brethren.  One day it went in dinners given to brethren who deliver diplomas of genius; another day it went in money lent to Grub-Street penny-a-liners who were starving; again it went to found petty newspapers established to demolish old reputations and raise new ones, and to die of inanition at their fifth number for want of a sixth subscriber.  In fine, before three years had passed away, not a cent was left of Monsieur Philoxene Boyer’s estate, and in return he had acquired neither talents nor fame.  He is scarcely thirty years old:  he looks like a man of sixty.  I know no man in the world who, for the hope of half a million of dollars and a place in the French Academy, would consent to bear the burden of tortures, privations, and humiliations which make up Monsieur Philoxene Boyer’s existence.  He undergoes the torments of the damned; he fasts; he flounders in all the sewers of Paris.  But he is riveted to this horrible existence as the galley-slave to his chain; he can breathe no other air than this mephitic atmosphere; he can lead no other life.  When I saw him on the threshold of that sombre and humid reading-room, muddied, wet, pale, thin, almost in rags, I could not help thinking of this wretched galley-slave of literary ambition as he might have been at home in his old Norman mansion, cozily stretched before a blazing fire, with a cellar full of cider and a larder groaning beneath the fat of that favored land, smiling at a young wife on whose lap merry children were gambolling.  He was in the vein of bitter frankness.  He had not dined the preceding day.  He seized me by the arm, and, dragging me out of the circulating-library, said to me, in a voice as abrupt as a feverish pulsation,—­

“Don’t listen to that old hag!  All the books she offers you are miserable stuff, fit at best for the pastry-cooks.  Oh! you don’t know how success is won nowadays.  I’ll tell you.  There is an assurance society between the book, the piece, and the judge.  Praise me, and I’ll praise you.  If you will praise us, we will praise you.  The public buys.”

Then he went on with his bitter voice to utter a furious philippic against our celebrated literary men.  He attacked them all, with scarcely an exception.  This one sold his pen to the highest bidder; that one levied contributions of all sorts on the vanity of authors and artists; another was a mere actor; a fourth was nothing but a mountebank; a fifth was a mere babbler; and so on he went through the whole catalogue of authors.  The illustrious literary democrats were Liberals and Spartans only for the public eye.  They cared as much about liberty as about old moons:  this one speculated on a title; that one on a vice; a third, to possess a carriage and dine at Vefour’s, had become the thrall of a wealthy stockjobber who paid his virtues by the month and his opinions by the line.  He spoke in this way for an hour, bitter, excessive, nervous, extravagant, and sometimes eloquent.  All at once he stopped,—­and pressing my hand with a mixture of bitterness and cynicism, he said,—­“Old boy, I have now given you a dollar’s worth of literature; lend me ten dimes.”  I hastily drew from my pocket three or four gold coins, and, blushing, slipped them into his hand; it trembled a little; he thanked me with a glance, and, muttering something like “Good bye,” disappeared around the next corner.