Lost Illusions

The Wooden Galleries of the Palais Royal used to be one of the most famous sights of Paris.  Some description of the squalid bazar will not be out of place; for there are few men of forty who will not take an interest in recollections of a state of things which will seem incredible to a younger generation.

The great dreary, spacious Galerie d’Orleans, that flowerless hothouse, as yet was not; the space upon which it now stands was covered with booths; or, to be more precise, with small, wooden dens, pervious to the weather, and dimly illuminated on the side of the court and the garden by borrowed lights styled windows by courtesy, but more like the filthiest arrangements for obscuring daylight to be found in little wineshops in the suburbs.

The Galleries, parallel passages about twelve feet in height, were formed by a triple row of shops.  The centre row, giving back and front upon the Galleries, was filled with the fetid atmosphere of the place, and derived a dubious daylight through the invariably dirty windows of the roof; but so thronged were these hives, that rents were excessively high, and as much as a thousand crowns was paid for a space scarce six feet by eight.  The outer rows gave respectively upon the garden and the court, and were covered on that side by a slight trellis-work painted green, to protect the crazy plastered walls from continual friction with the passers-by.  In a few square feet of earth at the back of the shops, strange freaks of vegetable life unknown to science grew amid the products of various no less flourishing industries.  You beheld a rosebush capped with printed paper in such a sort that the flowers of rhetoric were perfumed by the cankered blossoms of that ill-kept, ill-smelling garden.  Handbills and ribbon streamers of every hue flaunted gaily among the leaves; natural flowers competed unsuccessfully for an existence with odds and ends of millinery.  You discovered a knot of ribbon adorning a green tuft; the dahlia admired afar proved on a nearer view to be a satin rosette.

The Palais seen from the court or from the garden was a fantastic sight, a grotesque combination of walls of plaster patchwork which had once been whitewashed, of blistered paint, heterogeneous placards, and all the most unaccountable freaks of Parisian squalor; the green trellises were prodigiously the dingier for constant contact with a Parisian public.  So, upon either side, the fetid, disreputable approaches might have been there for the express purpose of warning away fastidious people; but fastidious folk no more recoiled before these horrors than the prince in the fairy stories turns tail at sight of the dragon or of the other obstacles put between him and the princess by the wicked fairy.

There was a passage through the centre of the Galleries then as now; and, as at the present day, you entered them through the two peristyles begun before the Revolution, and left unfinished for lack of funds; but in place of the handsome modern arcade leading to the Theatre-Francais, you passed along a narrow, disproportionately lofty passage, so ill-roofed that the rain came through on wet days.  All the roofs of the hovels indeed were in very bad repair, and covered here and again with a double thickness of tarpaulin.  A famous silk mercer once brought an action against the Orleans family for damages done in the course of a night to his stock of shawls and stuffs, and gained the day and a considerable sum.  It was in this last-named passage, called “The Glass Gallery” to distinguish it from the Wooden Galleries, that Chevet laid the foundations of his fortunes.

Here, in the Palais, you trod the natural soil of Paris, augmented by importations brought in upon the boots of foot passengers; here, at all seasons, you stumbled among hills and hollows of dried mud swept daily by the shopman’s besom, and only after some practice could you walk at your ease.  The treacherous mud-heaps, the window-panes incrusted with deposits of dust and rain, the mean-looking hovels covered with ragged placards, the grimy unfinished walls, the general air of a compromise between a gypsy camp, the booths of a country fair, and the temporary structures that we in Paris build round about public monuments that remain unbuilt; the grotesque aspect of the mart as a whole was in keeping with the seething traffic of various kinds carried on within it; for here in this shameless, unblushing haunt, amid wild mirth and a babel of talk, an immense amount of business was transacted between the Revolution of 1789 and the Revolution of 1830.

For twenty years the Bourse stood just opposite, on the ground floor of the Palais.  Public opinion was manufactured, and reputations made and ruined here, just as political and financial jobs were arranged.  People made appointments to meet in the Galleries before or after ’Change; on showery days the Palais Royal was often crowded with weather-bound capitalists and men of business.  The structure which had grown up, no one knew how, about this point was strangely resonant, laughter was multiplied; if two men quarreled, the whole place rang from one end to the other with the dispute.  In the daytime milliners and booksellers enjoyed a monopoly of the place; towards nightfall it was filled with women of the town.  Here dwelt poetry, politics, and prose, new books and classics, the glories of ancient and modern literature side by side with political intrigue and the tricks of the bookseller’s trade.  Here all the very latest and newest literature were sold to a public which resolutely decline to buy elsewhere.  Sometimes several thousand copies of such and such a pamphlet by Paul-Louis Courier would be sold in a single evening; and people crowded thither to buy Les aventures de la fille d’un Roi—­that first shot fired by the Orleanists at The Charter promulgated by Louis XVIII.

