“They are very few and far between in that great fermenting vat; rare as love in love-making, rare as fortunes honestly made in business, rare as the journalist whose hands are clean.  The experience of the first man who told me all that I am telling you was thrown away upon me, and mine no doubt will be wasted upon you.  It is always the same old story year after year; the same eager rush to Paris from the provinces; the same, not to say a growing, number of beardless, ambitious boys, who advance, head erect, and the heart that Princess Tourandocte of the Mille et un Jours—­each one of them fain to be her Prince Calaf.  But never a one of them reads the riddle.  One by one they drop, some into the trench where failures lie, some into the mire of journalism, some again into the quagmires of the book-trade.

“They pick up a living, these beggars, what with biographical notices, penny-a-lining, and scraps of news for the papers.  They become booksellers’ hacks for the clear-headed dealers in printed paper, who would sooner take the rubbish that goes off in a fortnight than a masterpiece which requires time to sell.  The life is crushed out of the grubs before they reach the butterfly stage.  They live by shame and dishonor.  They are ready to write down a rising genius or to praise him to the skies at a word from the pasha of the Constitutionnel, the Quotidienne, or the Debats, at a sign from a publisher, at the request of a jealous comrade, or (as not seldom happens) simply for a dinner.  Some surmount the obstacles, and these forget the misery of their early days.  I, who am telling you this, have been putting the best that is in me into newspaper articles for six months past for a blackguard who gives them out as his own and has secured a feuilleton in another paper on the strength of them.  He has not taken me on as his collaborator, he has not give me so much as a five-franc piece, but I hold out a hand to grasp his when we meet; I cannot help myself.”

“And why?” Lucien, asked, indignantly.

“I may want to put a dozen lines into his feuilleton some day,” Lousteau answered coolly.  “In short, my dear fellow, in literature you will not make money by hard work, that is not the secret of success; the point is to exploit the work of somebody else.  A newspaper proprietor is a contractor, we are the bricklayers.  The more mediocre the man, the better his chance of getting on among mediocrities; he can play the toad-eater, put up with any treatment, and flatter all the little base passions of the sultans of literature.  There is Hector Merlin, who came from Limoges a short time ago; he is writing political articles already for a Right Centre daily, and he is at work on our little paper as well.  I have seen an editor drop his hat and Merlin pick it up.  The fellow was careful never to give offence, and slipped into the thick of the fight between rival ambitions.  I am sorry for you.  It is as if I saw in you