Thursdays similar one to another followed and followed on until the furthest stages of their lives. All of them were eternally together, all started at the self-same hour, and participated in the same triumph! Sandoz must have guessed the thought that kept Claude mute, for he said to him across the table, with his frank, youthful smile: ‘Well, old man, here you are again! Ah, confound it! we missed you sorely. But, you see, nothing is changed; we are all the same--aren’t we, all of you?’ They answered by nodding their heads--no doubt, no doubt! ‘With this difference,’ he went on, beaming--‘with this difference, that the cookery is somewhat better than in the Rue d’Enfer! What a lot of messes I did make you swallow!’ After the _bouillabaisse_ there came a _civet_ of hare; and a roast fowl and salad terminated the dinner. But they sat for a long time at table, and the dessert proved a protracted affair, although the conversation lacked the fever and violence of yore. Every one spoke of himself and ended by relapsing into silence on perceiving that the others did not listen to him. With the cheese, however, when they had tasted some burgundy, a sharp little growth, of which the young couple had ordered a cask out of the profits of Sandoz’s first novel, their voices rose to a higher key, and they all grew animated. ‘So you have made an arrangement with Naudet, eh?’ asked Mahoudeau, whose bony cheeks seemed to have grown yet more hollow. ‘Is it true that he guarantees you fifty thousand francs for the first year?’ Fagerolles replied, with affected carelessness, ‘Yes, fifty thousand francs. But nothing is settled; I’m thinking it over. It is hard to engage oneself like that. I am not going to do anything precipitately.’ ‘The deuce!’ muttered the sculptor; ‘you are hard to please. For twenty francs a day I’d sign whatever you like.’ They all now listened to Fagerolles, who posed as being wearied by his budding success. He still had the same good-looking, disturbing hussy-like face, but the fashion in which he wore his hair and the cut of his beard lent him an appearance of gravity. Although he still came at long intervals to Sandoz’s, he was separating from the band; he showed himself on the boulevards, frequented the cafés and newspaper offices--all the places where a man can advertise himself and make useful acquaintances. These were tactics of his own, a determination to carve his own victory apart from the others; the smart idea that if he wished to triumph he ought to have nothing more in common with those revolutionists, neither dealer, nor connections, nor habits. It was even said that he had interested the female element of two or three drawing-rooms in his success, not in Jory’s style, but like a vicious fellow who rises superior to his passions, and is content to adulate superannuated baronesses.