When Lucien made his first appearance in the Wooden Galleries, some few of the shops boasted proper fronts and handsome windows, but these in every case looked upon the court or the garden.  As for the centre row, until the day when the whole strange colony perished under the hammer of Fontaine the architect, every shop was open back and front like a booth in a country fair, so that from within you could look out upon either side through gaps among the goods displayed or through the glass doors.  As it was obviously impossible to kindle a fire, the tradesmen were fain to use charcoal chafing-dishes, and formed a sort of brigade for the prevention of fires among themselves; and, indeed, a little carelessness might have set the whole quarter blazing in fifteen minutes, for the plank-built republic, dried by the heat of the sun, and haunted by too inflammable human material, was bedizened with muslin and paper and gauze, and ventilated at times by a thorough draught.

The milliners’ windows were full of impossible hats and bonnets, displayed apparently for advertisement rather than for sale, each on a separate iron spit with a knob at the top.  The galleries were decked out in all the colors of the rainbow.  On what heads would those dusty bonnets end their careers?—­for a score of years the problem had puzzled frequenters of the Palais.  Saleswomen, usually plain-featured, but vivacious, waylaid the feminine foot passenger with cunning importunities, after the fashion of market-women, and using much the same language; a shop-girl, who made free use of her eyes and tongue, sat outside on a stool and harangued the public with “Buy a pretty bonnet, madame?—­Do let me sell you something!”—­varying a rich and picturesque vocabulary with inflections of the voice, with glances, and remarks upon the passers-by.  Booksellers and milliners lived on terms of mutual understanding.

But it was in the passage known by the pompous title of the “Glass Gallery” that the oddest trades were carried on.  Here were ventriloquists and charlatans of every sort, and sights of every description, from the kind where there is nothing to see to panoramas of the globe.  One man who has since made seven or eight hundred thousand francs by traveling from fair to fair began here by hanging out a signboard, a revolving sun in a blackboard, and the inscription in red letters:  “Here Man may see what God can never see.  Admittance, two sous.”  The showman at the door never admitted one person alone, nor more than two at a time.  Once inside, you confronted a great looking-glass; and a voice, which might have terrified Hoffmann of Berlin, suddenly spoke as if some spring had been touched, “You see here, gentlemen, something that God can never see through all eternity, that is to say, your like.  God has not His like.”  And out you went, too shamefaced to confess to your stupidity.

Voices issued from every narrow doorway, crying up the merits of Cosmoramas, views of Constantinople, marionettes, automatic chess-players, and performing dogs who would pick you out the prettiest woman in the company.  The ventriloquist Fritz-James flourished here in the Cafe Borel before he went to fight and fall at Montmartre with the young lads from the Ecole polytechnique.  Here, too, there were fruit and flower shops, and a famous tailor whose gold-laced uniforms shone like the sun when the shops were lighted at night.

Of a morning the galleries were empty, dark, and deserted; the shopkeepers chatted among themselves.  Towards two o’clock in the afternoon the Palais began to fill; at three, men came in from the Bourse, and Paris, generally speaking, crowded the place.  Impecunious youth, hungering after literature, took the opportunity of turning over the pages of the books exposed for sale on the stalls outside the booksellers’ shops; the men in charge charitably allowed a poor student to pursue his course of free studies; and in this way a duodecimo volume of some two hundred pages, such as Smarra or Pierre Schlemihl, or Jean Sbogar or Jocko, might be devoured in a couple of afternoons.  There was something very French in this alms given to the young, hungry, starved intellect.  Circulating libraries were not as yet; if you wished to read a book, you were obliged to buy it, for which reason novels of the early part of the century were sold in numbers which now seem well-nigh fabulous to us.

