After the greetings, “What! is it you?” “Do you remember me?” and a shaking of hands, they all seated themselves around the table.

What! is that little dumpy fellow with the turned-up nose, straight as an arrow and with such a satisfied air, Gorju, who wanted to be an actor?  He is one now, or nearly so, since he studies with Regnier at the Conservatoire.  A make-believe actor, he puts on airs, and in the three minutes that he has been in the room he has looked at his retrousse nose and his coarse face, made to be seen from a distance, ten times in the mirror.  His first care is to inform Amedee that he has renounced his name Gorju, which was an impossible one for the theatre, and has taken that of Jocquelet.  Then, without losing a moment, he refers to his “talents,” “charms,” and “physique.”

Who is this handsome fellow with such neat side-whiskers, whose finely cut features suggest an intaglio head, and who has just placed a lawyer’s heavy portfolio upon the sofa?  It is Arthur Papillon, the distinguished Latin scholar who wished to organize a debating society at the Lycee, and to divide the rhetoric class into groups and sub-groups like a parliament.  “What have you been doing, Papillon?” Papillon had studied law, and was secretary of the Patru Conference, of course.

Amedee immediately recognized the third guest.

“What!  Gustave!” exclaimed he, joyously.

Yes!  Gustave, the former “dunce,” the one they had called “Good-luck” because his father had made an immense fortune in guano.  Not one bit changed was Gustave!  The same deep-set eyes and greenish complexion.  But what style!  English from the tips of his pointed shoes to the horseshoe scarfpin in his necktie.  One would say that he was a horse-jockey dressed in his Sunday best.  What was this comical Gustave doing now?  Nothing.  His father has made two hundred thousand pounds’ income dabbling in certain things, and Gustave is getting acquainted with that is all—­which means to wake up every morning toward noon, with a bitter mouth caused from the last night’s supper, and to be surprised every morning at dawn at the baccarat table, after spending five hours saying “Bac!” in a stifled, hollow voice.  Gustave understands life, and, taking into consideration his countenance like a death’s-head, it may lead him to make the acquaintance of something entirely different.  But who thinks of death at his age?  Gustave wishes to know life, and when a fit of coughing interrupts him in one of his idiotic bursts of laughter, his comrades at the Gateux Club tell him that he has swallowed the wrong way.  Wretched Gustave, so be it!