“Haven’t I been in Paris for three years?” said Lousteau, “and only yesterday Finot began to pay me a fixed monthly salary of three hundred francs, and a hundred francs per sheet for his paper.”

“Well; you are saying nothing!” exclaimed Florine, with her eyes turned on Lucien.

“We shall see,” said Lucien.

“My dear boy, if you had been my brother, I could not have done more for you,” retorted Lousteau, somewhat nettled, “but I won’t answer for Finot.  Scores of sharp fellows will besiege Finot for the next two days with offers to work for low pay.  I have promised for you, but you can draw back if you like.—­You little know how lucky you are,” he added after a pause.  “All those in our set combine to attack an enemy in various papers, and lend each other a helping hand all round.”

“Let us go in the first place to Felicien Vernou,” said Lucien.  He was eager to conclude an alliance with such formidable birds of prey.

Lousteau sent for a cab, and the pair of friends drove to Vernou’s house on the second floor up an alley in the Rue Mandar.  To Lucien’s great astonishment, the harsh, fastidious, and severe critic’s surroundings were vulgar to the last degree.  A marbled paper, cheap and shabby, with a meaningless pattern repeated at regular intervals, covered the walls, and a series of aqua tints in gilt frames decorated the apartment, where Vernou sat at table with a woman so plain that she could only be the legitimate mistress of the house, and two very small children perched on high chairs with a bar in front to prevent the infants from tumbling out.  Felicien Vernou, in a cotton dressing-gown contrived out of the remains of one of his wife’s dresses, was not over well pleased by this invasion.

“Have you breakfasted, Lousteau?” he asked, placing a chair for Lucien.

“We have just left Florine; we have been breakfasting with her.”

Lucien could not take his eyes off Mme. Vernou.  She looked like a stout, homely cook, with a tolerably fair complexion, but commonplace to the last degree.  The lady wore a bandana tied over her night-cap, the strings of the latter article of dress being tied so tightly under the chin that her puffy cheeks stood out on either side.  A shapeless, beltless garment, fastened by a single button at the throat, enveloped her from head to foot in such a fashion that a comparison to a milestone at once suggested itself.  Her health left no room for hope; her cheeks were almost purple; her fingers looked like sausages.  In a moment it dawned upon Lucien how it was that Vernou was always so ill at ease in society; here was the living explanation of his misanthropy.  Sick of his marriage, unable to bring himself to abandon his wife and family, he had yet sufficient of the artistic temper to suffer continually from their presence; Vernou was an actor by nature bound never to pardon the success of another, condemned to chronic discontent because he was never content with himself.  Lucien began to understand the sour look which seemed to add to the bleak expression of envy on Vernou’s face; the acerbity of the epigrams with which his conversation was sown, the journalist’s pungent phrases, keen and elaborately wrought as a stiletto, were at once explained.