A Distinguished Provincial at Paris

Other works of art were pinned in the cheap sea-green wall-paper. These consisted of nine pen-and-ink illustrations for Le Solitaire. The work had attained to such an unheard-of European popularity, that journalists evidently were tired of it. – “The Solitary makes his first appearance in the provinces; sensation among the women. – The Solitary perused at a chateau. – Effect of the Solitary on domestic animals. – The Solitary explained to savage tribes, with the most brilliant results. – The Solitary translated into Chinese and presented by the author to the Emperor at Pekin. – The Mont Sauvage, Rape of Elodie.” – (Lucien though this caricature very shocking, but he could not help laughing at it.) – “The Solitary under a canopy conducted in triumphal procession by the newspapers. – The Solitary breaks the press to splinters, and wounds the printers. – Read backwards, the superior beauties of the Solitary produce a sensation at the Academie.” – On a newspaper-wrapper Lucien noticed a sketch of a contributor holding out his hat, and beneath it the words, “Finot! my hundred francs,” and a name, since grown more notorious than famous.

Between the window and the chimney-piece stood a writing-table, a mahogany armchair, and a waste-paper basket on a strip of hearth-rug; the dust lay thick on all these objects. There were short curtains in the windows. About a score of new books lay on the writing-table, deposited there apparently during the day, together with prints, music, snuff-boxes of the “Charter” pattern, a copy of the ninth edition of Le Solitaire (the great joke of the moment), and some ten unopened letters.

Lucien had taken stock of this strange furniture, and made reflections of the most exhaustive kind upon it, when, the clock striking five, he returned to question the pensioner. Coloquinte had finished his crust, and was waiting with the patience of a commissionaire, for the man of medals, who perhaps was taking an airing on the boulevard.

At this conjuncture the rustle of a dress sounded on the stair, and the light unmistakable footstep of a woman on the threshold. The newcomer was passably pretty. She addressed herself to Lucien.

“Sir,” she said, “I know why you cry up Mlle. Virginie’s hats so much; and I have come to put down my name for a year’s subscription in the first place; but tell me your conditions – ”

“I am not connected with the paper, madame.”

“Oh!”

“A subscription dating from October?” inquired the pensioner.

“What does the lady want to know?” asked the veteran, reappearing on the scene.

The fair milliner and the retired military man were soon deep in converse; and when Lucien, beginning to lose patience, came back to the first room, he heard the conclusion of the matter.

“Why, I shall be delighted, quite delighted, sir. Mlle. Florentine can come to my shop and choose anything she likes. Ribbons are in my department. So it is all quite settled. You will say no more about Virginie, a botcher that cannot design a new shape, while I have ideas of my own, I have.”

Lucien heard a sound as of coins dropping into a cashbox, and the veteran began to make up his books for the day.

“I have been waiting here for an hour, sir,” Lucien began, looking not a little annoyed.

“And ‘they’ have not come yet!” exclaimed Napoleon’s veteran, civilly feigning concern. “I am not surprised at that. It is some time since I have seen ‘them’ here. It is the middle of the month, you see. Those fine fellows only turn up on pay days – the 29th or the 30th.”

“And M. Finot?” asked Lucien, having caught the editor’s name.

“He is in the Rue Feydeau, that’s where he lives. Coloquinte, old chap, just take him everything that has come in to-day when you go with the paper to the printers.”

“Where is the newspaper put together?” Lucien said to himself.

“The newspaper?” repeated the officer, as he received the rest of the stamp money from Coloquinte, “the newspaper? – broum! broum! – (Mind you are round at the printers’ by six o’clock to-morrow, old chap, to send off the porters.) – The newspaper, sir, is written in the street, at the writers’ houses, in the printing-office between eleven and twelve o’clock at night. In the Emperor’s time, sir, these shops for spoiled paper were not known. Oh! he would have cleared them out with four men and a corporal; they would not have come over him with their talk. But that is enough of prattling. If my nephew finds it worth his while, and so long as they write for the son of the Other (broum! broum!) – after all, there is no harm in that. Ah! by the way, subscribers don’t seem to me to be advancing in serried columns; I shall leave my post.”

