“Now, a sub-prefect’s salary only amounts to a thousand crowns, and there he stops in his arrondissement, wearing away time like the rung of a chair.  I say nothing of the pleasure of going to the theatre without paying for your seat, for that is a delight which quickly palls; but you can go behind the scenes in four theatres.  Be hard and sarcastic for a month or two, and you will be simply overwhelmed with invitations from actresses, and their adorers will pay court to you; you will only dine at Flicoteaux’s when you happen to have less than thirty sous in your pocket and no dinner engagement.  At the Luxembourg, at five o’clock, you did not know which way to turn; now, you are on the eve of entering a privileged class, you will be one of the hundred persons who tell France what to think.  In three days’ time, if all goes well, you can, if you choose, make a man’s life a curse to him by putting thirty jokes at his expense in print at the rate of three a day; you can, if you choose, draw a revenue of pleasure from the actresses at your theatres; you can wreck a good play and send all Paris running after a bad one.  If Dauriat declines to pay you for your Marguerites, you can make him come to you, and meekly and humbly implore you to take two thousand francs for them.  If you have the ability, and knock off two or three articles that threaten to spoil some of Dauriat’s speculations, or to ruin a book on which he counts, you will see him come climbing up your stairs like a clematis, and always at the door of your dwelling.  As for your novel, the booksellers who would show you more or less politely to the door at this moment will be standing outside your attic in a string, and the value of the manuscript, which old Doguereau valued at four hundred francs will rise to four thousand.  These are the advantages of the journalist’s profession.  So let us do our best to keep all newcomers out of it.  It needs an immense amount of brains to make your way, and a still greater amount of luck.  And here are you quibbling over your good fortune!  If we had not met to-day, you see, at Flicoteaux’s, you might have danced attendance on the booksellers for another three years, or starved like d’Arthez in a garret.  By the time that d’Arthez is as learned as Bayle and as great a writer of prose as Rousseau, we shall have made our fortunes, you and I, and we shall hold his in our hands—­wealth and fame to give or to hold.  Finot will be a deputy and proprietor of a great newspaper, and we shall be whatever we meant to be—­peers of France, or prisoner for debt in Sainte-Pelagie.”

“So Finot will sell his paper to the highest bidder among the Ministers, just as he sells favorable notices to Mme. Bastienne and runs down Mlle. Virginie, saying that Mme. Bastienne’s bonnets are superior to the millinery which they praised at first!” said Lucien, recollecting that scene in the office.