But the poetry of this terrible mart appeared in all its splendor at the close of the day.  Women of the town, flocking in and out from the neighboring streets, were allowed to make a promenade of the Wooden Galleries.  Thither came prostitutes from every quarter of Paris to “do the Palais.”  The Stone Galleries belonged to privileged houses, which paid for the right of exposing women dressed like princesses under such and such an arch, or in the corresponding space of garden; but the Wooden Galleries were the common ground of women of the streets.  This was the Palais, a word which used to signify the temple of prostitution.  A woman might come and go, taking away her prey whithersoever seemed good to her.  So great was the crowd attracted thither at night by the women, that it was impossible to move except at a slow pace, as in a procession or at a masked ball.  Nobody objected to the slowness; it facilitated examination.  The women dressed in a way that is never seen nowadays.  The bodices cut extremely low both back and front; the fantastical head-dresses, designed to attract notice; here a cap from the Pays de Caux, and there a Spanish mantilla; the hair crimped and curled like a poodle’s, or smoothed down in bandeaux over the forehead; the close-fitting white stockings and limbs, revealed it would not be easy to say how, but always at the right moment—­all this poetry of vice has fled.  The license of question and reply, the public cynicism in keeping with the haunt, is now unknown even at masquerades or the famous public balls.  It was an appalling, gay scene.  The dazzling white flesh of the women’s necks and shoulders stood out in magnificent contrast against the men’s almost invariably sombre costumes.  The murmur of voices, the hum of the crowd, could be heard even in the middle of the garden as a sort of droning bass, interspersed with fioriture of shrill laughter or clamor of some rare dispute.  You saw gentlemen and celebrities cheek by jowl with gallows-birds.  There was something indescribably piquant about the anomalous assemblage; the most insensible of men felt its charm, so much so, that, until the very last moment, Paris came hither to walk up and down on the wooden planks laid over the cellars where men were at work on the new buildings; and when the squalid wooden erections were finally taken down, great and unanimous regret was felt.

Ladvocat the bookseller had opened a shop but a few days since in the angle formed by the central passage which crossed the galleries; and immediately opposite another bookseller, now forgotten, Dauriat, a bold and youthful pioneer, who opened up the paths in which his rival was to shine.  Dauriat’s shop stood in the row which gave upon the garden; Ladvocat’s, on the opposite side, looked out upon the court.  Dauriat’s establishment was divided into two parts; his shop was simply a great trade warehouse, and the second room was his private office.

Lucien, on this first visit to the Wooden Galleries, was bewildered by a sight which no novice can resist.  He soon lost the guide who befriended him.

“If you were as good-looking as yonder young fellow, I would give you your money’s worth,” a woman said, pointing out Lucien to an old man.

Lucien slunk through the crowd like a blind man’s dog, following the stream in a state of stupefaction and excitement difficult to describe.  Importuned by glances and white-rounded contours, dazzled by the audacious display of bared throat and bosom, he gripped his roll of manuscript tightly lest somebody should steal it—­innocent that he was!

“Well, what is it, sir!” he exclaimed, thinking, when some one caught him by the arm, that his poetry had proved too great a temptation to some author’s honesty, and turning, he recognized Lousteau.

“I felt sure that you would find your way here at last,” said his friend.

The poet was standing in the doorway of a shop crowded with persons waiting for an audience with the sultan of the publishing trade.  Printers, paper-dealers, and designers were catechizing Dauriat’s assistants as to present or future business.

Lousteau drew Lucien into the shop.  “There! that is Finot who edits my paper,” he said; “he is talking with Felicien Vernou, who has abilities, but the little wretch is as dangerous as a hidden disease.”

“Well, old boy, there is a first night for you,” said Finot, coming up with Vernou.  “I have disposed of the box.”

“Sold it to Braulard?”

“Well, and if I did, what then?  You will get a seat.  What do you want with Dauriat?  Oh, it is agreed that we are to push Paul de Kock, Dauriat has taken two hundred copies, and Victor Ducange is refusing to give him his next.  Dauriat wants to set up another man in the same line, he says.  You must rate Paul de Kock above Ducange.”

“But I have a piece on with Ducange at the Gaite,” said Lousteau.

“Very well, tell him that I wrote the article.  It can be supposed that I wrote a slashing review, and you toned it down; and he will owe you thanks.”

“Couldn’t you get Dauriat’s cashier to discount this bit of a bill for a hundred francs?” asked Etienne Lousteau.  “We are celebrating Florine’s house-warming with a supper to-night, you know.”

“Ah! yes, you are treating us all,” said Finot, with an apparent effort of memory.  “Here, Gabusson,” he added, handing Barbet’s bill to the cashier, “let me have ninety francs for this individual.—­Fill in your name, old man.”

