house.  But how and by whom the magic wand had been waved he no longer sought to remember.  Florine and Coralie, dressed with the fanciful extravagance and magnificent artistic effect of the stage, smiled on the poet like two fairies at the gates of the Palace of Dreams.  And Lucien was almost in a dream.

His life had been changed so suddenly during the last few months; he had gone so swiftly from the depths of penury to the last extreme of luxury, that at moments he felt as uncomfortable as a dreaming man who knows that he is asleep.  And yet, he looked round at the fair reality about him with a confidence to which envious minds might have given the name of fatuity.

Lucien himself had changed.  He had grown paler during these days of continual enjoyment; languor had lent a humid look to his eyes; in short, to use Mme. d’Espard’s expression, he looked like a man who is loved.  He was the handsomer for it.  Consciousness of his powers and his strength was visible in his face, enlightened as it was by love and experience.  Looking out over the world of letters and of men, it seemed to him that he might go to and fro as lord of it all.  Sober reflection never entered his romantic head unless it was driven in by the pressure of adversity, and just now the present held not a care for him.  The breath of praise swelled the sails of his skiff; all the instruments of success lay there to his hand; he had an establishment, a mistress whom all Paris envied him, a carriage, and untold wealth in his inkstand.  Heart and soul and brain were alike transformed within him; why should he care to be over nice about the means, when the great results were visibly there before his eyes.

As such a style of living will seem, and with good reason, to be anything but secure to economists who have any experience of Paris, it will not be superfluous to give a glance to the foundation, uncertain as it was, upon which the prosperity of the pair was based.

Camusot had given Coralie’s tradesmen instructions to grant her credit for three months at least, and this had been done without her knowledge.  During those three months, therefore, horses and servants, like everything else, waited as if by enchantment at the bidding of two children, eager for enjoyment, and enjoying to their hearts’ content.