“You seem to know all about the newspaper, sir,” Lucien began.

“From a business point of view, broum! broum!” coughed the soldier, clearing his throat. “From three to five francs per column, according to ability. – Fifty lines to a column, forty letters to a line; no blanks; there you are! As for the staff, they are queer fish, little youngsters whom I wouldn’t take on for the commissariat; and because they make fly tracks on sheets of white paper, they look down, forsooth, on an old Captain of Dragoons of the Guard, that retired with a major’s rank after entering every European capital with Napoleon.”

The soldier of Napoleon brushed his coat, and made as if he would go out, but Lucien, swept to the door, had courage enough to make a stand.

“I came to be a contributor of the paper,” he said. “I am full of respect, I vow and declare, for a captain of the Imperial Guard, those men of bronze – ”

“Well said, my little civilian, there are several kinds of contributors; which kind do you wish to be?” replied the trooper, bearing down on Lucien, and descending the stairs. At the foot of the flight he stopped, but it was only to light a cigar at the porter’s box.

“If any subscribers come, you see them and take note of them, Mother Chollet. – Simply subscribers, never know anything but subscribers,” he added, seeing that Lucien followed him. “Finot is my nephew; he is the only one of my family that has done anything to relieve me in my position. So when anybody comes to pick a quarrel with Finot, he finds old Giroudeau, Captain of the Dragoons of the Guard, that set out as a private in a cavalry regiment in the army of the Sambre-et-Meuse, and was fencing-master for five years to the First Hussars, army of Italy! One, two, and the man that had any complaints to make would be turned off into the dark,” he added, making a lunge. “Now writers, my boy, are in different corps; there is the writer who writes and draws his pay; there is the writer who writes and gets nothing (a volunteer we call him); and, lastly, there is the writer who writes nothing, and he is by no means the stupidest, for he makes no mistakes; he gives himself out for a literary man, he is on the paper, he treats us to dinners, he loafs about the theatres, he keeps an actress, he is very well off. What do you mean to be?”

“The man that does good work and gets good pay.”

“You are like the recruits. They all want to be marshals of France. Take old Giroudeau’s word for it, and turn right about, in double-quick time, and go and pick up nails in the gutter like that good fellow yonder; you can tell by the look of him that he has been in the army. – Isn’t it a shame that an old soldier who has walked into the jaws of death hundreds of times should be picking up old iron in the streets of Paris? Ah! God A’mighty! ‘twas a shabby trick to desert the Emperor. – Well, my boy, the individual you saw this morning has made his forty francs a month. Are you going to do better? And, according to Finot, he is the cleverest man on the staff.”

“When you enlisted in the Sambre-et-Meuse, did they talk about danger?”

“Rather.”

“Very well?”

“Very well. Go and see my nephew Finot, a good fellow, as good a fellow as you will find, if you can find him, that is, for he is like a fish, always on the move. In his way of business, there is no writing, you see, it is setting others to write. That sort like gallivanting about with actresses better than scribbling on sheets of paper, it seems. Oh! they are queer customers, they are. Hope I may have the honor of seeing you again.”

With that the cashier raised his formidable loaded cane, one of the defenders of Germainicus, and walked off, leaving Lucien in the street, as much bewildered by this picture of the newspaper world as he had formerly been by the practical aspects of literature at Messrs. Vidal and Porchon’s establishment.

Ten several times did Lucien repair to the Rue Feydeau in search of Andoche Finot, and ten times he failed to find that gentleman. He went first thing in the morning; Finot had not come in. At noon, Finot had gone out; he was breakfasting at such and such a cafe. At the cafe, in answer to inquiries of the waitress, made after surmounting unspeakable repugnance, Lucien heard that Finot had just left the place. Lucien, at length tired out, began to regard Finot as a mythical and fabulous character; it appeared simpler to waylay Etienne Lousteau at Flicoteaux’s. That youthful journalist would, doubtless, explain the mysteries that enveloped the paper for which he wrote.

