But tell me, in the first place, what ass ever led you to drink of that cursed spring." "Des Lupeaulx." The three young men looked at each other with one and the same thought and suspicion, but they did not utter it.
"Explain all your resources; show us your hand," said de Marsay.
When Savinien had told of his mother and her old-fashioned ways, and the little house with three windows in the Rue des Bourgeois, without other grounds than a court for the well and a shed for the wood; when he had valued the house, built of sandstone and pointed in reddish cement, and put a price on the farm at Bordieres, the three dandies looked at each other, and all three said with a solemn air the word of the abbe in Alfred de Musset's "Marrons du feu" (which had then just appeared),--"Sad!" "Your mother will pay if you write a clever letter," said Rastignac.
"Yes, but afterwards ?" cried de Marsay.
"If you had merely been put in the fiacre," said Lucien, "the government would find you a place in diplomacy, but Saint-Pelagie isn't the antechamber of an embassy." "You are not strong enough for Parisian life," said Rastignac.
"Let us consider the matter," said de Marsay, looking Savinien over as a jockey examines a horse.

"You have fine blue eyes, well opened, a white forehead well shaped, magnificent black hair, a little moustache which suits those pale cheeks, and a slim figure; you've a foot that tells race, shoulders and chest not quite those of a porter, but solid.

You are what I call an elegant male brunette.

Your face is of the style Louis XII., hardly any color, well-formed nose; and you have the thing that pleases women, a something, I don't know what it is, which men take no account of themselves; it is in the air, the manner, the tone of the voice, the dart of the eye, the gesture,--in short, in a number of little things which women see and to which they attach a meaning which escapes us.

You don't know your merits, my dear fellow.