Lousteau signed his name while the cashier counted out the money; and Lucien, all eyes and ears, lost not a syllable of the conversation.

“That is not all, my friend,” Etienne continued; “I don’t thank you, we have sworn an eternal friendship.  I have taken it upon myself to introduce this gentleman to Dauriat, and you must incline his ear to listen to us.”

“What is on foot?” asked Finot.

“A volume of poetry,” said Lucien.

“Oh!” said Finot, with a shrug of the shoulders.

“Your acquaintance cannot have had much to do with publishers, or he would have hidden his manuscript in the loneliest spot in his dwelling,” remarked Vernou, looking at Lucien as he spoke.

Just at that moment a good-looking young man came into the shop, gave a hand to Finot and Lousteau, and nodded slightly to Vernou.  The newcomer was Emile Blondet, who had made his first appearance in the Journal des Debats, with articles revealing capacities of the very highest order.

“Come and have supper with us at midnight, at Florine’s,” said Lousteau.

“Very good,” said the newcomer.  “But who is going to be there?”

“Oh, Florine and Matifat the druggist,” said Lousteau, “and du Bruel, the author who gave Florine the part in which she is to make her first appearance, a little old fogy named Cardot, and his son-in-law Camusot, and Finot, and——­”

“Does your druggist do things properly?”

“He will not give us doctored wine,” said Lucien.

“You are very witty, monsieur,” Blondet returned gravely.  “Is he coming, Lousteau?”

“Yes.”

“Then we shall have some fun.”

Lucien had flushed red to the tips of his ears.  Blondet tapped on the window above Dauriat’s desk.

“Is your business likely to keep you long, Dauriat?”

“I am at your service, my friend.”

“That’s right,” said Lousteau, addressing his protege.  “That young fellow is hardly any older than you are, and he is on the Debats!  He is one of the princes of criticism.  They are afraid of him, Dauriat will fawn upon him, and then we can put in a word about our business with the pasha of vignettes and type.  Otherwise we might have waited till eleven o’clock, and our turn would not have come.  The crowd of people waiting to speak with Dauriat is growing bigger every moment.”

Lucien and Lousteau followed Blondet, Finot, and Vernou, and stood in a knot at the back of the shop.

“What is he doing?” asked Blondet of the head-clerk, who rose to bid him good-evening.

“He is buying a weekly newspaper.  He wants to put new life into it, and set up a rival to the Minerve and the Conservateur; Eymery has rather too much of his own way in the Minerve, and the Conservateur is too blindly Romantic.”

“Is he going to pay well?”

“Only too much—­as usual,” said the cashier.

Just as he spoke another young man entered; this was the writer of a magnificent novel which had sold very rapidly and met with the greatest possible success.  Dauriat was bringing out a second edition.  The appearance of this odd and extraordinary looking being, so unmistakably an artist, made a deep impression on Lucien’s mind.

“That is Nathan,” Lousteau said in his ear.

Nathan, then in the prime of his youth, came up to the group of journalists, hat in hand; and in spite of his look of fierce pride he was almost humble to Blondet, whom as yet he only knew by sight.  Blondet did not remove his hat, neither did Finot.

“Monsieur, I am delighted to avail myself of an opportunity yielded by chance——­”

(“He is so nervous that he is committing a pleonasm,” said Felicien in an aside to Lousteau.)

“——­to give expression to my gratitude for the splendid review which you were so good as to give me in the Journal des Debats.  Half the success of my book is owing to you.”

“No, my dear fellow, no,” said Blondet, with an air of patronage scarcely masked by good-nature.  “You have talent, the deuce you have, and I’m delighted to make your acquaintance.”

“Now that your review has appeared, I shall not seem to be courting power; we can feel at ease.  Will you do me the honor and the pleasure of dining with me to-morrow?  Finot is coming.—­Lousteau, old man, you will not refuse me, will you?” added Nathan, shaking Etienne by the hand.—­“Ah, you are on the way to a great future, monsieur,” he added, turning again to Blondet; “you will carry on the line of Dussaults, Fievees, and Geoffrois!  Hoffmann was talking about you to a friend of mine, Claude Vignon, his pupil; he said that he could die in peace, the Journal des Debats would live forever.  They ought to pay you tremendously well.”

“A hundred francs a column,” said Blondet.  “Poor pay when one is obliged to read the books, and read a hundred before you find one worth interesting yourself in, like yours.  Your work gave me pleasure, upon my word.”

