The young man can choose between several drinks, from chocolate (if he needs to digest the dinner of the last night) to coffee (if he tends to become fat).
The young man and the lady meet friends and wander about the streets with a carriage while they speak about several things.
The ostensible purpose of this poem is to give instructions, in immense detail, about how to fill the "simple day" of a young aristocratic man.
(When the young man visits the baths, he may feel some faint suspicion, swiftly dismissed, that he is the same type of creature as men of common clay.
)[1] The effect of the poem depends on the comic contrast between the banality and futility of the day of the young man and the exalted epic style of the writing used by the author to describe it, drawing heavily on Homer (ca.