Launched into the world of actors and actresses, writers, artists, and certain women of uncertain means, he lived well, went to the theatre without paying, gambled at Frascati, and often won.  Artist by nature and really profound, though by flashes only, he swayed to and fro in life like a swing, without thinking or caring of a time when the cord would break.  The liveliness of his wit and the prodigal flow of his ideas made him acceptable to all persons who took pleasure in the lights of intellect; but none of his friends liked him.  Incapable of checking a witty saying, he would scarify his two neighbors before a dinner was half over.  In spite of his skin-deep gayety, a secret dissatisfaction with his social position could be detected in his speech; he aspired to something better, but the fatal demon hiding in his wit hindered him from acquiring the gravity which imposes on fools.  He lived on the second floor of a house in the rue de Ponthieu, where he had three rooms delivered over to the untidiness of a bachelor’s establishment, in fact, a regular bivouac.  He often talked of leaving France and seeking his fortune in America.  No wizard could foretell the future of this young man in whom all talents were incomplete; who was incapable of perseverance, intoxicated with pleasure, and who acted on the belief that the world ended on the morrow.

In the matter of dress Bixiou had the merit of never being ridiculous; he was perhaps the only official of the ministry whose dress did not lead outsiders to say, “That man is a government clerk!” He wore elegant boots with black trousers strapped under them, a fancy waistcoat, a becoming blue coat, collars that were the never-ending gift of grisettes, one of Bandoni’s hats, and a pair of dark-colored kid gloves.  His walk and bearing, cavalier and simple both, were not without grace.  He knew all this, and when des Lupeaulx summoned him for a piece of impertinence said and done about Monsieur de la Billardiere and threatened him with dismissal, Bixiou replied, “You will take me back because my clothes do credit to the ministry”; and des Lupeaulx, unable to keep from laughing, let the matter pass.  The most harmless of Bixiou’s jokes perpetrated among the clerks was the one he played off upon Godard, presenting him with a butterfly just brought from China, which the worthy man keeps in his collection and exhibits to this day, blissfully unconscious that it is only painted paper.  Bixiou had the patience to work up the little masterpiece for the sole purpose of hoaxing his superior.

The devil always puts a martyr near a Bixiou.  Baudoyer’s bureau held the martyr, a poor copying-clerk twenty-two years of age, with a salary of fifteen hundred francs, named Auguste-Jean-Francois Minard.  Minard had married for love the daughter of a porter, an artificial-flower maker employed by Mademoiselle Godard.  Zelie Lorrain, a pupil, in the first place, of the Conservatoire, then by turns a danseuse,