“And brought him in fifteen hundred francs,” said Lousteau for Lucien’s benefit.

“But you write political articles, don’t you?” asked Nathan.

“Yes; now and again.”

Lucien felt like an embryo among these men; he had admired Nathan’s book, he had reverenced the author as an immortal; Nathan’s abject attitude before this critic, whose name and importance were both unknown to him, stupefied Lucien.

“How if I should come to behave as he does?” he thought.  “Is a man obliged to part with his self-respect?—­Pray put on your hat again, Nathan; you have written a great book, and the critic has only written a review of it.”

These thoughts set the blood tingling in his veins.  Scarce a minute passed but some young author, poverty-stricken and shy, came in, asked to speak with Dauriat, looked round the crowded shop despairingly, and went out saying, “I will come back again.”  Two or three politicians were chatting over the convocation of the Chambers and public business with a group of well-known public men.  The weekly newspaper for which Dauriat was in treaty was licensed to treat of matters political, and the number of newspapers suffered to exist was growing smaller and smaller, till a paper was a piece of property as much in demand as a theatre.  One of the largest shareholders in the Constitutionnel was standing in the midst of the knot of political celebrities.  Lousteau performed the part of cicerone to admiration; with every sentence he uttered Dauriat rose higher in Lucien’s opinion.  Politics and literature seemed to converge in Dauriat’s shop.  He had seen a great poet prostituting his muse to journalism, humiliating Art, as woman was humiliated and prostituted in those shameless galleries without, and the provincial took a terrible lesson to heart.  Money!  That was the key to every enigma.  Lucien realized the fact that he was unknown and alone, and that the fragile clue of an uncertain friendship was his sole guide to success and fortune.  He blamed the kind and loyal little circle for painting the world for him in false colors, for preventing him from plunging into the arena, pen in hand.  “I should be a Blondet at this moment!” he exclaimed within himself.

Only a little while ago they had sat looking out over Paris from the Gardens of the Luxembourg, and Lousteau had uttered the cry of a wounded eagle; then Lousteau had been a great man in Lucien’s eyes, and now he had shrunk to scarce visible proportions.  The really important man for him at this moment was the fashionable bookseller, by whom all these men lived; and the poet, manuscript in hand, felt a nervous tremor that was almost like fear.  He noticed a group of busts mounted on wooden pedestals, painted to resemble marble; Byron stood there, and Goethe and M. de Canalis.  Dauriat was hoping to publish a volume by the last-named poet, who might see, on his entrance into the shop, the estimation in which he was held by the trade.  Unconsciously Lucien’s own self-esteem began to shrink, and his courage ebbed.  He began to see how large a part this Dauriat would play in his destinies, and waited impatiently for him to appear.

“Well, children,” said a voice, and a short, stout man appeared, with a puffy face that suggested a Roman pro-consul’s visage, mellowed by an air of good-nature which deceived superficial observers.  “Well, children, here am I, the proprietor of the only weekly paper in the market, a paper with two thousand subscribers!”

“Old joker!  The registered number is seven hundred, and that is over the mark,” said Blondet.

“Twelve thousand, on my sacred word of honor—­I said two thousand for the benefit of the printers and paper-dealers yonder,” he added, lowering his voice, then raising it again.  “I thought you had more tact, my boy,” he added.

“Are you going to take any partners?” inquired Finot.

“That depends,” said Dauriat.  “Will you take a third at forty thousand francs?”

“It’s a bargain, if you will take Emile Blondet here on the staff, and Claude Vignon, Scribe, Theodore Leclercq, Felicien Vernou, Jay, Jouy, Lousteau, and——­”

“And why not Lucien de Rubempre?” the provincial poet put in boldly.

“——­and Nathan,” concluded Finot.

“Why not the people out there in the street?” asked Dauriat, scowling at the author of the Marguerites.—­“To whom have I the honor of speaking?” he added, with an insolent glance.

“One moment, Dauriat,” said Lousteau.  “I have brought this gentleman to you.  Listen to me, while Finot is thinking over your proposals.”

Lucien watched this Dauriat, who addressed Finot with the familiar tu, which even Finot did not permit himself to use in reply; who called the redoubtable Blondet “my boy,” and extended a hand royally to Nathan with a friendly nod.  The provincial poet felt his shirt wet with perspiration when the formidable sultan looked indifferent and ill pleased.

