“Gratitude!  For what do you take us?” asked Bianchon.

“We had the pleasure,” added Fulgence.

“Well, so you are a journalist, are you?” asked Leon Giraud.  “The fame of your first appearance has reached even the Latin Quarter.”

“I am not a journalist yet,” returned Lucien.

“Aha!  So much the better,” said Michel Chrestien.

“I told you so!” said d’Arthez.  “Lucien knows the value of a clean conscience.  When you can say to yourself as you lay your head on the pillow at night, ’I have not sat in judgment on another man’s work; I have given pain to no one; I have not used the edge of my wit to deal a stab to some harmless soul; I have sacrificed no one’s success to a jest; I have not even troubled the happiness of imbecility; I have not added to the burdens of genius; I have scorned the easy triumphs of epigram; in short, I have not acted against my convictions,’ is not this a viaticum that gives one daily strength?”

“But one can say all this, surely, and yet work on a newspaper,” said Lucien.  “If I had absolutely no other way of earning a living, I should certainly come to this.”

“Oh! oh! oh!” cried Fulgence, his voice rising a note each time; “we are capitulating, are we?”

“He will turn journalist,” Leon Giraud said gravely.  “Oh, Lucien, if you would only stay and work with us!  We are about to bring out a periodical in which justice and truth shall never be violated; we will spread doctrines that, perhaps, will be of real service to mankind——­”

“You will not have a single subscriber,” Lucien broke in with Machiavellian wisdom.

“There will be five hundred of them,” asserted Michel Chrestien, “but they will be worth five hundred thousand.”

“You will need a lot of capital,” continued Lucien.

“No, only devotion,” said d’Arthez.

“Anybody might take him for a perfumer’s assistant,” burst out Michel Chrestien, looking at Lucien’s head, and sniffing comically.  “You were seen driving about in a very smart turnout with a pair of thoroughbreds, and a mistress for a prince, Coralie herself.”

“Well, and is there any harm in it?”

“You would not say that if you thought that there was no harm in it,” said Bianchon.

“I could have wished Lucien a Beatrice,” said d’Arthez, “a noble woman, who would have been a help to him in life——­”

“But, Daniel,” asked Lucien, “love is love wherever you find it, is it not?”

“Ah!” said the republican member, “on that one point I am an aristocrat.  I could not bring myself to love a woman who must rub shoulders with all sorts of people in the green-room; whom an actor kisses on stage; she must lower herself before the public, smile on every one, lift her skirts as she dances, and dress like a man, that all the world may see what none should see save I alone.  Or if I loved such a woman, she should leave the stage, and my love should cleanse her from the stain of it.”