It was a frivolous age, a restless age, an age of change, of great possibilities. France was brilliant yet corrupt, energetic yet slothful. Paris did not dazzle so much to Luc’s near sight as it had done to his distant gaze. Carola Koklinska became to him as a symbol of the city--so calm, lofty, high, and bright from a distance, so mean, dishonoured, falsely glittering near, yet with an immortal heart concealed somewhere behind the gaudy shams. Paris was great, was eternal, held the seed of all future thought, was the theatre of all present action; yet her streets were thronged by the foppish, the foolish, the ignorant, and the starving. Her government was in the hands of men like M. de Richelieu, who in their turn were influenced by women like Carola--greedy soldiers of fortune who kept the point of view of the gutter from whence they came. Luc’s heart swelled to a sense of agony--the agony of powerlessness. All the pageant that passed by him he knew only by glimpses; he was outside, he could do nothing--nay, worse than that, he was even being swept along with the others, no better than they, a mere inarticulate creature played upon by the devices of those he met. Even M. de Richelieu, in his opulent consciencelessness, was expressing, fulfilling himself, turning circumstances into what he wished them to be, making his life what he wanted it; even Carola had forced the hand of Fate to satisfy her sordid ambition; while he was baffled, thwarted, like a thing chained. He thought of the young man whom he had met in the pavilion at Versailles, and whom he had just seen enter the house opposite. He lulled his slothful soul by juggling with the poor lures of charlatans. He could actually drive his lagging, empty days faster by such spurs as these! Luc had not yet conceived the task, the responsibility, the goal that would satisfy the hunger of _his_ soul. Ill-health, moderate means, an obscure position in the great world--these were his disadvantages. And was it possible that the fire of his desires could not surmount these paltry things?