“Another piece of business, my boy!” exclaimed Dauriat.  “Why, I have eleven hundred manuscripts on hand, as you know!  Yes, gentlemen, I have eleven hundred manuscripts submitted to me at this moment; ask Gabusson.  I shall soon be obliged to start a department to keep account of the stock of manuscripts, and a special office for reading them, and a committee to vote on their merits, with numbered counters for those who attend, and a permanent secretary to draw up the minutes for me.  It will be a kind of local branch of the Academie, and the Academicians will be better paid in the Wooden Galleries than at the Institut.”

“’Tis an idea,” said Blondet.

“A bad idea,” returned Dauriat.  “It is not my business to take stock of the lucubrations of those among you who take to literature because they cannot be capitalists, and there is no opening for them as bootmakers, nor corporals, nor domestic servants, nor officials, nor bailiffs.  Nobody comes here until he has made a name for himself!  Make a name for yourself, and you will find gold in torrents.  I have made three great men in the last two years; and lo and behold three examples of ingratitude!  Here is Nathan talking of six thousand francs for the second edition of his book, which cost me three thousand francs in reviews, and has not brought in a thousand yet.  I paid a thousand francs for Blondet’s two articles, besides a dinner, which cost me five hundred——­”

“But if all booksellers talked as you do, sir, how could a man publish his first book at all?” asked Lucien.  Blondet had gone down tremendously in his opinion since he had heard the amount given by Dauriat for the articles in the Debats.

“That is not my affair,” said Dauriat, looking daggers at this handsome young fellow, who was smiling pleasantly at him.  “I do not publish books for amusement, nor risk two thousand francs for the sake of seeing my money back again.  I speculate in literature, and publish forty volumes of ten thousand copies each, just as Panckouke does and the Baudoins.  With my influence and the articles which I secure, I can push a business of a hundred thousand crowns, instead of a single volume involving a couple of thousand francs.  It is just as much trouble to bring out a new name and to induce the public to take up an author and his book, as to make a success with the Theatres etrangers, Victoires et Conquetes, or Memoires sur la Revolution, books that bring in a fortune.  I am not here as a stepping-stone to future fame, but to make money, and to find it for men with distinguished names.  The manuscripts for which I give a hundred thousand francs pay me better than work by an unknown author who asks six hundred.  If I am not exactly a Maecenas, I deserve the gratitude of literature; I have doubled the prices of manuscripts.  I am giving you this explanation because you are a friend of Lousteau’s my boy,” added Dauriat, clapping Lucien on the shoulder with odious familiarity.  “If I were to talk to all the authors who have a mind that I should be their publisher, I should have to shut up shop; I should pass my time very agreeably no doubt, but the conversations would cost too much.  I am not rich enough yet to listen to all the monologues of self-conceit.  Nobody does, except in classical tragedies on the stage.”

The terrible Dauriat’s gorgeous raiment seemed in the provincial poet’s eyes to add force to the man’s remorseless logic.

“What is it about?” he continued, addressing Lucien’s protector.

“It is a volume of magnificent poetry.”

At that word, Dauriat turned to Gabusson with a gesture worthy of Talma.

“Gabusson, my friend,” he said, “from this day forward, when anybody begins to talk of works in manuscript here—­Do you hear that, all of you?” he broke in upon himself; and three assistants at once emerged from among the piles of books at the sound of their employer’s wrathful voice.  “If anybody comes here with manuscripts,” he continued, looking at the finger-nails of a well-kept hand, “ask him whether it is poetry or prose; and if he says poetry, show him the door at once.  Verses mean reverses in the booktrade.”

“Bravo! well put, Dauriat,” cried the chorus of journalists.

“It is true!” cried the bookseller, striding about his shop with Lucien’s manuscript in his hand.  “You have no idea, gentlemen, of the amount of harm that Byron, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Casimir Delavigne, Canalis, and Beranger have done by their success.  The fame of them has brought down an invasion of barbarians upon us.  I know this:  there are a thousand volumes of manuscript poetry going the round of the publishers at this moment, things that nobody can make head nor tail of, stories in verse that begin in the middle, like The Corsair and Lara.  They set up to be original, forsooth, and indulge in stanzas that nobody can understand, and descriptive poetry after the pattern of the younger men who discovered Delille, and imagine that they are doing something new.  Poets have been swarming like cockchafers for two years past.  I have lost twenty thousand francs through poetry in the last twelvemonth.  You ask Gabusson!  There may be immortal poets somewhere in the world; I know of some that are blooming and rosy, and have no beards on their chins as yet,” he continued, looking at Lucien; “but in the trade, young man, there are only four poets —­Beranger, Casimir Delavigne, Lamartine, and Victor Hugo; as for Canalis—­he is a poet made by sheer force of writing him up.”

