efuses,
he is unsociable, eaten up with self-love, he is sulky and rancorous,
he bears malice, he is a bad bed-fellow. To-day let an author receive a
treacherous stab in the back, let him avoid the snares set for him with
base hypocrisy, and endure the most unhandsome treatment, he must still
exchange greetings with his assassin, who, for that matter, claims
the esteem and friendship of his victim. Everything can be excused and
justified in an age which has transformed vice into virtue and virtue
into vice. Good-fellowship has come to be the most sacred of our
liberties; the representatives of the most opposite opinions courteously
blunt the edge of their words, and fence with buttoned foils. But in
those almost forgotten days the same theatre could scarcely hold certain
Royalist and Liberal journalists; the most malignant provocation was
offered, glances were like pistol-shots, the least spark produced an
explosion of quarrel. Who has not heard his neighbor's half-smothered
oath on the entrance of some man in the forefront of the battle on
the opposing side? There were but two parties--Royalists and Liberals,
Classics and Romantics. You found the same hatred masquerading in either
form, and no longer wondered at the scaffolds of the Convention.

Lucien had been a Liberal and a hot Voltairean; now he was a rabid
Royalist and a Romantic. Martainville, the only one among his colleagues
who really liked him and stood by him loyally, was more hated by the
Liberals than any man on the Royalist side, and this fact drew down
all the hate of the Liberals on Lucien's head. Martainville's staunch
friendship injured Lucien. Political parties show scanty gratitude to
outpost sentinels, and leave leaders of forlorn hopes to their fate;
'tis a rule of warfare which holds equally good in matters political, to
keep with the main body of the army if you mean to succeed. The spite of
the small Liberal papers fastened at once on the opportunity of coupling
the two names, and flung them into each other's arms. Their friendship,
real or imaginary, brought down upon them both a series of articles
written by pens dipped in gall. Felicien Vernou was furious with
jealousy of Lucien's social success; and believed, like all his old
associates, in the poet's approaching elevation.

The fiction of Lucien's treason was embellished with every kind of
aggravating circumstance; he was called Judas the Less, Martainville
being Judas the Great, for Mart