These Parisians come from Toulouse, Limoges, Cahors, and Montauban, but they are students, and a student in Paris is a Parisian. They are insignificant: neither good nor bad, neither geniuses nor fools, handsome with that April called twenty. They are four Oscars; Arthurs do not yet exist. Félix Tholomyès of Toulouse, Listolier of Cahors, Fameuil of Limoges, Blachevelle of Montauban. Each has a mistress. Blachevelle loves Favourite, named for England. Listolier adores Dahlia. Fameuil idolises Zéphine. Tholomyès has Fantine, called the Blonde because of her sunny hair. The four women are still a little like working-women, not yet entirely divorced from their needles, with that flower of honesty which survives the first fall. One is called the young; one is called the old; the old one is twenty-three. Favourite, Dahlia, and Zéphine are more experienced, more heedless, more emancipated into the tumult than Fantine, who is still in her first illusions.
Poverty and coquetry whisper on either side of such daughters of the people. Favourite had an establishment early; her father, a brutal professor of mathematics, bows when he meets her; a devout old woman arrives, names herself her mother, eats for four, and goes downstairs to speak ill of her. Dahlia's too-pretty nails drew her to idleness. Zéphine conquered Fameuil by a roguish way of saying yes, sir. Goodness and philosophy are two distinct things: Favourite, Zéphine, and Dahlia are philosophical; Fantine is a good girl. The love of Fantine is a first love, a sole love, a faithful love. She alone of the four is not called thou by a single one of them. She was born at M. sur M., without parents anyone can name, without a family name, in the Directory years when the Church no longer existed. A passer-by named the bare-legged child in the street. At ten she went to farmers; at fifteen to Paris to seek her fortune. She had gold and pearls for her dowry: gold on her head, pearls in her mouth. She worked, then, because the heart has its hunger, she loved. An amour for him; passion for her.
Tholomyès is the antique old student, rich on four thousand francs a year, a scandal on Mount Sainte-Geneviève. He is thirty, wrinkled, toothless, beginning a bald spot, one eye watering. Gaiety replaces what youth packs up. He doubts everything, which is a vast force in the eyes of the weak. Being ironical and bald, he is the leader. One day he takes the three others aside. The women have been teasing them for nearly a year for a surprise. Parents keep writing. Pressure on both sides. He lowers his voice and articulates something so mirthful that a vast grin breaks on four mouths, and Blachevelle exclaims that that is an idea. A smoky tap-room presents itself. The rest of the colloquy is lost in shadow. The result of those shades is a dazzling pleasure party the following Sunday, the four young men inviting the four young girls.
