of them come down at last to the banks of the Seine.
You may study their range of notes there any day if you care to make an
instructive pilgrimage along the Quais from old Jerome's stall by the
Pont Notre Dame to the Pont Royal. You will find them all there--all the
_Essays in Verse_, the _Inspirations_, the lofty flights, the hymns, and
songs, and ballads, and odes; all the nestfuls hatched during the
last seven years, in fact. There lie their muses, thick with dust,
bespattered by every passing cab, at the mercy of every profane hand
that turns them over to look at the vignette on the title-page.

"You know nobody; you have access to no newspaper, so your _Marguerites_
will remain demurely folded as you hold them now. They will never open
out to the sun of publicity in fair fields with broad margins enameled
with the florets which Dauriat the illustrious, the king of the Wooden
Galleries, scatters with a lavish hand for poets known to fame. I came
to Paris as you came, poor boy, with a plentiful stock of illusions,
impelled by irrepressible longings for glory--and I found the realities
of the craft, the practical difficulties of the trade, the hard facts of
poverty. In my enthusiasm (it is kept well under control now), my first
ebullition of youthful spirits, I did not see the social machinery at
work; so I had to learn to see it by bumping against the wheels and
bruising myself against the shafts, and chains. Now you are about to
learn, as I learned, that between you and all these fair dreamed-of
things lies the strife of men, and passions, and necessities.

"Willy-nilly, you must take part in a terrible battle; book against
book, man against man, party against party; make war you must, and that
systematically, or you will be abandoned by your own party. And they are
mean contests; struggles which leave you disenchanted, and wearied, and
depraved, and all in pure waste; for it often happens that you put
forth all your strength to win laurels for a man whom you despise,
and maintain, in spite of yourself, that some second-rate writer is a
genius.

"There is a world behind the scenes in the theatre of literature. The
public in front sees unexpected or well-deserved success, and applauds;
the public does _not_ see the preparations, ugly as they always are, the
painted supers, the _claqueurs_ hired to applaud, the stage carpenters,
and all that lies behind the scenes. You are still among the audience.
Abdicate, there