“You know that he is on the paper, Dauriat?” put in Lousteau.
“Yes,” Dauriat answered. “Yes, I saw his article, and in his own interests I decline the Marguerites. Yes, sir, in six months’ time I shall have paid you more money for the articles that I shall ask you to write than for your poetry that will not sell.”
“And fame?” said Lucien.
Dauriat and Lousteau laughed.
“Oh dear!” said Lousteau, “there be illusions left.”
“Fame means ten years of sticking to work, and a hundred thousand francs lost or made in the publishing trade. If you find anybody mad enough to print your poetry for you, you will feel some respect for me in another twelvemonth, when you have had time to see the outcome of the transaction.”
“Have you the manuscript here?” Lucien asked coldly.
“Here it is, my friend,” said Dauriat. The publisher’s manner towards Lucien had sweetened singularly.
Lucien took up the roll without looking at the string, so sure he felt that Dauriat had read his Marguerites. He went out with Lousteau, seemingly neither disconcerted nor dissatisfied. Dauriat went with them into the shop, talking of his newspaper and Lousteau’s daily, while Lucien played with the manuscript of the Marguerites.
“Do you suppose that Dauriat has read your sonnets or sent them to anyone else?” Étienne Lousteau snatched an opportunity to whisper.
“Yes,” said Lucien.
“Look at the string.” Lucien looked down at the blot of ink, and saw that the mark on the string still coincided; he turned white with rage.
“Which of the sonnets was it that you particularly liked?” he asked, turning to the publisher.
“They are all of them remarkable, my friend; but the sonnet on the Marguerite is delightful, the closing thought is fine, and exquisitely expressed. I felt sure from that sonnet that your prose work would command a success, and I spoke to Finot about you at once. Write articles for us, and we will pay you well for them. Fame is a very fine thing, you see, but don’t forget the practical and solid, and take every chance that turns up. When you have made money, you can write poetry.”
The poet dashed out of the shop to avoid an explosion. He was furious. Lousteau followed.
“Well, my boy, pray keep cool. Take men as they are—for means to an end. Do you wish for revenge?”
“At any price,” muttered the poet.
“Here is a copy of Nathan’s book. Dauriat has just given it to me. The second edition is coming out tomorrow; read the book again, and knock off an article demolishing it. Félicien Vernou cannot endure Nathan, for he thinks that Nathan’s success will injure his own forthcoming book. It is a craze with these little minds to fancy that there is not room for two successes under the sun; so he will see that your article finds a place in the big paper for which he writes.”
“But what is there to be said against the book; it is good work!” cried Lucien.
“Oh, I say! you must learn your trade,” said Lousteau, laughing. “Given that the book was a masterpiece, under the stroke of your pen it must turn to dull trash, dangerous and unwholesome stuff.”
“But how?”
“You turn all the good points into bad ones.”
“I am incapable of such a juggler’s feat.”
“My dear boy, a journalist is a juggler; a man must make up his mind to the drawbacks of the calling. Look here! I am not a bad fellow; this is the way I should set to work myself. Attention! You might begin by praising the book, and amuse yourself a while by saying what you really think. ‘Good,’ says the reader, ‘this critic is not jealous; he will be impartial, no doubt,’ and from that point your public will think that your criticism is a piece of conscientious work. Then, when you have won your reader’s confidence, you will regret that you must blame the tendency and influence of such work upon French literature. ‘Does not France,’ you will say, ‘sway the whole intellectual world? French writers have kept Europe in the path of analysis and philosophical criticism from age to age by their powerful style and the original turn given by them to ideas.’ Here, for the benefit of the philistine, insert a panegyric on Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu, and Buffon. Hold forth upon the inexorable French language; show how it spreads a varnish, as it were, over thought. Let fall a few aphorisms, such as—‘A great writer in France is invariably a great man; he writes in a language which compels him to think; it is otherwise in other countries’—and so on, and so on. Then, to prove your case, draw a comparison between Rabener, the German satirical moralist, and La Bruyère. Nothing gives a critic such an air as an apparent familiarity with foreign literature. Kant is Cousin’s pedestal.
“Once on that ground you bring out a word which sums up the French men of genius of the eighteenth century for the benefit of simpletons—you call that literature the ‘literature of ideas.’ Armed with this expression, you fling all the mighty dead at the heads of the illustrious living. You explain that in the present day a new form of literature has sprung up; that dialogue (the easiest form of writing) is overdone, and description dispenses with any need for thinking on the part of the author or reader. You bring up the fiction of Voltaire, Diderot, Sterne, and Le Sage, so trenchant, so compact of the stuff of life;
