“You seem to know all about the newspaper, sir,” Lucien began.

“From a business point of view, broum! broum!” coughed the soldier, clearing his throat.  “From three to five francs per column, according to ability.—­Fifty lines to a column, forty letters to a line; no blanks; there you are!  As for the staff, they are queer fish, little youngsters whom I wouldn’t take on for the commissariat; and because they make fly tracks on sheets of white paper, they look down, forsooth, on an old Captain of Dragoons of the Guard, that retired with a major’s rank after entering every European capital with Napoleon.”

The soldier of Napoleon brushed his coat, and made as if he would go out, but Lucien, swept to the door, had courage enough to make a stand.

“I came to be a contributor of the paper,” he said.  “I am full of respect, I vow and declare, for a captain of the Imperial Guard, those men of bronze——­”

“Well said, my little civilian, there are several kinds of contributors; which kind do you wish to be?” replied the trooper, bearing down on Lucien, and descending the stairs.  At the foot of the flight he stopped, but it was only to light a cigar at the porter’s box.

“If any subscribers come, you see them and take note of them, Mother Chollet.—­Simply subscribers, never know anything but subscribers,” he added, seeing that Lucien followed him.  “Finot is my nephew; he is the only one of my family that has done anything to relieve me in my position.  So when anybody comes to pick a quarrel with Finot, he finds old Giroudeau, Captain of the Dragoons of the Guard, that set out as a private in a cavalry regiment in the army of the Sambre-et-Meuse, and was fencing-master for five years to the First Hussars, army of Italy!  One, two, and the man that had any complaints to make would be turned off into the dark,” he added, making a lunge.  “Now writers, my boy, are in different corps; there is the writer who writes and draws his pay; there is the writer who writes and gets nothing (a volunteer we call him); and, lastly, there is the writer who writes nothing, and he is by no means the stupidest, for he makes no mistakes; he gives himself out for a literary man, he is on the paper, he treats us to dinners, he loafs about the theatres, he keeps an actress, he is very well off.  What do you mean to be?”

“The man that does good work and gets good pay.”

“You are like the recruits.  They all want to be marshals of France.  Take old Giroudeau’s word for it, and turn right about, in double-quick time, and go and pick up nails in the gutter like that good fellow yonder; you can tell by the look of him that he has been in the army.—­Isn’t it a shame that an old soldier who has walked into the jaws of death hundreds of times should be picking up old iron in the streets of Paris?  Ah!  God A’mighty! ’twas a shabby trick to desert the Emperor.—­Well, my boy, the individual you saw this morning has made his forty francs a month.  Are you going to do better?  And, according to Finot, he is the cleverest man on the staff.”