“Yes, what do you think of them?” asked one of the two whom Lucien did not know.
“They are all right, gentlemen; I give you my word,” said Lousteau.
“Very well, that will do for me,” said Vernou; “I will heave your book at the poets of the sacristy; I am tired of them.”
“If Dauriat declines to take the Marguerites this evening, we will attack him by pitching into Nathan.”
“But what will Nathan say?” cried Lucien.
His five colleagues burst out laughing.
“Oh! he will be delighted,” said Vernou. “You will see how we manage these things.”
“So he is one of us?” said one of the two journalists.
“Yes, yes, Frédéric; no tricks.—We are all working for you, Lucien, you see; you must stand by us when your turn comes. We are all friends of Nathan’s, and we are attacking him. Now, let us divide Alexander’s empire.—Frédéric, will you take the Français and the Odéon?”
“If these gentlemen are willing,” returned the person addressed as Frédéric. The others nodded assent, but Lucien saw a gleam of jealousy here and there.
“I am keeping the Opéra, the Italiens, and the Opéra-Comique,” put in Vernou.
“And how about me? Am I to have no theatres at all?” asked the second stranger.
“Oh well, Hector can let you have the Variétés, and Lucien can spare you the Porte Saint-Martin.—Let him have the Porte Saint-Martin, Lucien, he is wild about Fanny Beaupré; and you can take the Cirque-Olympique in exchange. I shall have Bobino and the Funambules and Madame Saqui. Now, what have we for tomorrow?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
“Gentlemen, be brilliant for my first number. The Baron du Châtelet and his cuttlefish bone will not last for a week, and the writer of Le Solitaire is worn out.”
“And ‘Sosthenes-Demosthenes’ is stale too,” said Vernou; “everybody has taken it up.”
“The fact is, we want a new set of ninepins,” said Frédéric.
“Suppose that we take the virtuous representatives of the Right?” suggested Lousteau. “We might say that M. de Bonald has sweaty feet.”
“Let us begin a series of sketches of Ministerialist orators,” suggested Hector Merlin.
“You do that, youngster; you know them; they are your own party,” said Lousteau; “you could indulge any little private grudges of your own. Pitch into Beugnot and Syrieys de Mayrinhac and the rest. You might have the sketches ready in advance, and we shall have something to fall back upon.”
“How if we invented one or two cases of refusal of burial with aggravating circumstances?” asked Hector.
“Do not follow in the tracks of the big Constitutional papers; they have pigeonholes full of ecclesiastical canards,” retorted Vernou.
“Canards?” repeated Lucien.
“That is our word for a scrap of fiction told for true, put in to enliven the column of morning news when it is flat. We owe the discovery to Benjamin Franklin, the inventor of the lightning conductor and the republic. That journalist completely deceived the Encyclopaedists by his transatlantic canards. Raynal gives two of them for facts in his Histoire philosophique des Indes.”
“I did not know that,” said Vernou. “What were the stories?”
“One was a tale about an Englishman and a Negress who helped him to escape; he sold the woman for a slave after getting her with child himself to enhance her value. The other was the eloquent defence of a young woman brought before the authorities for bearing a child out of wedlock. Franklin owned to the fraud in Necker’s house when he came to Paris, much to the confusion of French philosophism. Behold how the New World twice set a bad example to the Old!”
“In journalism,” said Lousteau, “everything that is probable is true. That is an axiom.”
“Criminal procedure is based on the same rule,” said Vernou.
“Very well, we meet here at nine o’clock,” and with that they rose, and the sitting broke up with the most affecting demonstrations of intimacy and goodwill.
“What have you done to Finot, Lucien, that he should make a special arrangement with you? You are the only one that he has bound to himself,” said Étienne Lousteau, as they came downstairs.
“I? Nothing. It was his own proposal,” said Lucien.
“As a matter of fact, if you should make your own terms with him, I should be delighted; we should, both of us, be the better for it.”
On the ground floor they found Finot. He stepped across to Lousteau and asked him into the so-called private office. Giroudeau immediately put a couple of stamped agreements before Lucien.
“Sign your agreement,” he said, “and the new editor will think the whole thing was arranged yesterday.”
Lucien, reading the document, overheard fragments of a tolerably warm dispute within as to the line of conduct and profits of the paper. Étienne Lousteau wanted his share of the blackmail levied by Giroudeau; and, in all probability, the matter was compromised, for the pair came out perfectly good friends.
“We will meet at Dauriat’s, Lucien, in the Wooden Galleries at eight o’clock,” said Étienne Lousteau.
A young man appeared, meanwhile, in search of employment, wearing the same nervous shy look with which Lucien himself had come to the office so short a while ago; and in his secret soul Lucien felt amused as he watched Giroudeau playing off the same tactics with which the old campaigner had previously foiled him. Self-interest opened his eyes to the necessity of the manoeuvres which raised well-nigh insurmountable barriers between beginners and the upper room where the elect were gathered together.
“Contributors don’t get very much as it is,” he said, addressing Giroudeau.
“If there were more of you, there would be so much less,” retorted the captain. “So there!”
The old campaigner swung his loaded cane, and went down coughing as usual. Out in the street he was amazed to see a handsome carriage waiting on the boulevard for Lucien.
“You are the army nowadays,” he said, “and we are the civilians.”
“Upon my word,” said Lucien, as he drove away with Coralie, “these young writers seem to me to be the best fellows alive. Here am I a journalist, sure of making six