Since the day, a hundred times blessed, when Lucien made the acquaintance of Daniel d’Arthez, he had taken another seat at Flicoteaux’s. The two friends dined side by side, talking in lowered voices of the higher literature, of suggested subjects, and ways of presenting, opening up, and developing them. At the present time Daniel d’Arthez was correcting the manuscript of The Archer of Charles IX. He reconstructed whole chapters, and wrote the fine passages found therein, as well as the magnificent preface, which is, perhaps, the best thing in the book, and throws so much light on the work of the young school of literature. One day it so happened that Daniel had been waiting for Lucien, who now sat with his friend’s hand in his own, when he saw Etienne Lousteau turn the door-handle. Lucien instantly dropped Daniel’s hand, and told the waiter that he would dine at his old place by the counter. D’Arthez gave Lucien a glance of divine kindness, in which reproach was wrapped in forgiveness. The glance cut the poet to the quick; he took Daniel’s hand and grasped it anew.

“It is an important question of business for me; I will tell you about it afterwards,” said he.

Lucien was in his old place by the time that Lousteau reached the table; as the first comer, he greeted his acquaintance; they soon struck up a conversation, which grew so lively that Lucien went off in search of the manuscript of the Marguerites, while Lousteau finished his dinner. He had obtained leave to lay his sonnets before the journalist, and mistook the civility of the latter for willingness to find him a publisher, or a place on the paper. When Lucien came hurrying back again, he saw d’Arthez resting an elbow on the table in a corner of the restaurant, and knew that his friend was watching him with melancholy eyes, but he would not see d’Arthez just then; he felt the sharp pangs of poverty, the goadings of ambition, and followed Lousteau.

In the late afternoon the journalist and the neophyte went to the Luxembourg, and sat down under the trees in that part of the gardens which lies between the broad Avenue de l’Observatoire and the Rue de l’Ouest. The Rue de l’Ouest at that time was a long morass, bounded by planks and market-gardens; the houses were all at the end nearest the Rue de Vaugirard; and the walk through the gardens was so little frequented, that at the hour when Paris dines, two lovers might fall out and exchange the earnest of reconciliation without fear of intruders. The only possible spoil-sport was the pensioner on duty at the little iron gate on the Rue de l’Ouest, if that gray-headed veteran should take it into his head to lengthen his monotonous beat. There, on a bench beneath the lime-trees, Etienne Lousteau sat and listened to sample-sonnets from the Marguerites.

Etienne Lousteau, after a two-years’ apprenticeship, was on the staff of a newspaper; he had his foot in the stirrup; he reckoned some of the celebrities of the day among his friends; altogether, he was an imposing personage in Lucien’s eyes. Wherefore, while Lucien untied the string about the Marguerites, he judged it necessary to make some sort of preface.

“The sonnet, monsieur,” said he, “is one of the most difficult forms of poetry. It has fallen almost entirely into disuse. No Frenchman can hope to rival Petrarch; for the language in which the Italian wrote, being so infinitely more pliant than French, lends itself to play of thought which our positivism (pardon the use of the expression) rejects. So it seemed to me that a volume of sonnets would be something quite new. Victor Hugo has appropriated the old, Canalis writes lighter verse, Beranger has monopolized songs, Casimir Delavigne has taken tragedy, and Lamartine the poetry of meditation.”

“Are you a ‘Classic’ or a ‘Romantic’?” inquired Lousteau.

Lucien’s astonishment betrayed such complete ignorance of the state of affairs in the republic of letters, that Lousteau thought it necessary to enlighten him.

