Between the window and the chimneypiece stood a writing-table, a mahogany armchair, and a wastepaper basket on a strip of hearthrug; the dust lay thick on all these objects. There were short curtains in the windows. About a score of new books lay on the writing-table, deposited there apparently during the day, together with prints, music, snuffboxes of the “Charter” pattern, a copy of the ninth edition of Le Solitaire (the great joke of the moment), and some ten unopened letters.
Lucien had taken stock of this strange furniture, and made reflections of the most exhaustive kind upon it, when, the clock striking five, he returned to question the pensioner. Coloquinte had finished his crust, and was waiting with the patience of a commissionaire, for the man of medals, who perhaps was taking an airing on the boulevard.
At this conjuncture the rustle of a dress sounded on the stair, and the light unmistakable footstep of a woman on the threshold. The newcomer was passably pretty. She addressed herself to Lucien.
“Sir,” she said, “I know why you cry up Mlle. Virginie’s hats so much; and I have come to put down my name for a year’s subscription in the first place; but tell me your conditions—”
“I am not connected with the paper, madame.”
“Oh!”
“A subscription dating from October?” inquired the pensioner.
“What does the lady want to know?” asked the veteran, reappearing on the scene.
The fair milliner and the retired military man were soon deep in converse; and when Lucien, beginning to lose patience, came back to the first room, he heard the conclusion of the matter.
“Why, I shall be delighted, quite delighted, sir. Mlle. Florentine can come to my shop and choose anything she likes. Ribbons are in my department. So it is all quite settled. You will say no more about Virginie, a botcher that cannot design a new shape, while I have ideas of my own, I have.”
Lucien heard a sound as of coins dropping into a cashbox, and the veteran began to make up his books for the day.
“I have been waiting here for an hour, sir,” Lucien began, looking not a little annoyed.
“And ‘they’ have not come yet!” exclaimed Napoleon’s veteran, civilly feigning concern. “I am not surprised at that. It is some time since I have seen ‘them’ here. It is the middle of the month, you see. Those fine fellows only turn up on pay days—the 29th or the 30th.”
“And M. Finot?” asked Lucien, having caught the editor’s name.
“He is in the Rue Feydeau, that’s where he lives. Coloquinte, old chap, just take him everything that has come in today when you go with the paper to the printers.”
“Where is the newspaper put together?” Lucien said to himself.
“The newspaper?” repeated the officer, as he received the rest of the stamp money from Coloquinte, “the newspaper?—broum! broum!—(Mind you are round at the printers’ by six o’clock tomorrow, old chap, to send off the porters.)—The newspaper, sir, is written in the street, at the writers’ houses, in the printing-office between eleven and twelve o’clock at night. In the Emperor’s time, sir, these shops for spoiled paper were not known. Oh! he would have cleared them out with four men and a corporal; they would not have come over him with their talk. But that is enough of prattling. If my nephew finds it worth his while, and so long as they write for the son of the Other (broum! broum!)—after all, there is no harm in that. Ah! by the way, subscribers don’t seem to me to be advancing in serried columns; I shall leave my post.”
“You seem to know all about the newspaper, sir,” Lucien began.
“From a business point of view, broum! broum!” coughed the soldier, clearing his throat. “From three to five francs per column, according to ability.—Fifty lines to a column, forty letters to a line; no blanks; there you are! As for the staff, they are queer fish, little youngsters whom I wouldn’t take on for the commissariat; and because they make fly tracks on sheets of white paper, they look down, forsooth, on an old Captain of Dragoons of the Guard, that retired with a major’s rank after entering every European capital with Napoleon.”
The soldier of Napoleon brushed his coat, and made as if he would go out, but Lucien, swept to the door, had courage enough to make a stand.
“I came to be a contributor of the paper,” he said. “I am full of respect, I vow and declare, for a captain of the Imperial Guard, those men of bronze—”
“Well said, my little civilian, there are several kinds of contributors; which kind do you wish to be?” replied the trooper, bearing down on Lucien, and descending the stairs. At the foot of the flight he stopped, but it was only to light a cigar at the porter’s box.
“If any subscribers come, you see them and take note of them, Mother Chollet.—Simply subscribers, never know anything but subscribers,” he added, seeing that Lucien followed him. “Finot is my nephew; he is the only one of my family that has done anything to relieve me in my position. So when anybody comes to pick a quarrel with Finot, he finds old Giroudeau, Captain of the Dragoons of the Guard, that set out as a private in a cavalry regiment in the army of the Sambre-et-Meuse, and was fencing-master for five years to the First Hussars, army of Italy! One, two, and the man that had any complaints to make would be turned off into the dark,” he added, making a lunge. “Now writers, my boy, are in different corps; there is the writer who writes and draws his pay; there is the writer who writes and gets nothing
