by inferior minds. Blondet would share his purse with a comrade he had
affronted the day before; he would dine, drink, and sleep with one
whom he would demolish on the morrow. His amusing paradoxes excused
everything. Accepting the whole world as a jest, he did not want to be
taken seriously; young, beloved, almost famous and contented, he did
not devote himself, like Finot, to acquiring the fortune an old man
needs.

The most difficult form of courage, perhaps, is that which Lucien
needed at this moment to get rid of Blondet as he had just got rid of
Madame d'Espard and Chatelet. In him, unfortunately, the joys of
vanity hindered the exercise of pride--the basis, beyond doubt, of
many great things. His vanity had triumphed in the previous encounter;
he had shown himself as a rich man, happy and scornful, to two persons
who had scorned him when he was poor and wretched. But how could a
poet, like an old diplomate, run the gauntlet with two self-styled
friends, who had welcomed him in misery, under whose roof he had slept
in the worst of his troubles? Finot, Blondet, and he had groveled
together; they had wallowed in such orgies as consume something more
than money. Like soldiers who find no market for their courage, Lucien
had just done what many men do in Paris: he had still further
compromised his character by shaking Finot's hand, and not rejecting
Blondet's affection.

Every man who has dabbled, or still dabbles, in journalism is under
the painful necessity of bowing to men he despises, of smiling at his
dearest foe, of compounding the foulest meanness, of soiling his
fingers to pay his aggressors in their own coin. He becomes used to
seeing evil done, and passing it over; he begins by condoning it, and
ends by committing it. In the long run the soul, constantly strained