eleven o'clock
His friends were learned naturalists , young doctors of medicine , political writers and artists , a number of earnest students full of promise . D'Arthez earned a living by conscientious and ill-paid work ; he wrote articles for encyclopaedias , dictionaries of biography and natural science , doing just enough to enable him to live while he followed his own bent , and neither more nor less . He had a piece of imaginative work on hand , undertaken solely for the sake of studying the resources of language , an important psychological study in the form of a novel , unfinished as yet , for d'Arthez took it up or laid it down as the humor took him , and kept it for days of great distress . D'Arthez 's revelations of himself were made very simply , but to Lucien he seemed like an intellectual giant ; and by eleven o'clock , when they left the restaurant , he began to feel a sudden , warm friendship for this nature , unconscious of its loftiness , this unostentatious worth . Lucien took d'Arthez 's advice unquestioningly , and followed it out to the letter . The most magnificent palaces of fancy had been suddenly flung open to him by a nobly-gifted mind , matured already by thought and critical examinations undertaken for their own sake , not for publication , but for the solitary thinker 's own satisfaction . The burning coal had been laid on the lips of the poet of Angouleme , a word uttered by a hard student in Paris had fallen upon ground prepared to receive it in the provincial .