writer I
wish to secure to our cause. I therefore sought you in your rooms,
unintroduced and a stranger, in order to express my admiration of your
compositions. Bref, we soon became friends; and after comparing minds,
I admitted you, at your request, into this Secret Council. Now, in
proposing to you the conduct of the journal I would establish, for
which I am prepared to find all necessary funds, I am compelled to
make imperative conditions. Nominally you will be editor-in-chief: that
station, if the journal succeeds, will secure you position and fortune;
if it fail, you fail with it. But we will not speak of failure; I must
have it succeed. Our interest, then, is the same. Before that
interest all puerile vanities fade away. Nominally, I say, you are
editor-in-chief; but all the real work of editing will, at first, be
done by others."

"Ah!" exclaimed Rameau, aghast and stunned. Lebeau resumed,

"To establish the journal I propose needs more than the genius of youth;
it needs the tact and experience of mature years."

Rameau sank back on his chair with a sullen sneer on his pale lips.
Decidedly Lebeau was not so great a man as he had thought.

"A certain portion of the journal," continued Lebeau, "will be
exclusively appropriated to your pen."

Rameau's lip lost the sneer.

"But your pen must be therein restricted to compositions of pure fancy,
disporting in a world that does not exist; or, if on graver themes
connected with the beings of the world that does exist, the subjects
will be dictated to you and revised. Yet even in the higher departments
of a journal intended to make way at its first start, we need the aid,
not indeed of men who write better than you, but of men whose fame is
established,--whose writings, good or bad, the public run to read, and
will find good even if they are bad. You must consign one column to the
playful comments and witticisms of Savarin."

"Savarin? But he has a journal of his own. He will not, as an author,
condescend to write in one just set up by me; and as a politician, he as
certainly will not aid in an ultrademocratic revolution. If he care for
politics at all, he is a constitutionalist, an Orleanist."

"Enfant! as an author Savarin will condescend to contribute to your
journal, first, because it in no way attempts to interfere with his own;
secondly,--I can tell you a secret, Savarin's journal no longer suffices
for his existence. He has sold more than two-thirds of its