The ardent young man, without a murmur or any misgivings, drank to the very dregs the cup poured out to neophytes in the harsh career of letters by editors, theatrical managers, and publishers.  With some, this course ends in suicide, but it only cost Gerfaut a portion of his slender patrimony; he bore this loss like a man who feels that he is strong enough to repair it.  When his plans were once made, he followed them up with indefatigable perseverance, and became a striking example of the irresistible power of intelligence united to will-power.  Reputation, for him, lay in the unknown depths of an arid and rocky soil; he was obliged, in order to reach it, to dig a sort of artesian well.  Gerfaut accepted this heroic labor; he worked day and night for several years, his forehead, metaphorically, bathed in a painful perspiration alleviated only by hopes far away.  At last the untiring worker’s drill struck the underground spring over which so many noble ones breathlessly bend, although their thirst is never quenched.  At this victorious stroke, glory burst forth, falling in luminous sparks, making this new name—­his name—­flash with a brilliancy too dearly paid for not to be lasting.

At the time of which we speak, Octave had conquered every obstacle in the literary field.  With a versatility of talent which sometimes recalled Voltaire’s “proteanism,” he attacked in succession the most difficult styles.  Besides their poetic value, his dramas had this positive merit, the highest in the theatre world they were money-makers; so the managers greeted him with due respect, while collaborators swarmed about him.  The journals paid for his articles in their weight in gold; reviews snatched every line of his yet unfinished novels; his works were illustrated by Porret and Tony Johannot—­the masters of the day—­and shone resplendent behind the glass cases in the Orleans gallery.  Gerfaut had at last made a place for himself among that baker’s dozen of writers who call themselves, and justly, too, the field-marshals of French literature, of which Chateaubriand was then commander-in-chief.

What was it that had brought such a person a hundred leagues from the opera balcony, to put on a pretty woman’s slipper?  Was the fair lady one of those caprices, so frequent and fleeting in an artist’s thoughts, or had she given birth to one of those sentiments that end by absorbing the rest of one’s life?

The young man seated opposite Gerfaut was, physically and morally, as complete a contrast to him as one could possibly imagine.  He was one of the kind very much in request in fashionable society.  There is not a person who has not met one of these worthy fellows, destined to make good officers, perfect merchants, and very satisfactory lawyers, but who, unfortunately, have been seized with a mania for notoriety.  Ordinarily they think of it on account of somebody else’s talent.  This one is brother to a poet, another son-in-law to a historian; they conclude that they also have a right to be poet and historian in their turn.  Thomas Corneille is their model; but we must admit that very few of our writers reach the rank attained by Corneille the younger.