Lucien went back gaily to his lodgings.  He was as careful over his toilet as on that former unlucky occasion when he occupied the Marquise d’Espard’s box; but he had learned by this time how to wear his clothes with a better grace.  They looked as though they belonged to him.  He wore his best tightly-fitting, light-colored trousers, and a dress-coat.  His boots, a very elegant pair adorned with tassels, had cost him forty francs.  His thick, fine, golden hair was scented and crimped into bright, rippling curls.  Self-confidence and belief in his future lighted up his forehead.  He paid careful attention to his almost feminine hands, the filbert nails were a spotless pink, and the white contours of his chin were dazzling by contrast with a black satin stock.  Never did a more beautiful youth come down from the hills of the Latin Quarter.

Glorious as a Greek god, Lucien took a cab, and reached the Cafe Servel at a quarter to seven.  There the portress gave him some tolerably complicated directions for the ascent of four pairs of stairs.  Provided with these instructions, he discovered, not without difficulty, an open door at the end of a long, dark passage, and in another moment made the acquaintance of the traditional room of the Latin Quarter.

A young man’s poverty follows him wherever he goes—­into the Rue de la Harpe as into the Rue de Cluny, into d’Arthez’s room, into Chrestien’s lodging; yet everywhere no less the poverty has its own peculiar characteristics, due to the idiosyncrasies of the sufferer.  Poverty in this case wore a sinister look.

A shabby, cheap carpet lay in wrinkles at the foot of a curtainless walnut-wood bedstead; dingy curtains, begrimed with cigar smoke and fumes from a smoky chimney, hung in the windows; a Carcel lamp, Florine’s gift, on the chimney-piece, had so far escaped the pawnbroker.  Add a forlorn-looking chest of drawers, and a table littered with papers and disheveled quill pens, and the list of furniture was almost complete.  All the books had evidently arrived in the course of the last twenty-four hours; and there was not a single object of any value in the room.  In one corner you beheld a collection of crushed and flattened cigars, coiled pocket-handkerchiefs, shirts which had been turned to do double duty, and cravats that had reached a third edition; while a sordid array of old boots stood gaping in another angle of the room among aged socks worn into lace.

The room, in short, was a journalist’s bivouac, filled with odds and ends of no value, and the most curiously bare apartment imaginable.  A scarlet tinder-box glowed among a pile of books on the nightstand.  A brace of pistols, a box of cigars, and a stray razor lay upon the mantel-shelf; a pair of foils, crossed under a wire mask, hung against a panel.  Three chairs and a couple of armchairs, scarcely fit for the shabbiest lodging-house in the street, completed the inventory.