“You have come up in the middle of a pitched battle, my dear fellow; you must make your decision at once. Literature is divided, in the first place, into several zones, but our great men are ranged in two hostile camps. The Royalists are ‘Romantics,’ the Liberals are ‘Classics.’ The divergence of taste in matters literary and divergence of political opinion coincide; and the result is a war with weapons of every sort, double-edged witticisms, subtle calumnies and nicknames a outrance, between the rising and the waning glory, and ink is shed in torrents. The odd part of it is that the Royalist-Romantics are all for liberty in literature, and for repealing laws and conventions; while the Liberal-Classics are for maintaining the unities, the Alexandrine, and the classical theme. So opinions in politics on either side are directly at variance with literary taste. If you are eclectic, you will have no one for you. Which side do you take?”

“Which is the winning side?”

“The Liberal newspapers have far more subscribers than the Royalist and Ministerial journals; still, though Canalis is for Church and King, and patronized by the Court and the clergy, he reaches other readers. – Pshaw! sonnets date back to an epoch before Boileau’s time,” said Etienne, seeing Lucien’s dismay at the prospect of choosing between two banners. “Be a Romantic. The Romantics are young men, and the Classics are pedants; the Romantics will gain the day.”

The word “pedant” was the latest epithet taken up by Romantic journalism to heap confusion on the Classical faction.

Lucien began to read, choosing first of all the title-sonnets.

EASTER DAISIESThe daisies in the meadows, not in vain,In red and white and gold before our eyes,Have written an idyll for man’s sympathies,And set his heart’s desire in language plain.Gold stamens set in silver filigraneReveal the treasures which we idolize;And all the cost of struggle for the prizeIs symboled by a secret blood-red stain.Was it because your petals once uncurledWhen Jesus rose upon a fairer world,And from wings shaken for a heav’nward flightShed grace, that still as autumn reappearsYou bloom again to tell of dead delight,To bring us back the flower of twenty years?

Lucien felt piqued by Lousteau’s complete indifference during the reading of the sonnet; he was unfamiliar as yet with the disconcerting impassibility of the professional critic, wearied by much reading of poetry, prose, and plays. Lucien was accustomed to applause. He choked down his disappointment and read another, a favorite with Mme. de Bargeton and with some of his friends in the Rue des Quatre-Vents.

“This one, perhaps, will draw a word from him,” he thought.

THE MARGUERITEI am the Marguerite, fair and tall I grewIn velvet meadows, ‘mid the flowers a star.They sought me for my beauty near and far;My dawn, I thought, should be for ever new.But now an all unwished-for gift I rue,A fatal ray of knowledge shed to marMy radiant star-crown grown oracular,For I must speak and give an answer true.An end of silence and of quiet days,The Lover with two words my counsel prays;And when my secret from my heart is reft,When all my silver petals scattered lie,I am the only flower neglected left,Cast down and trodden under foot to die.

At the end, the poet looked up at his Aristarchus. Etienne Lousteau was gazing at the trees in the Pepiniere.

“Well?” asked Lucien.

“Well, my dear fellow, go on! I am listening to you, am I not? That fact in itself is as good as praise in Paris.”

“Have you had enough?” Lucien asked.

“Go on,” the other answered abruptly enough.

Lucien proceeded to read the following sonnet, but his heart was dead within him; Lousteau’s inscrutable composure froze his utterance. If he had come a little further upon the road, he would have known that between writer and writer silence or abrupt speech, under such circumstances, is a betrayal of jealousy, and outspoken admiration means a sense of relief over the discovery that the work is not above the average after all.

THE CAMELLIAIn Nature’s book, if rightly understood,The rose means love, and red for beauty glows;A pure, sweet spirit in the violet blows,And bright the lily gleams in lowlihood.But this strange bloom, by sun and wind unwooed,Seems to expand and blossom ‘mid the snows,A lily sceptreless, a scentless rose,For dainty listlessness of maidenhood.Yet at the opera house the petals traceFor modesty a fitting aureole;An alabaster wreath to lay, methought,In dusky hair o’er some fair woman’s faceWhich kindles ev’n such love within the soulAs sculptured marble forms by Phidias wrought.

“What do you think of my poor sonnets?” Lucien asked, coming straight to the point.

“Do you want the truth?”

