“And I was once a coxcomb even as he,” said the Vidame, indicating de Marsay.

The conversation continued pitched in the same key, charmingly scandalous, and agreeably corrupt.  The dinner went off very pleasantly.  Rastignac and de Marsay went to the Opera with the Vidame and Victurnien, with a view to following them afterwards to Mlle. des Touches’ salon.  And thither, accordingly, this pair of rakes betook themselves, calculating that by that time the tragedy would have been read; for of all things to be taken between eleven and twelve o’clock at night, a tragedy in their opinion was the most unwholesome.  They went to keep a watch on Victurnien and to embarrass him, a piece of schoolboys’s mischief embittered by a jealous dandy’s spite.  But Victurnien was gifted with that page’s effrontery which is a great help to ease of manner; and Rastignac, watching him as he made his entrance, was surprised to see how quickly he caught the tone of the moment.

“That young d’Esgrignon will go far, will he not?” he said, addressing his companion.

“That is as may be,” returned de Marsay, “but he is in a fair way.”

The Vidame introduced his young friend to one of the most amiable and frivolous duchesses of the day, a lady whose adventures caused an explosion five years later.  Just then, however, she was in the full blaze of her glory; she had been suspected, it is true, of equivocal conduct; but suspicion, while it is still suspicion and not proof, marks a woman out with the kind of distinction which slander gives to a man.  Nonentities are never slandered; they chafe because they are left in peace.  This woman was, in fact, the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, a daughter of the d’Uxelles; her father-in-law was still alive; she was not to be the Princesse de Cadignan for some years to come.  A friend of the Duchesse de Langeais and the Vicomtesse de Beauseant, two glories departed, she was likewise intimate with the Marquise d’Espard, with whom she disputed her fragile sovereignty as queen of fashion.  Great relations lent her countenance for a long while, but the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse was one of those women who, in some way, nobody knows how, or why, or where, will spend the rents of all the lands of earth, and of the moon likewise, if they were not out of reach.  The general outline of her character was scarcely known as yet; de Marsay, and de Marsay only, really had read her.  That redoubtable dandy now watched the Vidame de Pamiers’ introduction of his young friend to that lovely woman, and bent over to say in Rastignac’s ear: 

“My dear fellow, he will go up whizz! like a rocket, and come down like a stick,” an atrociously vulgar saying which was remarkably fulfilled.

The Duchesse de Maufrigneuse had lost her heart to Victurnien after first giving her mind to a serious study of him.  Any lover who should have caught the glance by which she expressed her gratitude to the Vidame might well have been jealous of such friendship.  Women are like horses let loose on a steppe when they feel, as the Duchess felt with the Vidame de Pamiers, that the ground is safe; at such moments they are themselves; perhaps it pleases them to give, as it were, samples of their tenderness in intimacy in this way.  It was a guarded glance, nothing was lost between eye and eye; there was no possibility of reflection in any mirror.  Nobody intercepted it.