“Yes,” said Joseph Bridau, “he has reached a height that we cannot so much as see.”
“We are to be pitied, not Louis,” said Fulgence Ridal.
“Perhaps he will recover,” exclaimed Lucien.
“From what Meyraux has been telling us, recovery seems impossible,” answered Bianchon. “Medicine has no power over the change that is working in his brain.”
“Yet there are physical means,” said d’Arthez.
“Yes,” said Bianchon; “we might produce imbecility instead of catalepsy.”
“Is there no way of offering another head to the spirit of evil? I would give mine to save him!” cried Michel Chrestien.
“And what would become of European federation?” asked d’Arthez.
“Ah! true,” replied Michel Chrestien. “Our duty to Humanity comes first; to one man afterwards.”
“I came here with a heart full of gratitude to you all,” said Lucien. “You have changed my alloy into golden coin.”
“Gratitude! For what do you take us?” asked Bianchon.
“We had the pleasure,” added Fulgence.
“Well, so you are a journalist, are you?” asked Léon Giraud. “The fame of your first appearance has reached even the Latin Quarter.”
“I am not a journalist yet,” returned Lucien.
“Aha! So much the better,” said Michel Chrestien.
“I told you so!” said d’Arthez. “Lucien knows the value of a clean conscience. When you can say to yourself as you lay your head on the pillow at night, ‘I have not sat in judgment on another man’s work; I have given pain to no one; I have not used the edge of my wit to deal a stab to some harmless soul; I have sacrificed no one’s success to a jest; I have not even troubled the happiness of imbecility; I have not added to the burdens of genius; I have scorned the easy triumphs of epigram; in short, I have not acted against my convictions,’ is not this a viaticum that gives one daily strength?”
“But one can say all this, surely, and yet work on a newspaper,” said Lucien. “If I had absolutely no other way of earning a living, I should certainly come to this.”
“Oh! oh! oh!” cried Fulgence, his voice rising a note each time; “we are capitulating, are we?”
“He will turn journalist,” Léon Giraud said gravely. “Oh, Lucien, if you would only stay and work with us! We are about to bring out a periodical in which justice and truth shall never be violated; we will spread doctrines that, perhaps, will be of real service to mankind—”
“You will not have a single subscriber,” Lucien broke in with Machiavellian wisdom.
“There will be five hundred of them,” asserted Michel Chrestien, “but they will be worth five hundred thousand.”
“You will need a lot of capital,” continued Lucien.
“No, only devotion,” said d’Arthez.
“Anybody might take him for a perfumer’s assistant,” burst out Michel Chrestien, looking at Lucien’s head, and sniffing comically. “You were seen driving about in a very smart turnout with a pair of thoroughbreds, and a mistress for a prince, Coralie herself.”
“Well, and is there any harm in it?”
“You would not say that if you thought that there was no harm in it,” said Bianchon.
“I could have wished Lucien a Beatrice,” said d’Arthez, “a noble woman, who would have been a help to him in life—”
“But, Daniel,” asked Lucien, “love is love wherever you find it, is it not?”
“Ah!” said the republican member, “on that one point I am an aristocrat. I could not bring myself to love a woman who must rub shoulders with all sorts of people in the greenroom; whom an actor kisses on stage; she must lower herself before the public, smile on everyone, lift her skirts as she dances, and dress like a man, that all the world may see what none should see save I alone. Or if I loved such a woman, she should leave the stage, and my love should cleanse her from the stain of it.”
“And if she would not leave the stage?”
“I should die of mortification, jealousy, and all sorts of pain. You cannot pluck love out of your heart as you draw a tooth.”
Lucien’s face grew dark and thoughtful.
“When they find out that I am tolerating Camusot, how they will despise me,” he thought.
“Look here,” said the fierce republican, with humorous fierceness, “you can be a great writer, but a little playactor you shall never be,” and he took up his hat and went out.
“He is hard, is Michel Chrestien,” commented Lucien.
“Hard and salutary, like the dentist’s pincers,” said Bianchon. “Michel foresees your future; perhaps in the street, at this moment, he is thinking of you with tears in his eyes.”
D’Arthez was kind, and talked comfortingly, and tried to cheer Lucien. The poet spent an hour with his friends, then he went, but his conscience treated him hardly, crying to him, “You will be a journalist—a journalist!” as the witch cried to Macbeth that he should be king hereafter!
Out in the street, he looked up at d’Arthez’s windows, and saw a faint light shining in them, and his heart sank. A dim foreboding told him that he had bidden his friends goodbye for the last time.
As he turned out of the Place de la Sorbonne into the Rue de Cluny, he saw a carriage at the door of his lodging. Coralie had driven all the way from the Boulevard du Temple for the sake of a moment with her lover and a “good night.” Lucien found her sobbing in his garret. She would be as wretchedly poor as her poet, she wept, as she arranged his shirts and gloves and handkerchiefs in the crazy chest of drawers. Her distress was so real and so great, that Lucien, but even now chidden for his connection with an actress, saw Coralie as a saint ready to assume the hair-shirt of poverty. The adorable girl’s excuse for her visit was an announcement that the firm of Camusot, Coralie, and Lucien meant to invite Matifat, Florine, and Lousteau (the second trio) to supper; had Lucien any invitations to issue to people who might be useful to him? Lucien said that he would take
