Raoul Nathan is a fair type of the Parisian literary youth of the day, with its false grandeurs and its real misery.  He represents that youth by his incomplete beauties and his headlong falls, by the turbulent torrent of his existence, with its sudden reverses and its unhoped-for triumphs.  He is truly the child of a century consumed with envy,—­a century with a thousand rivalries lurking under many a system, which nourish to their own profit that hydra of anarchy which wants wealth without toil, fame without talent, success without effort, but whose vices force it, after much rebellion and many skirmishes, to accept the budget under the powers that be.  When so many young ambitions, starting on foot, give one another rendezvous at the same point, there is always contention of wills, extreme wretchedness, bitter struggles.  In this dreadful battle, selfishness, the most overbearing or the most adroit selfishness, gains the victory; and it is envied and applauded in spite, as Moliere said, of outcries, and we all know it.

When, in his capacity as enemy to the new dynasty, Raoul was introduced in the salon of Madame de Montcornet, his apparent grandeurs were flourishing.  He was accepted as the political critic of the de Marsays, the Rastignacs, and the Roche-Hugons, who had stepped into power.  Emile Blondet, the victim of incurable hesitation and of his innate repugnance to any action that concerned only himself, continued his trade of scoffer, took sides with no one, and kept well with all.  He was friendly with Raoul, friendly with Rastignac, friendly with Montcornet.

“You are a political triangle,” said de Marsay, laughing, when they met at the Opera.  “That geometric form, my dear fellow, belongs only to the Deity, who has nothing to do; ambitious men ought to follow curved lines, the shortest road in politics.”

Seen from a distance, Raoul Nathan was a very fine meteor.  Fashion accepted his ways and his appearance.  His borrowed republicanism gave him, for the time being, that Jansenist harshness assumed by the defenders of the popular cause, while they inwardly scoff at it,—­a quality not without charm in the eyes of women.  Women like to perform prodigies, break rocks, and soften natures which seem of iron.

Raoul’s moral costume was therefore in keeping with his clothes.  He was fitted to be what he became to the Eve who was bored in her paradise in the rue du Rocher,—­the fascinating serpent, the fine talker with magnetic eyes and harmonious motions who tempted the first woman.  No sooner had the Comtesse Marie laid eyes on Raoul than she felt an inward emotion, the violence of which caused her a species of terror.  The glance of that fraudulent great man exercised a physical influence upon her, which quivered in her very heart, and troubled it.  But the trouble was pleasure.  The purple mantle which celebrity had draped for a moment round Nathan’s shoulders dazzled the ingenuous young woman.  When tea was served, she rose from her seat among a knot of talking women, where she had been striving to see and hear that extraordinary being.  Her silence and absorption were noticed by her false friends.