The conversation ended in a joke, and they changed the subject.
Lucien's friends, with their perspicacity and delicacy of heart, tried
to efface the memory of the little quarrel; but Lucien knew
thenceforward that it was no easy matter to deceive them. He soon fell
into despair, which he was careful to hide from such stern mentors as
he imagined them to be; and the Southern temper that runs so easily
through the whole gamut of mental dispositions, set him making the
most contradictory resolutions.

Again and again he talked of making the plunge into journalism; and
time after time did his friends reply with a "Mind you do nothing of
the sort!"

"It would be the tomb of the beautiful, gracious Lucien whom we love
and know," said d'Arthez.

"You would not hold out for long between the two extremes of toil and
pleasure which make up a journalist's life, and resistance is the very
foundation of virtue. You would be so delighted to exercise your power
of life and death over the offspring of the brain, that you would be
an out-and-out journalist in two months' time. To be a journalist
--that is to turn Herod in the republic of letters. The man who will
say anything will end by sticking at nothing. That was Napoleon's
maxim, and it explains itself."

"But you would be with me, would you not?" asked Lucien.

"Not by that time," said Fulgence. "If you were a journalist, you
would no more think of us than the Opera girl in all her glory, with