“Oh well, refute yourself in three good columns in Merlin’s paper.  We have been enjoying the sight of Nathan’s wrath; we have just been telling him that he owes us no little gratitude for getting up a hot controversy that will sell his second edition in a week.  In his eyes at this present moment you are a spy, a scoundrel, a caitiff wretch; the day after to-morrow you will be a genius, an uncommonly clever fellow, one of Plutarch’s men.  Nathan will hug you and call you his best friend.  Dauriat has been to see you; you have your three thousand francs; you have worked the trick!  Now you want Nathan’s respect and esteem.  Nobody ought to be let in except the publisher.  We must not immolate any one but an enemy.  We should not talk like this if it were a question of some outsider, some inconvenient person who had made a name for himself without us and was not wanted; but Nathan is one of us.  Blondet got some one to attack him in the Mercure for the pleasure of replying in the Debats.  For which reason the first edition went off at once.”

“My friends, upon my word and honor, I cannot write two words in praise of that book——­”

“You will have another hundred francs,” interrupted Merlin.  “Nathan will have brought you in ten louis d’or, to say nothing of an article that you might put in Finot’s paper; you would get a hundred francs for writing that, and another hundred francs from Dauriat—­total, twenty louis.”

“But what am I to say?”

“Here is your way out of the difficulty,” said Blondet, after some thought.  “Say that the envy that fastens on all good work, like wasps on ripe fruit, has attempted to set its fangs in this production.  The captious critic, trying his best to find fault, has been obliged to invent theories for that purpose, and has drawn a distinction between two kinds of literature—­’the literature of ideas and the literature of imagery,’ as he calls them.  On the heads of that, youngster, say that to give expression to ideas through imagery is the highest form of art.  Try to show that all poetry is summed up in that, and lament that there is so little poetry in French; quote foreign criticisms on the unimaginative precision of our style, and then extol M. de Canalis and Nathan for the services they have done France by infusing a less prosaic spirit into the language.  Knock your previous argument to pieces by calling attention to the fact that we have made progress since the eighteenth century. (Discover the ‘progress,’ a beautiful word to mystify the bourgeois public.) Say that the new methods in literature concentrate all styles, comedy and tragedy, description, character-drawing and dialogues, in a series of pictures set in the brilliant frame of a plot which holds the reader’s interest.  The Novel, which demands sentiment, style, and imagery, is the greatest creation of modern days; it is the successor of stage comedy grown obsolete with its restrictions.  Facts and ideas are all within the