Marie's absence might have saved Raoul from the gulf into which he was
falling, if Florine had been near him; but, unfortunately, he was
alone in the midst of friends who had become his enemies from the
moment that he showed his intention of ruling them. His staff of
writers hated him "pro tem.," ready to hold out a hand to him and
console him in case of a fall, ready to adore him in case of success.
So goes the world of literature. No one is really liked but an
inferior. Every man's hand is against him who is likely to rise. This
wide-spread envy doubles the chances of common minds who excite
neither envy nor suspicion, who make their way like moles, and, fools
though they be, find themselves gazetted in the "Moniteur," for three
or four places, while men of talent are still struggling at the door
to keep each other out.

The underhand enmity of these pretended friends, which Florine would
have scented with the innate faculty of a courtesan to get at truth
amid a thousand misleading circumstances, was by no means Raoul's
greatest danger. His partners, Massol the lawyer, and du Tillet the
banker, had intended from the first to harness his ardor to the
chariot of their own importance and get rid of him as soon as he was
out of condition to feed the paper, or else to deprive him of his
power, arbitrarily, whenever it suited their purpose to take it. To
them Nathan represented a certain amount of talent to use up, a
literary force of the motive power of ten pens to employ. Massol, one
of those lawyers who mistake the faculty of endless speech for
eloquence, who possess the art of boring by diffusiveness, the torment
of all meetings and assemblies where they belittle everything, and who
desire to become personages at any cost,--Massol no longer wanted the
place as Keeper of the Seals; he had seen some five or six different
men go through that office in four years, and the robes disgusted him.