“I am young enough to like the truth, and so anxious to succeed that I can hear it without taking offence, but not without despair,” replied Lucien.

“Well, my dear fellow, the first sonnet, from its involved style, was evidently written at Angouleme; it gave you so much trouble, no doubt, that you cannot give it up. The second and third smack of Paris already; but read us one more sonnet,” he added, with a gesture that seemed charming to the provincial.

Encouraged by the request, Lucien read with more confidence, choosing a sonnet which d’Arthez and Bridau liked best, perhaps on account of its color.

THE TULIPI am the Tulip from Batavia’s shore;The thrifty Fleming for my beauty rarePays a king’s ransom, when that I am fair,And tall, and straight, and pure my petal’s core.And, like some Yolande of the days of yore,My long and amply folded skirts I wear,O’er-painted with the blazon that I bear– Gules, a fess azure; purpure, fretty, or.The fingers of the Gardener divineHave woven for me my vesture fair and fine,Of threads of sunlight and of purple stain;No flower so glorious in the garden bed,But Nature, woe is me, no fragrance shedWithin my cup of Orient porcelain.

“Well?” asked Lucien after a pause, immeasurably long, as it seemed to him.

“My dear fellow,” Etienne said, gravely surveying the tips of Lucien’s boots (he had brought the pair from Angouleme, and was wearing them out). “My dear fellow, I strongly recommend you to put your ink on your boots to save blacking, and to take your pens for toothpicks, so that when you come away from Flicoteaux’s you can swagger along this picturesque alley looking as if you had dined. Get a situation of any sort or description. Run errands for a bailiff if you have the heart, be a shopman if your back is strong enough, enlist if you happen to have a taste for military music. You have the stuff of three poets in you; but before you can reach your public, you will have time to die of starvation six times over, if you intend to live on the proceeds of your poetry, that is. And from your too unsophisticated discourse, it would seem to be your intention to coin money out of your inkstand.

“I say nothing as to your verses; they are a good deal better than all the poetical wares that are cumbering the ground in booksellers’ backshops just now. Elegant ‘nightingales’ of that sort cost a little more than the others, because they are printed on hand-made paper, but they nearly all 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 is still time, before you set your foot on the lowest step of the throne for which so many ambitious spirits are contending, and do not sell your honor, as I do, for a livelihood.” Etienne’s eyes filled with tears as he spoke.

“Do you know how I make a living?” he continued passionately. “The little stock of money they gave me at home was soon eaten up. A piece of mine was accepted at the Theatre-Francais just as I came to an end of it. At the Theatre-Francais the influence of a first gentleman of the bedchamber, or of a prince of the blood, would not be enough to secure a turn of favor; the actors only make concessions to those who threaten their self-love. If it is in your power to spread a report that the jeune premier has the asthma, the leading lady a fistula where you please, and the soubrette has foul breath, then your piece would be played to-morrow. I do not know whether in two years’ time, I who speak to you now, shall be in a position to exercise such power. You need so many to back you. And where and how am I to gain my bread meanwhile?

“I tried lots of things; I wrote a novel, anonymously; old Doguereau gave me two hundred francs for it, and he did not make very much out of it himself. Then it grew plain to me that journalism alone could give me a living. The next thing was to find my way into those shops. I will not tell you all the advances I made, nor how often I begged in vain. I will say nothing of the six months I spent as extra hand on a paper, and was told that I scared subscribers away, when as a fact I attracted them. Pass over the insults I put up with. At this moment I am doing the plays at the Boulevard theatres, almost gratis, for a paper belonging to Finot, that stout young fellow who breakfasts two or three times a month, even now, at the Cafe Voltaire (but you don’t go there). I live by selling tickets that managers give me to bribe a good word in the paper, and reviewers’ copies of books. In short, Finot once satisfied, I am allowed to write for and against various commercial articles, and I traffic in tribute paid in kind by various tradesmen. A facetious notice of a Carminative Toilet Lotion, Pate des Sultanes, Cephalic Oil, or Brazilian Mixture brings me in twenty or thirty francs.