“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“Gentlemen, be brilliant for my first number.  The Baron du Chatelet and his cuttlefish bone will not last for a week, and the writer of Le Solitaire is worn out.”

“And ‘Sosthenes-Demosthenes’ is stale too,” said Vernou; “everybody has taken it up.”

“The fact is, we want a new set of ninepins,” said Frederic.

“Suppose that we take the virtuous representatives of the Right?” suggested Lousteau.  “We might say that M. de Bonald has sweaty feet.”

“Let us begin a series of sketches of Ministerialist orators,” suggested Hector Merlin.

“You do that, youngster; you know them; they are your own party,” said Lousteau; “you could indulge any little private grudges of your own.  Pitch into Beugnot and Syrieys de Mayrinhac and the rest.  You might have the sketches ready in advance, and we shall have something to fall back upon.”

“How if we invented one or two cases of refusal of burial with aggravating circumstances?” asked Hector.

“Do not follow in the tracks of the big Constitutional papers; they have pigeon-holes full of ecclesiastical canards,” retorted Vernou.

“Canards?” repeated Lucien.

“That is our word for a scrap of fiction told for true, put in to enliven the column of morning news when it is flat.  We owe the discovery to Benjamin Franklin, the inventor of the lightning conductor and the republic.  That journalist completely deceived the Encyclopaedists by his transatlantic canards.  Raynal gives two of them for facts in his Histoire philosophique des Indes.”

“I did not know that,” said Vernou.  “What were the stories?”

“One was a tale about an Englishman and a negress who helped him to escape; he sold the woman for a slave after getting her with child himself to enhance her value.  The other was the eloquent defence of a young woman brought before the authorities for bearing a child out of wedlock.  Franklin owned to the fraud in Necker’s house when he came to Paris, much to the confusion of French philosophism.  Behold how the New World twice set a bad example to the Old!”

“In journalism,” said Lousteau, “everything that is probable is true.  That is an axiom.”

“Criminal procedure is based on the same rule,” said Vernou.

“Very well, we meet here at nine o’clock,” and with that they rose, and the sitting broke up with the most affecting demonstrations of intimacy and good-will.

“What have you done to Finot, Lucien, that he should make a special arrangement with you?  You are the only one that he has bound to himself,” said Etienne Lousteau, as they came downstairs.

“I?  Nothing.  It was his own proposal,” said Lucien.

“As a matter of fact, if you should make your own terms with him, I should be delighted; we should, both of us, be the better for it.”