“But Coralie is not attending to her part,” remarked the manager.  “Coralie is smitten with our friend here, all unsuspicious of his conquest, and Coralie will make a fiasco; she is missing her cues, this is the second time she had not heard the prompter.  Pray, go into the corner, monsieur,” he continued.  “If Coralie is smitten with you, I will go and tell her that you have left the house.”

“No! no!” cried Lousteau; “tell Coralie that this gentleman is coming to supper, and that she can do as she likes with him, and she will play like Mlle. Mars.”

The manager went, and Lucien turned to Etienne.  “What! do you mean to say that you will ask that druggist, through Mlle. Florine, to pay thirty thousand francs for one-half a share, when Finot gave no more for the whole of it?  And ask without the slightest scruple?——­”

Lousteau interrupted Lucien before he had time to finish his expostulation.  “My dear boy, what country can you come from?  The druggist is not a man; he is a strong box delivered into our hands by his fancy for an actress.”

“How about your conscience?”

“Conscience, my dear fellow, is a stick which every one takes up to beat his neighbor and not for application to his own back.  Come, now! who the devil are you angry with?  In one day chance has worked a miracle for you, a miracle for which I have been waiting these two years, and you must needs amuse yourself by finding fault with the means?  What! you appear to me to possess intelligence; you seem to be in a fair way to reach that freedom from prejudice which is a first necessity to intellectual adventurers in the world we live in; and are you wallowing in scruples worthy of a nun who accuses herself of eating an egg with concupiscence? . . .  If Florine succeeds, I shall be editor of a newspaper with a fixed salary of two hundred and fifty francs per month; I shall take the important plays and leave the vaudevilles to Vernou, and you can take my place and do the Boulevard theatres, and so get a foot in the stirrup.  You will make three francs per column and write a column a day—­thirty columns a month means ninety francs; you will have some sixty francs worth of books to sell to Barbet; and lastly, you can demand ten tickets a month of each of your theatres—­that is, forty tickets in all—­and sell them for forty francs to a Barbet who deals in them (I will introduce you to the man), so you will have two hundred francs coming in every month.  Then if you make yourself useful to Finot, you might get a hundred francs for an article in this new weekly review of his, in which case you would show uncommon talent, for all the articles are signed, and you cannot put in slip-shod work as you can on a small paper.  In that case you would be making a hundred crowns a month.  Now, my dear boy, there are men of ability, like that poor d’Arthez, who dines at Flicoteaux’s every day, who may wait for ten years before they will make a hundred crowns; and you will be making four thousand francs a year by your pen, to say nothing of the books you will write for the trade, if you do work of that kind.