sombre dignity which an artist of one-and-twenty is rather apt to overdo, Lucien’s thoughts went back to them at home.  He saw the pretty rooms which David had furnished for him, at the cost of part of his little store, and a vision rose before him of quiet, simple pleasures in the past.  Shadowy figures came about him; he saw his mother and Eve and David, and heard their sobs over his leave-taking, and at that he began to cry himself, for he felt very lonely in Paris, and friendless and forlorn.

Two or three days later he wrote to his sister:—­

“MY DEAR EVE,—­When a sister shares the life of a brother who devotes himself to art, it is her sad privilege to take more sorrow than joy into her life; and I am beginning to fear that I shall be a great trouble to you.  Have I not abused your goodness already? have not all of you sacrificed yourselves to me?  It is the memory of the past, so full of family happiness, that helps me to bear up in my present loneliness.  Now that I have tasted the first beginnings of poverty and the treachery of the world of Paris, how my thoughts have flown to you, swift as an eagle back to its eyrie, so that I might be with true affection again.  Did you see sparks in the candle?  Did a coal pop out of the fire?  Did you hear singing in your ears?  And did mother say, ’Lucien is thinking of us,’ and David answer, ’He is fighting his way in the world?’

“My Eve, I am writing this letter for your eyes only.  I cannot tell any one else all that has happened to me, good and bad, blushing for both, as I write, for good here is as rare as evil ought to be.  You shall have a great piece of news in a very few words.  Mme. de Bargeton was ashamed of me, disowned me, would not see me, and gave me up nine days after we came to Paris.  She saw me in the street and looked another way; when, simply to follow her into the society to which she meant to introduce me, I had spent seventeen hundred and sixty francs out of the two thousand I brought from Angouleme, the money so hardly scraped together.  ’How did you spend it?’ you will ask.  Paris is a strange bottomless gulf, my poor sister; you can dine here for less than a franc, yet the simplest dinner at a fashionable restaurant costs fifty francs; there are waistcoats and trousers to be had for four francs and two francs each; but a fashionable tailor never charges less than a hundred francs.  You pay for everything; you pay a halfpenny to cross the kennel in the street when it rains; you cannot go the least little way in a cab for less than thirty-two sous.

“I have been staying in one of the best parts of Paris, but now I am living at the Hotel de Cluny, in the Rue de Cluny, one of the poorest and darkest slums, shut in between three churches and the old buildings of the Sorbonne.  I have a furnished room on the fourth floor; it is very bare and very dirty, but, all the same, I pay fifteen francs a month for it.  For breakfast I spend a