annot I turn journalist to sell my volume of poetry and the
novel, and then give up at once?"

"Machiavelli might do so, but not Lucien de Rubempre," said Leon
Giraud.

"Very well," exclaimed Lucien; "I will show you that I can do as much
as Machiavelli."

"Oh!" cried Michel, grasping Leon's hand, "you have done it, Leon.
--Lucien," he continued, "you have three hundred francs in hand; you
can live comfortably for three months; very well, then, work hard and
write another romance. D'Arthez and Fulgence will help you with the
plot; you will improve, you will be a novelist. And I, meanwhile, will
enter one of those _lupanars_ of thought; for three months I will be a
journalist. I will sell your books to some bookseller or other by
attacking his publications; I will write the articles myself; I will
get others for you. We will organize a success; you shall be a great
man, and still remain our Lucien."

"You must despise me very much, if you think that I should perish
while you escape," said the poet.

"O Lord, forgive him; it is a child!" cried Michel Chrestien.

When Lucien's intellect had been stimulated by the evenings spent in
d'Arthez's garret, he had made some study of the jokes and articles in
the smaller newspapers. He was at least the equal, he felt, of the
wittiest contributors; in private he tried some mental gymnastics of
the kind, and went out one morning with the triumphant idea of finding
some colonel of such light skirmishers of the press and enlisting in
their ranks. He dressed in his best and crossed the bridges, thinking
as he went that authors, journalists, and men of letters, his future
comrades, in short, would show him rather more kindness and
disinterestedness than the two species of booksellers who had so
dashed his hopes. He should meet with fellow-feeling, and something of
the kindly and grateful affection which he found in the _cenacle_ of the
Rue des Quatre-Vents. Tormented by emotion, consequent upon the
presentiments to which men of imagination cling so fondly, half
believing, half battling with their belief in them, he arrived in the
Rue Saint-Fiacre off the Boulevard Montmartre. Before a house,
occupied by the offices of a small newspaper, he stopped, and at the
sight of it his heart began to throb as heavily as the pulses of a
youth upon the threshold of some evil haunt.

Nevertheless, upstairs he went, and found the offices in the low
_entresol_ between the ground floor and t