“But, dear me,” continued Claude Vignon, “_I_ knew all this, yet here am I in the galleys, and the arrival of another convict gives me pleasure. We are cleverer, Blondet and I, than Messieurs This and That, who speculate in our abilities, yet nevertheless we are always exploited by them. We have a heart somewhere beneath the intellect; we have NOT the grim qualities of the man who makes others work for him. We are indolent, we like to look on at the game, we are meditative, and we are fastidious; they will sweat our brains and blame us for improvidence.” “I thought you would be more amusing than this!” said Florine. “Florine is right,” said Blondet; “let us leave the cure of public evils to those quacks the statesmen. As Charlet says, ‘Quarrel with my own bread and butter? _Never_!’” “Do you know what Vignon puts me in mind of?” said Lousteau. “Of one of those fat women in the Rue du Pélican telling a schoolboy, ‘My boy, you are too young to come here.’” A burst of laughter followed the sally, but it pleased Coralie. The merchants meanwhile ate and drank and listened. “What a nation this is! You see so much good in it and so much evil,” said the Minister, addressing the Duc de Rhétoré.—“You are prodigals who cannot ruin yourselves, gentlemen.” And so, by the blessing of chance, Lucien, standing on the brink of the precipice over which he was destined to fall, heard warnings on all sides. D’Arthez had set him on the right road, had shown him the noble method of work, and aroused in him the spirit before which all obstacles disappear. Lousteau himself (partly from selfish motives) had tried to warn him away by describing Journalism and Literature in their practical aspects. Lucien had refused to believe that there could be so much hidden corruption; but now he had heard the journalists themselves crying woe for their hurt, he had seen them at their work, had watched them tearing their foster-mother’s heart to read auguries of the future. That evening he had seen things as they are. He beheld the very heart’s core of corruption of that Paris which Blücher so aptly described; and so far from shuddering at the sight, he was intoxicated with enjoyment of the intellectually stimulating society in which he found himself.