Between the months of April and July, when Dinah expected her confinement, she discovered why it was that Lousteau had not triumphed over poverty; he was idle and had no power of will.  The brain, to be sure, must obey its own laws; it recognizes neither the exigencies of life nor the voice of honor; a man cannot write a great book because a woman is dying, or to pay a discreditable debt, or to bring up a family; at the same time, there is no great talent without a strong will.  These twin forces are requisite for the erection of the vast edifice of personal glory.  A distinguished genius keeps his brain in a productive condition, just as the knights of old kept their weapons always ready for battle.  They conquer indolence, they deny themselves enervating pleasures, or indulge only to a fixed limit proportioned to their powers.  This explains the life of such men as Walter Scott, Cuvier, Voltaire, Newton, Buffon, Bayle, Bossuet, Leibnitz, Lopez de Vega, Calderon, Boccacio, Aretino, Aristotle—­in short, every man who delighted, governed, or led his contemporaries.

A man may and ought to pride himself more on his will than on his talent.  Though Talent has its germ in a cultivated gift, Will means the incessant conquest of his instincts, of proclivities subdued and mortified, and difficulties of every kind heroically defeated.  The abuse of smoking encouraged Lousteau’s indolence.  Tobacco, which can lull grief, inevitably numbs a man’s energy.

Then, while the cigar deteriorated him physically, criticism as a profession morally stultified a man so easily tempted by pleasure.  Criticism is as fatal to the critic as seeing two sides to a question is to a pleader.  In these professions the judgment is undermined, the mind loses its lucid rectitude.  The writer lives by taking sides.  Thus, we may distinguish two kinds of criticism, as in painting we may distinguish art from practical dexterity.  Criticism, after the pattern of most contemporary leader-writers, is the expression of judgments formed at random in a more or less witty way, just as an advocate pleads in court on the most contradictory briefs.  The newspaper critic always finds a subject to work up in the book he is discussing.  Done after this fashion, the business is well adapted to indolent brains, to men devoid of the sublime faculty of imagination, or, possessed of it indeed, but lacking courage to cultivate it.  Every play, every book comes to their pen as a subject, making no demand on their imagination, and of which they simply write a report, seriously or in irony, according to the mood of the moment.  As to an opinion, whatever it may be, French wit can always justify it, being admirably ready to defend either side of any case.  And conscience counts for so little, these bravi have so little value for their own words, that they will loudly praise in the greenroom the work they tear to tatters in print.

Nay, men have been known to transfer their services from one paper to another without being at the pains to consider that the opinions of the new sheet must be diametrically antagonistic to those of the old.  Madame de la Baudraye could smile to see Lousteau with one article on the Legitimist side and one on the side of the new dynasty, both on the same occasion.  She admired the maxim he preached: