His poor parents will never know what their son has come to Paris to learn at great cost, namely:  That it is difficult to be a writer and to understand the French language short of a dozen years of heculean labor:  That a man must have explored every sphere of social life, to become a genuine novelist, inasmuch as the novel is the private history of nations:  That the great story-tellers, Aesop, Lucian, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, La Fontaine, Lesage, Sterne, Voltaire, Walter Scott, the unknown Arabians of the Thousand and One Nights, were all men of genius as well as giants of erudition.

Their Adolphe serves his literary apprenticeship in two or three coffee-houses, becomes a member of the Society of Men of Letters, attacks, with or without reason, men of talent who don’t read his articles, assumes a milder tone on seeing the powerlessness of his criticisms, offers novelettes to the papers which toss them from one to the other as if they were shuttlecocks:  and, after five or six years of exercises more or less fatiguing, of dreadful privations which seriously tax his parents, he attains a certain position.

This position may be described as follows:  Thanks to a sort of reciprocal support extended to each other, and which an ingenious writer has called “Mutual Admiration,” Adolphe often sees his name cited among the names of celebrities, either in the prospectuses of the book-trade, or in the lists of newspapers about to appear.  Publishers print the title of one of his works under the deceitful heading “IN PRESS,” which might be called the typographical menagerie of bears.[*] Chodoreille is sometimes mentioned among the promising young men of the literary world.

[*] A bear (ours) is a play which has been refused by a multitude of
    theatres, but which is finally represented at a time when some
    manager or other feels the need of one.  The word has necessarily
    passed from the language of the stage into the jargon of
    journalism, and is applied to novels which wander the streets in
    search of a publisher.

For eleven years Adolphe Chodoreille remains in the ranks of the promising young men:  he finally obtains a free entrance to the theatres, thanks to some dirty work or certain articles of dramatic criticism:  he tries to pass for a good fellow; and as he loses his illusions respecting glory and the world of Paris, he gets into debt and his years begin to tell upon him.

A paper which finds itself in a tight place asks him for one of his bears revised by his friends.  This has been retouched and revamped every five years, so that it smells of the pomatum of each prevailing and then forgotten fashion.  To Adolphe it becomes what the famous cap, which he was constantly staking, was to Corporal Trim, for during five years “Anything for a Woman” (the title decided upon) “will be one of the most entertaining productions of our epoch.”