Few Parisian restaurants are so well worth seeing.  Every one at Flicoteaux’s is young; you see nothing but youth; and although earnest faces and grave, gloomy, anxious faces are not lacking, you see hope and confidence and poverty gaily endured.  Dress, as a rule, is careless, and regular comers in decent clothes are marked exceptions.  Everybody knows at once that something extraordinary is afoot:  a mistress to visit, a theatre party, or some excursion into higher spheres.  Here, it is said, friendships have been made among students who became famous men in after days, as will be seen in the course of this narrative; but with the exception of a few knots of young fellows from the same part of France who make a group about the end of a table, the gravity of the diners is hardly relaxed.  Perhaps this gravity is due to the catholicity of the wine, which checks good fellowship of any kind.

Flicoteaux’s frequenters may recollect certain sombre and mysterious figures enveloped in the gloom of the chilliest penury; these beings would dine there daily for a couple of years and then vanish, and the most inquisitive regular comer could throw no light on the disappearance of such goblins of Paris.  Friendships struck up over Flicoteaux’s dinners were sealed in neighboring cafes in the flames of heady punch, or by the generous warmth of a small cup of black coffee glorified by a dash of something hotter and stronger.

Lucien, like all neophytes, was modest and regular in his habits in those early days at the Hotel de Cluny.  After the first unlucky venture in fashionable life which absorbed his capital, he threw himself into his work with the first earnest enthusiasm, which is frittered away so soon over the difficulties or in the by-paths of every life in Paris.  The most luxurious and the very poorest lives are equally beset with temptations which nothing but the fierce energy of genius or the morose persistence of ambition can overcome.

Lucien used to drop in at Flicoteaux’s about half-past four, having remarked the advantages of an early arrival; the bill-of-fare was more varied, and there was still some chance of obtaining the dish of your choice.  Like all imaginative persons, he had taken a fancy to a particular seat, and showed discrimination in his selection.  On the very first day he had noticed a table near the counter, and from the faces of those who sat about it, and chance snatches of their talk, he recognized brothers of the craft.  A sort of instinct, moreover, pointed out the table near the counter as a spot whence he could parlay with the owners of the restaurant.  In time an acquaintance would grow up, he thought, and then in the day of distress he could no doubt obtain the necessary credit.  So he took his place at a small square table close to the desk, intended probably for casual comers, for the two clean serviettes were unadorned with rings.  Lucien’s opposite neighbor was a thin, pallid youth, to all appearance as poor as himself; his handsome face was somewhat worn, already it told of hopes that had vanished, leaving lines upon his forehead and barren furrows in his soul, where seeds had been sown that had come to nothing.  Lucien felt drawn to the stranger by these tokens; his sympathies went out to him with irresistible fervor.