In short, he is not _true_; his presentation is false; in him, as Comte Felix said, is the born juggler.

Moreover, his pen gets its ink in the boudoir of an actress.
Raoul Nathan is a fair type of the Parisian literary youth of the day, with its false grandeurs and its real misery.

He represents that youth by his incomplete beauties and his headlong falls, by the turbulent torrent of his existence, with its sudden reverses and its unhoped-for triumphs.

He is truly the child of a century consumed with envy,--a century with a thousand rivalries lurking under many a system, which nourish to their own profit that hydra of anarchy which wants wealth without toil, fame without talent, success without effort, but whose vices force it, after much rebellion and many skirmishes, to accept the budget under the powers that be.

When so many young ambitions, starting on foot, give one another rendezvous at the same point, there is always contention of wills, extreme wretchedness, bitter struggles.