the booksellers who would show you more or less politely to the door
at this moment will be standing outside your attic in a string, and
the value of the manuscript, which old Doguereau valued at four
hundred francs will rise to four thousand. These are the advantages of
the journalist's profession. So let us do our best to keep all
newcomers out of it. It needs an immense amount of brains to make your
way, and a still greater amount of luck. And here are you quibbling
over your good fortune! If we had not met to-day, you see, at
Flicoteaux's, you might have danced attendance on the booksellers for
another three years, or starved like d'Arthez in a garret. By the time
that d'Arthez is as learned as Bayle and as great a writer of prose as
Rousseau, we shall have made our fortunes, you and I, and we shall
hold his in our hands--wealth and fame to give or to hold. Finot will
be a deputy and proprietor of a great newspaper, and we shall be
whatever we meant to be--peers of France, or prisoner for debt in
Sainte-Pelagie."

"So Finot will sell his paper to the highest bidder among the
Ministers, just as he sells favorable notices to Mme. Bastienne and
runs down Mlle. Virginie, saying that Mme. Bastienne's bonnets are
superior to the millinery which they praised at first!" said Lucien,
recollecting that scene in the office.

"My dear fellow, you are a simpleton," Lousteau remarked drily. "Three
years ago Finot was walking on the uppers of his boots, dining for
eighteen sous at Tabar's, and knocking off a tradesman's prospectus
(when he could get it) for ten francs. His clothes hung together by
some miracle as mysterious as the Immaculate Conception. _Now_, Finot
has a paper of his own, worth about a hundred thousand francs. What
with subscribers who pay and take no copies, genuine subscriptions,