At twenty-one years of age he left his mother's house to make acquaintance with his relations, and try his luck in Paris.

The contrast between life in Paris and life in Nemours was likely to be fatal to a young man of twenty-one, free, with no one to say him nay, naturally eager for pleasure, and for whom his name and his connections opened the doors of all the salons.

Quite convinced that his mother had the savings of many years in her strong-box, Savinien soon spent the six thousand francs which she had given him to see Paris.

That sum did not defray his expenses for six months, and he soon owed double that sum to his hotel, his tailor, his boot maker, to the man from whom he hired his carriages and horses, to a jeweler,--in short, to all those traders and shopkeepers who contribute to the luxury of young men.
He had only just succeeded in making himself known, and had scarcely learned how to converse, how to present himself in a salon, how to wear his waistcoats and choose them and to order his coats and tie his cravat, before he found himself in debt for over thirty thousand francs, while still seeking the right phrases in which to declare his love for the sister of the Marquis de Ronquerolles, the elegant Madame de Serizy, whose youth had been at its climax during the Empire.
"How is that you all manage ?" asked Savinien one day, at the end of a gay breakfast with a knot of young dandies, with whom he was intimate as the young men of the present day are intimate with each other, all aiming for the same thing and all claiming an impossible equality.
"You were no richer than I and yet you get along without anxiety; you contrive to maintain yourselves, while as for me I make nothing but debts." "We all began that way," answered Rastignac, laughing, and the laugh was echoed by Lucien de Rubempre, Maxime de Trailles, Emile Blondet, and others of the fashionable young men of the day.
"Though de Marsay was rich when he started in life he was an exception," said the host, a parvenu named Finot, ambitious of seeming intimate with these young men.

"Any one but he," added Finot bowing to that personage, "would have been ruined by it." "A true remark," said Maxime de Trailles.
"And a true idea," added Rastignac.
"My dear fellow," said de Marsay, gravely, to Savinien; "debts are the capital stock of experience.