over their champagne and their pheasants,--are handed down at their
birth from the brain to the commercial travellers who are employed to
spread them discreetly, "urbi et orbi," through Paris and the provinces,
seasoned with the fried pork of advertisement and prospectus, by means
of which they catch in their rat-trap the departmental rodent commonly
called subscriber, sometimes stockholder, occasionally corresponding
member or patron, but invariably fool.

"I am a fool!" many a poor country proprietor has said when, caught by
the prospect of being the first to launch a new idea, he finds that he
has, in point of fact, launched his thousand or twelve hundred francs
into a gulf.

"Subscribers are fools who never can be brought to understand that to
go ahead in the intellectual world they must start with more money than
they need for the tour of Europe," say the speculators.

Consequently there is endless warfare between the recalcitrant public
which refuses to pay the Parisian imposts and the tax-gatherer who,
living by his receipt of custom, lards the public with new ideas, turns
it on the spit of lively projects, roasts it with prospectuses (basting
all the while with flattery), and finally gobbles it up with some
toothsome sauce in which it is caught and intoxicated like a fly with
a black-lead. Moreover, since 1830 what honors and emoluments have been
scattered throughout France to stimulate the zeal and self-love of the
"progressive and intelligent masses"! Titles, medals, diplomas, a sort
of legion of honor invented for the army of martyrs, have followed each
other with marvellous rapidity. Speculators in the manufactured products
of the intellect have developed a spice, a ginger, all their own. From
this have come premiums, forestalled dividends, and that conscription
of noted names which is levied without the knowledge of the unfortunate
writers who bear them, and who thus find themselves actual co-operators
in more enterprises than there are days in the year; for the law, we may
remark, takes no account of the theft of a patronymic. Worse than all
is the rape of ideas which these caterers for the public mind, like the
slave-merchants of Asia, tear from the paternal brain before they are
well matured, and drag half-clothed before the eyes of their blockhead
of a sultan, their Shahabaham, their terrible public, which, if they
don't amuse it, will cut off their heads by curtailing the ingots and
emptying their po