After a week’s exchange of small courtesies and remarks, the poet from Angouleme found the first person with whom he could chat.  The stranger’s name was Etienne Lousteau.  Two years ago he had left his native place, a town in Berri, just as Lucien had come from Angouleme.  His lively gestures, bright eyes, and occasionally curt speech revealed a bitter apprenticeship to literature.  Etienne had come from Sancerre with his tragedy in his pocket, drawn to Paris by the same motives that impelled Lucien—­hope of fame and power and money.

Sometimes Etienne Lousteau came for several days together; but in a little while his visits became few and far between, and he would stay away for five or six days in succession.  Then he would come back, and Lucien would hope to see his poet next day, only to find a stranger in his place.  When two young men meet daily, their talk harks back to their last conversation; but these continual interruptions obliged Lucien to break the ice afresh each time, and further checked an intimacy which made little progress during the first few weeks.  On inquiry of the damsel at the counter, Lucien was told that his future friend was on the staff of a small newspaper, and wrote reviews of books and dramatic criticism of pieces played at the Ambigu-Comique, the Gaite, and the Panorama-Dramatique.  The young man became a personage all at once in Lucien’s eyes.  Now, he thought, he would lead the conversation on rather more personal topics, and make some effort to gain a friend so likely to be useful to a beginner.  The journalist stayed away for a fortnight.  Lucien did not know that Etienne only dined at Flicoteaux’s when he was hard up, and hence his gloomy air of disenchantment and the chilly manner, which Lucien met with gracious smiles and amiable remarks.  But, after all, the project of a friendship called for mature deliberation.  This obscure journalist appeared to lead an expensive life in which petits verres, cups of coffee, punch-bowls, sight-seeing, and suppers played a part.  In the early days of Lucien’s life in the Latin Quarter, he behaved like a poor child bewildered by his first experience of Paris life; so that when he had made a study of prices and weighed his purse, he lacked courage to make advances to Etienne; he was afraid of beginning a fresh series of blunders of which he was still repenting.  And he was still under the yoke of provincial creeds; his two guardian angels, Eve and David, rose up before him at the least approach of an evil thought, putting him in mind of all the hopes that were centered on him, of the happiness that he owed to the old mother, of all the promises of his genius.