“Let him preserve these simple habits of life, this frugality, these modest requirements,” thought he.—­Aloud he said:  “It is a pleasure to me to see you.  Thus, sir, lived Jean-Jacques, whom you resemble in more ways than one.  Amid such surroundings the fire of genius shines brightly; good work is done in such rooms as these.  This is how men of letters should work, instead of living riotously in cafes and restaurants, wasting their time and talent and our money.”

He sat down.

“Your romance is not bad, young man.  I was a professor of rhetoric once; I know French history, there are some capital things in it.  You have a future before you, in fact.”

“Oh! sir.”

“No; I tell you so.  We may do business together.  I will buy your romance.”

Lucien’s heart swelled and throbbed with gladness.  He was about to enter the world of literature; he should see himself in print at last.

“I will give you four hundred francs,” continued Doguereau in honeyed accents, and he looked at Lucien with an air which seemed to betoken an effort of generosity.

“The volume?” queried Lucien.

“For the romance,” said Doguereau, heedless of Lucien’s surprise.  “In ready money,” he added; “and you shall undertake to write two books for me every year for six years.  If the first book is out of print in six months, I will give you six hundred francs for the others.  So, if you write two books each year, you will be making a hundred francs a month; you will have a sure income, you will be well off.  There are some authors whom I only pay three hundred francs for a romance; I give two hundred for translations of English books.  Such prices would have been exorbitant in the old days.”

“Sir, we cannot possibly come to an understanding.  Give me back my manuscript, I beg,” said Lucien, in a cold chill.

“Here it is,” said the old bookseller.  “You know nothing of business, sir.  Before an author’s first book can appear, a publisher is bound to sink sixteen hundred francs on the paper and the printing of it.  It is easier to write a romance than to find all that money.  I have a hundred romances in manuscript, and I have not a hundred and sixty thousand francs in my cash box, alas!  I have not made so much in all these twenty years that I have been a bookseller.  So you don’t make a fortune by printing romances, you see.  Vidal and Porchon only take them of us on conditions that grow harder and harder day by day.  You have only your time to lose, while I am obliged to disburse two thousand francs.  If we fail, habent sua fata libelli, I lose two thousand francs; while, as for you, you simply hurl an ode at the thick-headed public.  When you have thought over this that I have the honor of telling you, you will come back to me.—­You will come back to me!” he asserted authoritatively, by way of reply to a scornful gesture made involuntarily by Lucien.  “So far from finding a publisher obliging enough to risk two thousand francs for an unknown writer, you will not find a publisher’s clerk that will trouble himself to look through your screed.  Now that I have read it I can point out a good many slips in grammar.  You have put observer for faire observer and malgre que. Malgre is a preposition, and requires an object.”