Lucien felt that he lacked the courage to hold up his head and show his spirit before all these influential persons, who were laughing with all their might.  He knew very well that he should look hopelessly ridiculous, and yet he felt consumed by a fierce desire to catch the bookseller by the throat, to ruffle the insolent composure of his cravat, to break the gold chain that glittered on the man’s chest, trample his watch under his feet, and tear him in pieces.  Mortified vanity opened the door to thoughts of vengeance, and inwardly he swore eternal enmity to that bookseller.  But he smiled amiably.

“Poetry is like the sun,” said Blondet, “giving life alike to primeval forests and to ants and gnats and mosquitoes.  There is no virtue but has a vice to match, and literature breeds the publisher.”

“And the journalist,” said Lousteau.

Dauriat burst out laughing.

“What is this after all?” he asked, holding up the manuscript.

“A volume of sonnets that will put Petrarch to the blush,” said Lousteau.

“What do you mean?”

“Just what I say,” answered Lousteau, seeing the knowing smile that went round the group.  Lucien could not take offence but he chafed inwardly.

“Very well, I will read them,” said Dauriat, with a regal gesture that marked the full extent of the concession.  “If these sonnets of yours are up to the level of the nineteenth century, I will make a great poet of you, my boy.”

“If he has brains to equal his good looks, you will run no great risks,” remarked one of the greatest public speakers of the day, a deputy who was chatting with the editor of the Minerve, and a writer for the Constitutionnel.

“Fame means twelve thousand francs in reviews, and a thousand more for dinners, General,” said Dauriat.  “If M. Benjamin de Constant means to write a paper on this young poet, it will not be long before I make a bargain with him.”

At the title of General, and the distinguished name of Benjamin Constant, the bookseller’s shop took the proportions of Olympus for the provincial great man.

“Lousteau, I want a word with you,” said Finot; “but I shall see you again later, at the theatre.—­Dauriat, I will take your offer, but on conditions.  Let us step into your office.”

“Come in, my boy,” answered Dauriat, allowing Finot to pass before him.  Then, intimating to some ten persons still waiting for him that he was engaged, he likewise was about to disappear when Lucien impatiently stopped him.

“You are keeping my manuscript.  When shall I have an answer?”

“Oh, come back in three or four days, my little poet, and we will see.”

Lousteau hurried Lucien away; he had not time to take leave of Vernou and Blondet and Raoul Nathan, nor to salute General Foy nor Benjamin Constant, whose book on the Hundred Days was just about to appear.  Lucien scarcely caught a glimpse of fair hair, a refined oval-shaped face, keen eyes, and the pleasant-looking mouth belonging to the man who had played the part of a Potemkin to Mme. de Stael for twenty years, and now was at war with the Bourbons, as he had been at war with Napoleon.  He was destined to win his cause and to die stricken to earth by his victory.

“What a shop!” exclaimed Lucien, as he took his place in the cab beside Lousteau.

“To the Panorama-Dramatique; look sharp, and you shall have thirty sous,” Etienne Lousteau called to the cabman.—­“Dauriat is a rascal who sells books to the amount of fifteen or sixteen hundred thousand francs every year.  He is a kind of Minister of Literature,” Lousteau continued.  His self-conceit had been pleasantly tickled, and he was showing off before Lucien.  “Dauriat is just as grasping as Barbet, but it is on a wholesale scale.  Dauriat can be civil, and he is generous, but he has a great opinion of himself; as for his wit, it consists in a faculty for picking up all that he hears, and his shop is a capital place to frequent.  You meet all the best men at Dauriat’s.  A young fellow learns more there in an hour than by poring over books for half-a-score of years.  People talk about articles and concoct subjects; you make the acquaintance of great or influential people who may be useful to you.  You must know people if you mean to get on nowadays.—­It is all luck, you see.  And as for sitting by yourself in a corner alone with your intellect, it is the most dangerous thing of all.”

“But what insolence!” said Lucien.

“Pshaw! we all of us laugh at Dauriat,” said Etienne.  “If you are in need of him, he tramples upon you; if he has need of the Journal des Debats, Emile Blondet sets him spinning like a top.  Oh, if you take to literature, you will see a good many queer things.  Well, what was I telling you, eh?”

