Men, like women, have a stock in hand of recitatives, of cantabile, of nocturnes, airs and refrains—shall we say of recipes, although we speak of love—which each one believes to be exclusively his own. Men who have reached Lousteau’s age try to distribute the “movements” of this repertoire through the whole opera of a passion. Lousteau, regarding this adventure with Dinah as a mere temporary connection, was eager to stamp himself on her memory in indelible lines; and during that beautiful October he was prodigal of his most entrancing melodies and most elaborate barcarolles. In fact, he exhausted every resource of the stage management of love, to use an expression borrowed from the theatrical dictionary, and admirably descriptive of his manoeuvres.
“If that woman ever forgets me!” he would sometimes say to himself as they returned together from a long walk in the woods, “I will owe her no grudge—she will have found something better.”
When two beings have sung together all the duets of that enchanting score, and still love each other, it may be said that they love truly.
Lousteau, however, had not time to repeat himself, for he was to leave Anzy in the early days of November. His paper required his presence in Paris. Before breakfast, on the day before he was to leave, the journalist and Dinah saw the master of the house come in with an artist from Nevers, who restored carvings of all kinds.
“What are you going to do?” asked Lousteau. “What is to be done to the château?”
“This is what I am going to do,” said the little man, leading Lousteau, the local artist, and Dinah out on the terrace.
He pointed out, on the front of the building, a shield supported by two sirens, not unlike that which may be seen on the arcade, now closed, through which there used to be a passage from the Quai des Tuileries to the courtyard of the old Louvre, and over which the words may still be seen, “Bibliothèque du Cabinet du Roi.” This shield bore the arms of the noble House of Uxelles, namely, Or and gules party per fess, with two lions or, dexter and sinister as supporters. Above, a knight’s helm, mantled of the tincture of the shield, and surmounted by a ducal coronet. Motto, Cy paroist! A proud and sonorous device.
“I want to put my own coat of arms in the place of that of the Uxelles; and as they are repeated six times on the two fronts and the two wings, it is not a trifling affair.”
“Your arms, so new, and since 1830!” exclaimed Dinah.
“Have I not created an entail?”
“I could understand it if you had children,” said the journalist.
“Oh!” said the old man, “Madame de la Baudraye is still young; there is no time lost.”
This allusion made Lousteau smile; he did not understand Monsieur de la Baudraye.
“There, Didine!” said he in Dinah’s ear, “what a waste of remorse!”
Dinah begged him to give her one day more, and the lovers parted after the manner of certain theatres, which give ten last performances of a piece that is paying. And how many promises they made! How many solemn pledges did not Dinah exact and the unblushing journalist give her!
Dinah, with superiority of the Superior Woman, accompanied Lousteau, in the face of all the world, as far as Cosne, with her mother and little La Baudraye. When, ten days later, Madame de la Baudraye saw in her drawing-room at La Baudraye, Monsieur de Clagny, Gatien, and Gravier, she found an opportunity of saying to each in turn:
“I owe it to Monsieur Lousteau that I discovered that I had not been loved for my own sake.”
And what noble speeches she uttered, on man, on the nature of his feelings, on the end of his base passions, and so forth. Of Dinah’s three worshipers, Monsieur de Clagny only said to her: “I love you, come what may”—and Dinah accepted him as her confidant, lavished on him all the marks of friendship which women can devise for the Gurths who are ready thus to wear the collar of gilded slavery.
In Paris once more, Lousteau had, in a few weeks, lost the impression of the happy time he had spent at the Château d’Anzy. This is why: Lousteau lived by his pen.
In this century, especially since the triumph of the bourgeoisie—the commonplace, money-saving citizen—who takes good care not to imitate Francis I or Louis XIV—to live by the pen is a form of penal servitude to which a galley-slave would prefer death. To live by the pen means to create—to create today, and tomorrow, and incessantly—or to seem to create; and the imitation costs as dear as the reality. So, besides his daily contribution to a newspaper, which was like the stone of Sisyphus, and which came every Monday, crashing down on to the feather of his pen, Étienne worked for three or four literary magazines. Still, do not be alarmed; he put no artistic conscientiousness into his work. This man of Sancerre had a facility, a carelessness, if you call it so, which ranked him with those writers who are mere scriveners, literary hacks. In Paris, in our day, hackwork cuts a man off from every pretension to a literary position. When he can do no more, or no longer cares for advancement, the man who can write becomes a journalist and a hack.
The life he leads is not unpleasing. Bluestockings, beginners in every walk of life, actresses at the outset or the close of a career, publishers and authors, all make much of these writers of the ready pen. Lousteau, a thorough man about town, lived at scarcely any expense beyond paying his rent. He had boxes at all the theatres; the sale of the books he reviewed or left unreviewed paid for his
