contemporary literature," said Etienne, when they came away. "Poor
Vernou cannot forgive us for his wife. He ought to be relieved of her in
the interests of the public; and a deluge of blood-thirsty reviews and
stinging sarcasms against successful men of every sort would be averted.
What is to become of a man with such a wife and that pair of abominable
brats? Have you seen Rigaudin in Picard's _La Maison en Loterie_? You
have? Well, like Rigaudin, Vernou will not fight himself, but he will
set others fighting; he would give an eye to put out both eyes in the
head of the best friend he has. You will see him using the bodies of
the slain for a stepping-stone, rejoicing over every one's misfortunes,
attacking princes, dukes, marquises, and nobles, because he himself is
a commoner; reviling the work of unmarried men because he forsooth has
a wife; and everlastingly preaching morality, the joys of domestic life,
and the duties of the citizen. In short, this very moral critic will
spare no one, not even infants of tender age. He lives in the Rue Mandar
with a wife who might be the _Mamamouchi_ of the _Bourgeois gentilhomme_
and a couple of little Vernous as ugly as sin. He tries to sneer at
the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where he will never set foot, and makes his
duchesses talk like his wife. That is the sort of man to raise a howl
at the Jesuits, insult the Court, and credit the Court party with the
design of restoring feudal rights and the right of primogeniture--just
the one to preach a crusade for Equality, he that thinks himself the
equal of no one. If he were a bachelor, he would go into society; if he
were in a fair way to be a Royalist poet with a pension and the Cross
of the Legion of Honor, he would be an optimist, and journalism offers
starting-points by the hundred. Journalism is the giant catapult set in
motion by pigmy hatreds. Have you any wish to marry after this? Vernou
has none of the milk of human kindness in him, it is all turned to gall;
and he is emphatically the Journalist, a tiger with two hands that tears
everything to pieces, as if his pen had the hydrophobia."

"It is a case of gunophobia," said Lucien. "Has he ability?"

"He is witty, he is a writer of articles. He incubates articles; he does
that all his life and nothing else. The most dogged industry would fail
to graft a book on his prose. Felicien is incapable of conceiving a work
on a large scale, of broad effects, of fitting characters harmoni