underneath it. Come, now, take the lot and give me forty francs."

"_Forty francs_!" exclaimed the bookseller, emitting a cry like the
squall of a frightened fowl. "Twenty at the very most! And then I may
never see the money again," he added.

"Where are your twenty francs?" asked Lousteau.

"My word, I don't know that I have them," said Barbet, fumbling in his
pockets. "Here they are. You are plundering me; you have an ascendency
over me----"

"Come, let us be off," said Lousteau, and taking up Lucien's
manuscript, he drew a line upon it in ink under the string.

"Have you anything else?" asked Barbet.

"Nothing, you young Shylock. I am going to put you in the way of a bit
of very good business," Etienne continued ("in which you shall lose a
thousand crowns, to teach you to rob me in this fashion"), he added
for Lucien's ear.

"But how about your reviews?" said Lucien, as they rolled away to the
Palais Royal.

"Pooh! you do not know how reviews are knocked off. As for the _Travels
in Egypt_, I looked into the book here and there (without cutting the
pages), and I found eleven slips in grammar. I shall say that the
writer may have mastered the dicky-bird language on the flints that
they call 'obelisks' out there in Egypt, but he cannot write in his