In this century, especially since the triumph of the bourgeoisie —­the commonplace, money-saving citizen—­who takes good care not to imitate Francis I. or Louis XIV.—­to live by the pen is a form of penal servitude to which a galley-slave would prefer death.  To live by the pen means to create—­to create to-day, and to-morrow, and incessantly—­or to seem to create; and the imitation costs as dear as the reality.  So, besides his daily contribution to a newspaper, which was like the stone of Sisyphus, and which came every Monday, crashing down on to the feather of his pen, Etienne worked for three or four literary magazines.  Still, do not be alarmed; he put no artistic conscientiousness into his work.  This man of Sancerre had a facility, a carelessness, if you call it so, which ranked him with those writers who are mere scriveners, literary hacks.  In Paris, in our day, hack-work cuts a man off from every pretension to a literary position.  When he can do no more, or no longer cares for advancement, the man who can write becomes a journalist and a hack.

The life he leads is not unpleasing.  Blue-stockings, beginners in every walk of life, actresses at the outset or the close of a career, publishers and authors, all make much of these writers of the ready pen.  Lousteau, a thorough man about town, lived at scarcely any expense beyond paying his rent.  He had boxes at all the theatres; the sale of the books he reviewed or left unreviewed paid for his gloves; and he would say to those authors who published at their own expense, “I have your book always in my hands!” He took toll from vanity in the form of drawings or pictures.  Every day had its engagements to dinner, every night its theatre, every morning was filled up with callers, visits, and lounging.  His serial in the paper, two novels a year for weekly magazines, and his miscellaneous articles were the tax he paid for this easy-going life.  And yet, to reach this position, Etienne had struggled for ten years.

At the present time, known to the literary world, liked for the good or the mischief he did with equally facile good humor, he let himself float with the stream, never caring for the future.  He ruled a little set of newcomers, he had friendships—­or rather, habits of fifteen years’ standing, and men with whom he supped, and dined, and indulged his wit.  He earned from seven to eight hundred francs a month, a sum which he found quite insufficient for the prodigality peculiar to the impecunious.  Indeed, Lousteau found himself now just as hard up as when, on first appearing in Paris, he had said to himself, “If I had but five hundred francs a month, I should be rich!”