“What shall I do?” he asked aloud.

“One must do as one can,” the great critic said.  “Your book is good, but it excited jealousy, and your struggle will be hard and long.  Genius is a cruel disease.  Every writer carries a canker in his heart, a devouring monster, like the tapeworm in the stomach, which destroys all feeling as it arises in him.  Which is the stronger?  The man or the disease?  One has need be a great man, truly, to keep the balance between genius and character.  The talent grows, the heart withers.  Unless a man is a giant, unless he has the thews of a Hercules, he must be content either to lose his gift or to live without a heart.  You are slender and fragile, you will give way,” he added, as he turned into the restaurant.

Lucien returned home, thinking over that terrible verdict.  He beheld the life of literature by the light of the profound truths uttered by Vignon.

“Money! money!” a voice cried in his ears.

Then he drew three bills of a thousand francs each, due respectively in one, two, and three months, imitating the handwriting of his brother-in-law, David Sechard, with admirable skill.  He endorsed the bills, and took them next morning to Metivier, the paper-dealer in the Rue Serpente, who made no difficulty about taking them.  Lucien wrote a few lines to give his brother-in-law notice of this assault upon his cash-box, promising, as usual in such cases, to be ready to meet the bills as they fell due.

When all debts, his own and Coralie’s, were paid, he put the three hundred francs which remained into Berenice’s hands, bidding her to refuse him money if he asked her for it.  He was afraid of a return of the gambler’s frenzy.  Lucien worked away gloomily in a sort of cold, speechless fury, putting forth all his powers into witty articles, written by the light of the lamp at Coralie’s bedside.  Whenever he looked up in search of ideas, his eyes fell on that beloved face, white as porcelain, fair with the beauty that belongs to the dying, and he saw a smile on her pale lips, and her eyes, grown bright with a more consuming pain than physical suffering, always turned on his face.

Lucien sent in his work, but he could not leave the house to worry editors, and his articles did not appear.  When he at last made up his mind to go to the office, he met with a cool reception from Theodore Gaillard, who had advanced him money, and turned his literary diamonds to good account afterwards.

“Take care, my dear fellow, you are falling off,” he said.  “You must not let yourself down, your work wants inspiration!”

“That little Lucien has written himself out with his romance and his first articles,” cried Felicien Vernou, Merlin, and the whole chorus of his enemies, whenever his name came up at Dauriat’s or the Vaudeville.  “The work he is sending us is pitiable.”