“I confess that you are stronger than I,” he said, with a charming glance at them.  “My back and shoulders are not made to bear the burden of Paris life; I cannot struggle bravely.  We are born with different temperaments and faculties, and you know better than I that faults and virtues have their reverse side.  I am tired already, I confess.”

“We will stand by you,” said d’Arthez; “it is just in these ways that a faithful friendship is of use.”

“The help that I have just received is precarious, and every one of us is just as poor as another; want will soon overtake me again.  Chrestien, at the service of the first that hires him, can do nothing with the publishers; Bianchon is quite out of it; d’Arthez’s booksellers only deal in scientific and technical books—­they have no connection with publishers of new literature; and as for Horace and Fulgence Ridal and Bridau, their work lies miles away from the booksellers.  There is no help for it; I must make up my mind one way or another.”

“Stick by us, and make up your mind to it,” said Bianchon.  “Bear up bravely, and trust in hard work.”

“But what is hardship for you is death for me,” Lucien put in quickly.

“Before the cock crows thrice,” smiled Leon Giraud, “this man will betray the cause of work for an idle life and the vices of Paris.”

“Where has work brought you?” asked Lucien, laughing.

“When you start out from Paris for Italy, you don’t find Rome half-way,” said Joseph Bridau.  “You want your pease to grow ready buttered for you.”

The conversation ended in a joke, and they changed the subject.  Lucien’s friends, with their perspicacity and delicacy of heart, tried to efface the memory of the little quarrel; but Lucien knew thenceforward that it was no easy matter to deceive them.  He soon fell into despair, which he was careful to hide from such stern mentors as he imagined them to be; and the Southern temper that runs so easily through the whole gamut of mental dispositions, set him making the most contradictory resolutions.

Again and again he talked of making the plunge into journalism; and time after time did his friends reply with a “Mind you do nothing of the sort!”

“It would be the tomb of the beautiful, gracious Lucien whom we love and know,” said d’Arthez.

“You would not hold out for long between the two extremes of toil and pleasure which make up a journalist’s life, and resistance is the very foundation of virtue.  You would be so delighted to exercise your power of life and death over the offspring of the brain, that you would be an out-and-out journalist in two months’ time.  To be a journalist —­that is to turn Herod in the republic of letters.  The man who will say anything will end by sticking at nothing.  That was Napoleon’s maxim, and it explains itself.”

“But you would be with me, would you not?” asked Lucien.