Lucien was moved to tears, and he grasped Etienne’s hand in his.  The journalist rose to his feet, and the pair went up and down the broad Avenue de l’Observatoire, as if their lungs craved ampler breathing space.

“Outside the world of letters,” Etienne Lousteau continued, “not a single creature suspects that every one who succeeds in that world —­who has a certain vogue, that is to say, or comes into fashion, or gains reputation, or renown, or fame, or favor with the public (for by these names we know the rungs of the ladder by which we climb to the higher heights above and beyond them),—­every one who comes even thus far is the hero of a dreadful Odyssey.  Brilliant portents rise above the mental horizon through a combination of a thousand accidents; conditions change so swiftly that no two men have been known to reach success by the same road.  Canalis and Nathan are two dissimilar cases; things never fall out in the same way twice.  There is d’Arthez, who knocks himself to pieces with work—­he will make a famous name by some other chance.

“This so much desired reputation is nearly always crowned prostitution.  Yes; the poorest kind of literature is the hapless creature freezing at the street corner; second-rate literature is the kept-mistress picked out of the brothels of journalism, and I am her bully; lastly, there is lucky literature, the flaunting, insolent courtesan who has a house of her own and pays taxes, who receives great lords, treating or ill-treating them as she pleases, who has liveried servants and a carriage, and can afford to keep greedy creditors waiting.  Ah! and for yet others, for me not so very long ago, for you to-day—­she is a white-robed angel with many-colored wings, bearing a green palm branch in the one hand, and in the other a flaming sword.  An angel, something akin to the mythological abstraction which lives at the bottom of a well, and to the poor and honest girl who lives a life of exile in the outskirts of the great city, earning every penny with a noble fortitude and in the full light of virtue, returning to heaven inviolate of body and soul; unless, indeed, she comes to lie at the last, soiled, despoiled, polluted, and forgotten, on a pauper’s bier.  As for the men whose brains are encompassed with bronze, whose hearts are still warm under the snows of experience, they are found but seldom in the country that lies at our feet,” he added, pointing to the great city seething in the late afternoon light.

A vision of d’Arthez and his friends flashed upon Lucien’s sight, and made appeal to him for a moment; but Lousteau’s appalling lamentation carried him away.