himself is a commoner; reviling the work of unmarried men because he forsooth has a wife; and everlastingly preaching morality, the joys of domestic life, and the duties of the citizen.  In short, this very moral critic will spare no one, not even infants of tender age.  He lives in the Rue Mandar with a wife who might be the Mamamouchi of the Bourgeois gentilhomme and a couple of little Vernous as ugly as sin.  He tries to sneer at the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where he will never set foot, and makes his duchesses talk like his wife.  That is the sort of man to raise a howl at the Jesuits, insult the Court, and credit the Court party with the design of restoring feudal rights and the right of primogeniture—­just the one to preach a crusade for Equality, he that thinks himself the equal of no one.  If he were a bachelor, he would go into society; if he were in a fair way to be a Royalist poet with a pension and the Cross of the Legion of Honor, he would be an optimist, and journalism offers starting-points by the hundred.  Journalism is the giant catapult set in motion by pigmy hatreds.  Have you any wish to marry after this?  Vernou has none of the milk of human kindness in him, it is all turned to gall; and he is emphatically the Journalist, a tiger with two hands that tears everything to pieces, as if his pen had the hydrophobia.”

“It is a case of gunophobia,” said Lucien.  “Has he ability?”

“He is witty, he is a writer of articles.  He incubates articles; he does that all his life and nothing else.  The most dogged industry would fail to graft a book on his prose.  Felicien is incapable of conceiving a work on a large scale, of broad effects, of fitting characters harmoniously in a plot which develops till it reaches a climax.  He has ideas, but he has no knowledge of facts; his heroes are utopian creatures, philosophical or Liberal notions masquerading.  He is at pains to write an original style, but his inflated periods would collapse at a pin-prick from a critic; and therefore he goes in terror of reviews, like every one else who can only keep his head above water with the bladders of newspaper puffs.”

“What an article you are making out of him!”

“That particular kind, my boy, must be spoken, and never written.”

“You are turning editor,” said Lucien.

“Where shall I put you down?”

“At Coralie’s.”

“Ah! we are infatuated,” said Lousteau.  “What a mistake!  Do as I do with Florine, let Coralie be your housekeeper, and take your fling.”

“You would send a saint to perdition,” laughed Lucien.

“Well, there is no damning a devil,” retorted Lousteau.

The flippant tone, the brilliant talk of this new friend, his views of life, his paradoxes, the axioms of Parisian Machiavelism,—­all these things impressed Lucien unawares.  Theoretically the poet knew that such thoughts were perilous; but he believed them practically useful.