“Let us go into my study,” Vernou said, rising from the table; “you have come on business, no doubt.”
“Yes and no,” replied Étienne Lousteau. “It is a supper, old chap.”
“I have brought a message from Coralie,” said Lucien (Mme. Vernou looked up at once at the name), “to ask you to supper tonight at her house to meet the same company as before at Florine’s, and a few more besides—Hector Merlin and Mme. du Val-Noble and some others. There will be play afterwards.”
“But we are engaged to Mme. Mahoudeau this evening, dear,” put in the wife.
“What does that matter?” returned Vernou.
“She will take offence if we don’t go; and you are very glad of her when you have a bill to discount.”
“This wife of mine, my dear boy, can never be made to understand that a supper engagement for twelve o’clock does not prevent you from going to an evening party that comes to an end at eleven. She is always with me while I work,” he added.
“You have so much imagination!” said Lucien, and thereby made a mortal enemy of Vernou.
“Well,” continued Lousteau, “you are coming; but that is not all. M. de Rubempré is about to be one of us, so you must push him in your paper. Give him out for a chap that will make a name for himself in literature, so that he can put in at least a couple of articles every month.”
“Yes, if he means to be one of us, and will attack our enemies, as we will attack his, I will say a word for him at the Opéra tonight,” replied Vernou.
“Very well—goodbye till tomorrow, my boy,” said Lousteau, shaking hands with every sign of cordiality. “When is your book coming out?”
“That depends on Dauriat; it is ready,” said Vernou paterfamilias.
“Are you satisfied?”
“Yes and no—”
“We will get up a success,” said Lousteau, and he rose with a bow to his colleague’s wife.
The abrupt departure was necessary indeed; for the two infants, engaged in a noisy quarrel, were fighting with their spoons, and flinging the pap in each other’s faces.
“That, my boy, is a woman who all unconsciously will work great havoc in contemporary literature,” said Étienne, when they came away. “Poor Vernou cannot forgive us for his wife. He ought to be relieved of her in the interests of the public; and a deluge of bloodthirsty reviews and stinging sarcasms against successful men of every sort would be averted. What is to become of a man with such a wife and that pair of abominable brats? Have you seen Rigaudin in Picard’s La Maison en Loterie? You have? Well, like Rigaudin, Vernou will not fight himself, but he will set others fighting; he would give an eye to put out both eyes in the head of the best friend he has. You will see him using the bodies of the slain for a stepping-stone, rejoicing over everyone’s misfortunes, attacking princes, dukes, marquises, and nobles, because he himself is a commoner; reviling the work of unmarried men because he forsooth has a wife; and everlastingly preaching morality, the joys of domestic life, and the duties of the citizen. In short, this very moral critic will spare no one, not even infants of tender age. He lives in the Rue Mandar with a wife who might be the Mamamouchi of the Bourgeois gentilhomme and a couple of little Vernous as ugly as sin. He tries to sneer at the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where he will never set foot, and makes his duchesses talk like his wife. That is the sort of man to raise a howl at the Jesuits, insult the Court, and credit the Court party with the design of restoring feudal rights and the right of primogeniture—just the one to preach a crusade for Equality, he that thinks himself the equal of no one. If he were a bachelor, he would go into society; if he were in a fair way to be a Royalist poet with a pension and the Cross of the Legion of Honor, he would be an optimist, and journalism offers starting-points by the hundred. Journalism is the giant catapult set in motion by pygmy hatreds. Have you any wish to marry after this? Vernou has none of the milk of human kindness in him, it is all turned to gall; and he is emphatically the Journalist, a tiger with two hands that tears everything to pieces, as if his pen had the hydrophobia.”
“It is a case of gunophobia,” said Lucien. “Has he ability?”
“He is witty, he is a writer of articles. He incubates articles; he does that all his life and nothing else. The most dogged industry would fail to graft a book on his prose. Félicien is incapable of conceiving a work on a large scale, of broad effects, of fitting characters harmoniously in a plot which develops till it reaches a climax. He has ideas, but he has no knowledge of facts; his heroes are utopian creatures, philosophical or Liberal notions masquerading. He is at pains to write an original style, but his inflated periods would collapse at a pinprick
