He was one of the kind very much in request in fashionable society.

There is not a person who has not met one of these worthy fellows, destined to make good officers, perfect merchants, and very satisfactory lawyers, but who, unfortunately, have been seized with a mania for notoriety.
Ordinarily they think of it on account of somebody else's talent.
This one is brother to a poet, another son-in-law to a historian; they conclude that they also have a right to be poet and historian in their turn.

Thomas Corneille is their model; but we must admit that very few of our writers reach the rank attained by Corneille the younger.
Marillac was train-bearer to Gerfaut, and was rewarded for this bondage by a few bribes of collaboration, crumbs that fall from the rich man's table.

They had been close friends since they both entered the law school, where they were companions in folly rather than in study.
Marillac also had thrown himself into the arena of literature; then, different fortunes having greeted the two friends' efforts, he had descended little by little from the role of a rival to that of an inferior.

Marillac was an artist, talent accepted, from the tip of his toes to the sole of his boots, which he wished to lengthen by pointed toes out of respect for the Middle Ages; for he excelled above all things in his manner of dressing, and possessed, among other intellectual merits, the longest moustache in literature.
If he had not art in his brain, to make up for it he always had its name at his tongue's end.