“You must despise me very much, if you think that I should perish while you escape,” said the poet.

“O Lord, forgive him; it is a child!” cried Michel Chrestien.

When Lucien’s intellect had been stimulated by the evenings spent in d’Arthez’s garret, he had made some study of the jokes and articles in the smaller newspapers.  He was at least the equal, he felt, of the wittiest contributors; in private he tried some mental gymnastics of the kind, and went out one morning with the triumphant idea of finding some colonel of such light skirmishers of the press and enlisting in their ranks.  He dressed in his best and crossed the bridges, thinking as he went that authors, journalists, and men of letters, his future comrades, in short, would show him rather more kindness and disinterestedness than the two species of booksellers who had so dashed his hopes.  He should meet with fellow-feeling, and something of the kindly and grateful affection which he found in the cenacle of the Rue des Quatre-Vents.  Tormented by emotion, consequent upon the presentiments to which men of imagination cling so fondly, half believing, half battling with their belief in them, he arrived in the Rue Saint-Fiacre off the Boulevard Montmartre.  Before a house, occupied by the offices of a small newspaper, he stopped, and at the sight of it his heart began to throb as heavily as the pulses of a youth upon the threshold of some evil haunt.

Nevertheless, upstairs he went, and found the offices in the low entresol between the ground floor and the first story.  The first room was divided down the middle by a partition, the lower half of solid wood, the upper lattice work to the ceiling.  In this apartment Lucien discovered a one-armed pensioner supporting several reams of paper on his head with his remaining hand, while between his teeth he held the passbook which the Inland Revenue Department requires every newspaper to produce with each issue.  This ill-favored individual, owner of a yellow countenance covered with red excrescences, to which he owed his nickname of “Coloquinte,” indicated a personage behind the lattice as the Cerberus of the paper.  This was an elderly officer with a medal on his chest and a silk skull-cap on his head; his nose was almost hidden by a pair of grizzled moustaches, and his person was hidden as completely in an ample blue overcoat as the body of the turtle in its carapace.

“From what date do you wish your subscription to commence, sir?” inquired the Emperor’s officer.

“I did not come about a subscription,” returned Lucien.  Looking about him, he saw a placard fastened on a door, corresponding to the one by which he had entered, and read the words—­EDITOR’S OFFICE, and below, in smaller letters, No admittance except on business.

“A complaint, I expect?” replied the veteran.  “Ah! yes; we have been hard on Mariette.  What would you have?  I don’t know the why and wherefore of it yet.—­But if you want satisfaction, I am ready for you,” he added, glancing at a collection of small arms and foils stacked in a corner, the armory of the modern warrior.