“How is that you all manage?” asked Savinien one day, at the end of a gay breakfast with a knot of young dandies, with whom he was intimate as the young men of the present day are intimate with each other, all aiming for the same thing and all claiming an impossible equality.  “You were no richer than I and yet you get along without anxiety; you contrive to maintain yourselves, while as for me I make nothing but debts.”

“We all began that way,” answered Rastignac, laughing, and the laugh was echoed by Lucien de Rubempre, Maxime de Trailles, Emile Blondet, and others of the fashionable young men of the day.

“Though de Marsay was rich when he started in life he was an exception,” said the host, a parvenu named Finot, ambitious of seeming intimate with these young men.  “Any one but he,” added Finot bowing to that personage, “would have been ruined by it.”

“A true remark,” said Maxime de Trailles.

“And a true idea,” added Rastignac.

“My dear fellow,” said de Marsay, gravely, to Savinien; “debts are the capital stock of experience.  A good university education with tutors for all branches, who don’t teach you anything, costs sixty thousand francs.  If the education of the world does cost double, at least it teaches you to understand life, politics, men,—­and sometimes women.”

Blondet concluded the lesson by a paraphrase from La Fontaine:  “The world sells dearly what we think it gives.”

Instead of laying to heart the sensible advice which the cleverest pilots of the Parisian archipelago gave him, Savinien took it all as a joke.

“Take care, my dear fellow,” said de Marsay one day.  “You have a great name; if you don’t obtain the fortune that name requires you’ll end your days in the uniform of a cavalry-sergeant.  ’We have seen the fall of nobler heads,’” he added, declaiming the line of Corneille as he took Savinien’s arm.  “About six years ago,” he continued, “a young Comte d’Esgrignon came among us; but he did not stay two years in the paradise of the great world.  Alas! he lived and moved like a rocket.  He rose to the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse and fell to his native town, where he is now expiating his faults with a wheezy old father and a game of whist at two sous a point.  Tell Madame de Serizy your situation, candidly, without shame; she will understand it and be very useful to you.  Whereas, if you play the charade of first love with her she will pose as a Raffaelle Madonna, practice all the little games of innocence upon you, and take you journeying at enormous cost through the Land of Sentiment.”