Page:Novels of Honoré de Balzac Volume 23.djvu/176

 tailor, his bootmaker, his livery-stable keeper, to a jeweler, and to all the tradesmen who contribute to the luxury of young men. He had hardly succeeded in becoming known, hardly learnt how to talk, to make calls, to wear his waistcoats and choose them, to order his clothes and to put on a tie, when he found himself at the head of thirty thousand francs’ worth of debt and knowing no better than to seek a delicate turn of expression in which to declare his love to the sister of the Marquis de Ronquerolles, Madame de Sérizy, a fashionable woman, but whose youth had bloomed under the Empire.

“How did you others extricate yourselves?” said Savinien one day, at the end of a breakfast, to a few dandies with whom he had formed a connection, as nowadays young men form connections whose affectations in everything aim at the same goal and who lay claim to an impossible equality.

“You were no richer than I, you go along without anxiety, you keep up your positions, and I, I already have debts!”

“We all began that way,” laughed Rastignac, Lucien de Rubempré, Maxime de Trailles, and Émile Blondet, the dandies of the day.

“If De Marsay happened to be rich at the outset of life, it was an accident!” said the host, a parvenu called Finot, who was trying to associate with these young men. “And had he not been himself,” he added, bowing to him, “his fortune might be the undoing of him.”