“Yes, you were right,” said Lucien.  “My experience in that shop was even more painful than I expected, after your programme.”

“Why do you choose to suffer?  You find your subject, you wear out your wits over it with toiling at night, you throw your very life into it:  and after all your journeyings in the fields of thought, the monument reared with your life-blood is simply a good or a bad speculation for a publisher.  Your work will sell or it will not sell; and therein, for them, lies the whole question.  A book means so much capital to risk, and the better the book, the less likely it is to sell.  A man of talent rises above the level of ordinary heads; his success varies in direct ratio with the time required for his work to be appreciated.  And no publisher wants to wait.  To-day’s book must be sold by to-morrow.  Acting on this system, publishers and booksellers do not care to take real literature, books that call for the high praise that comes slowly.”

“D’Arthez was right,” exclaimed Lucien.

“Do you know d’Arthez?” asked Lousteau.  “I know of no more dangerous company than solitary spirits like that fellow yonder, who fancy that they can draw the world after them.  All of us begin by thinking that we are capable of great things; and when once a youthful imagination is heated by this superstition, the candidate for posthumous honors makes no attempt to move the world while such moving of the world is both possible and profitable; he lets the time go by.  I am for Mahomet’s system—­if the mountain does not come to me, I am for going to the mountain.”

The common-sense so trenchantly put in this sally left Lucien halting between the resignation preached by the brotherhood and Lousteau’s militant doctrine.  He said not a word till they reached the Boulevard du Temple.

The Panorama-Dramatique no longer exists.  A dwelling-house stands on the site of the once charming theatre in the Boulevard du Temple, where two successive managements collapsed without making a single hit; and yet Vignol, who has since fallen heir to some of Potier’s popularity, made his debut there; and Florine, five years later a celebrated actress, made her first appearance in the theatre opposite the Rue Charlot.  Play-houses, like men, have their vicissitudes.  The Panorama-Dramatique suffered from competition.  The machinations of its rivals, the Ambigu, the Gaite, the Porte Saint-Martin, and the Vaudeville, together with a plethora of restrictions and a scarcity of good plays, combined to bring about the downfall of the house.  No dramatic author cared to quarrel with a prosperous theatre for the sake of the Panorama-Dramatique, whose existence was, to say the least, problematical.  The management at this moment, however, was counting on the success of a new melodramatic comedy by M. du Bruel, a young author who, after working in collaboration with divers celebrities, had now produced a piece professedly entirely his own.  It had been specially composed for the leading lady, a young actress who began her stage career as a supernumerary at the Gaite, and had been promoted to small parts for the last twelvemonth.  But though Mlle. Florine’s acting had attracted some attention, she obtained no engagement, and the Panorama accordingly had carried her off.  Coralie, another actress, was to make her debut at the same time.

Lucien was amazed at the power wielded by the press.  “This gentleman is with me,” said Etienne Lousteau, and the box-office clerks bowed before him as one man.

“You will find it no easy matter to get seats,” said the head-clerk.  “There is nothing left now but the stage box.”

A certain amount of time was wasted in controversies with the box-keepers in the lobbies, when Etienne said, “Let us go behind the scenes; we will speak to the manager, he will take us into the stage-box; and besides, I will introduce you to Florine, the heroine of the evening.”

At a sign from Etienne Lousteau, the doorkeeper of the orchestra took out a little key and unlocked a door in the thickness of the wall.  Lucien, following his friend, went suddenly out of the lighted corridor into the black darkness of the passage between the house and the wings.  A short flight of damp steps surmounted, one of the strangest of all spectacles opened out before the provincial poet’s eyes.  The height of the roof, the slenderness of the props, the ladders hung with Argand lamps, the atrocious ugliness of scenery beheld at close quarters, the thick paint on the actors’ faces, and their outlandish costumes, made of such coarse materials, the stage carpenters in greasy jackets, the firemen, the stage manager strutting about with his hat on his head, the supernumeraries sitting among the hanging back-scenes, the ropes and pulleys, the heterogeneous collection of absurdities, shabby, dirty, hideous, and gaudy, was something so altogether different from the stage seen over the footlights, that Lucien’s astonishment knew no bounds.  The curtain was just about to fall on a good old-fashioned melodrama entitled Bertram, a play adapted from a tragedy by Maturin which Charles Nodier, together with Byron and Sir Walter Scott, held in the highest esteem, though the play was a failure on the stage in Paris.