penny on a roll and a halfpenny for milk, but I dine very decently for twenty-two sous at a restaurant kept by a man named Flicoteaux in the Place de la Sorbonne itself.  My expenses every month will not exceed sixty francs, everything included, until the winter begins —­at least I hope not.  So my two hundred and forty francs ought to last me for the first four months.  Between now and then I shall have sold The Archer of Charles IX. and the Marguerites no doubt.  Do not be in the least uneasy on my account.  If the present is cold and bare and poverty-stricken, the blue distant future is rich and splendid; most great men have known the vicissitudes which depress but cannot overwhelm me.

“Plautus, the great comic Latin poet, was once a miller’s lad.  Machiavelli wrote The Prince at night, and by day was a common working-man like any one else; and more than all, the great Cervantes, who lost an arm at the battle of Lepanto, and helped to win that famous day, was called a ‘base-born, handless dotard’ by the scribblers of his day; there was an interval of ten years between the appearance of the first part and the second of his sublime Don Quixote for lack of a publisher.  Things are not so bad as that nowadays.  Mortifications and want only fall to the lot of unknown writers; as soon as a man’s name is known, he grows rich, and I will be rich.  And besides, I live within myself, I spend half the day at the Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevieve, learning all that I want to learn; I should not go far unless I knew more than I do.  So at this moment I am almost happy.  In a few days I have fallen in with my life very gladly.  I begin the work that I love with daylight, my subsistence is secure, I think a great deal, and I study.  I do not see that I am open to attack at any point, now that I have renounced a world where my vanity might suffer at any moment.  The great men of every age are obliged to lead lives apart.  What are they but birds in the forest?  They sing, nature falls under the spell of their song, and no one should see them.  That shall be my lot, always supposing that I can carry out my ambitious plans.

“Mme. de Bargeton I do not regret.  A woman who could behave as she behaved does not deserve a thought.  Nor am I sorry that I left Angouleme.  She did wisely when she flung me into the sea of Paris to sink or swim.  This is the place for men of letters and thinkers and poets; here you cultivate glory, and I know how fair the harvest is that we reap in these days.  Nowhere else can a writer find the living works of the great dead, the works of art which quicken the imagination in the galleries and museums here; nowhere else will you find great reference libraries always open in which the intellect may find pasture.  And lastly, here in Paris there is a spirit which you breathe in the air; it infuses the least details, every literary creation bears traces of its influence.