_cafe_, while taking my
beefsteak and cup of chocolate, the various details of the punishment I
was about to undergo. One of my tormentors, who was a great deal more
celebrated for his aversion to water and clean linen than for any
article he had ever written, declared that I was about to be banished
from everything like decent society; another vowed by all the deities of
his Olympus that I was a mountebank and a skeptic, who had undertaken to
defend sound doctrines and to tomahawk eminent writers simply by way of
bringing myself into public notice; a third painted me as a poor wretch
who had come from his provincial home with his pockets filled with
manuscripts, and was going about Paris begging favorable notices as a
means of touching publishers and booksellers; a fourth depicted me, on
the other hand, as a wealthy fellow, who was so diseased with a mania
for literature that I paid newspapers and reviews to publish my
contributions, which no human being would have accepted gratuitously. As
I left the _cafe_, one of my intimate friends ran up to me. His face
expressed that mixture of cordial commiseration and desire to make a
fuss about the matter which one's friends' faces always wear under these
circumstances.

"Well," said he, "what do you think of the way they treat you?"

"Why, they are all at it,--Monsieur Edmond About, Monsieur Louis Ulbach,
Monsieur Paulin Limayrac, Monsieur Henry Murger, Monsieur Taxile
Delord,"----

"Ah! by the way, have you seen his article of yesterday?"

"No."

"You should have read that. Those in the morning's papers are nothing to
it. Really, you ought not to leave town without seeing it." Looking very
important, he added,--"In your position, you should know everything
written against you."

I followed this friendly advice, and went to the Rue du Croissant, where
the office of "Le Charivari" moulders. As the place is anything but
attractive to well-bred persons, allow me to get there by the longest
road, and to go through the Faubourg Saint Honore. A month before the
conversation above reported took place in front of a _cafe_-door, I had
the pleasure of meeting the Count de ----, an intellectual gentleman who
occupies an influential place in some aristocratic drawing-rooms which
still retain a partiality for literature. He said to me,--

"Do you know Monsieur Ernest Legouve?"

"Assuredly! The most polite and most agreeable of all the generals of
_Alexander_ Scribe; the author