In the meantime, de Leuven returned to Villers-Cotterets, after five or six months' absence. His return was to open out new fields for my ambitionsambitions, however, which I believed were capable of being fulfilled. If you throw a stone into a lake, however large the lake may be, the first circle it will make round it, after its fall, will go on growing and multiplying itself, even as do our days and our desires, until the last one touches the bankthat is to say, eternity.
Adolphe returned and brought Lafarge back with him. Poor Lafarge! Do you remember the brilliant head clerk, who returned to his native place in an elegant carriage, drawn by a mettlesome steed? Well, he had bought a practice, but there the progress of his rising fortune had stopped. By some inconceivable fatality, although he was young, good-looking, clever, perhaps even because he possessed all these gifts, which are perfectly useless to a lawyer, he had not found a wife to pay for the practice, so he had been obliged to sell it again, and, disgusted with the law, he had taken to literature. De Leuven, who had taken notice of him in Villers-Cotterets, found him out in Paris and returned with him. Some of his ancient splendour still stuck to the poor fellow, but you might seek in vain for any real stability at the base of his fresh plans for the future; those fleeting clouds hardly got beyond the stage of hopes.
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