"Conscience,my dear fellow,is a stick which every one takes up to beat his neighbor and not for application to his own back.Come,now!
who the devil are you angry with?In one day chance has worked a miracle for you,a miracle for which I have been waiting these two years,and you must needs amuse yourself by finding fault with the means?What!you appear to me to possess intelligence;you seem to be in a fair way to reach that freedom from prejudice which is a first necessity to intellectual adventurers in the world we live in;and are you wallowing in scruples worthy of a nun who accuses herself of eating an egg with concupiscence?...If Florine succeeds,I shall be editor of a newspaper with a fixed salary of two hundred and fifty francs per month;I shall take the important plays and leave the vaudevilles to Vernou,and you can take my place and do the Boulevard theatres,and so get a foot in the stirrup.You will make three francs per column and write a column a day--thirty columns a month means ninety francs;you will have some sixty francs worth of books to sell to Barbet;and lastly,you can demand ten tickets a month of each of your theatres--that is,forty tickets in all--and sell them for forty francs to a Barbet who deals in them (I will introduce you to the man),so you will have two hundred francs coming in every month.Then if you make yourself useful to Finot,you might get a hundred francs for an article in this new weekly review of his,in which case you would show uncommon talent,for all the articles are signed,and you cannot put in slip-shod work as you can on a small paper.In that case you would be making a hundred crowns a month.Now,my dear boy,there are men of ability,like that poor d'Arthez,who dines at Flicoteaux's every day,who may wait for ten years before they will make a hundred crowns;and you will be making four thousand francs a year by your pen,to say nothing of the books you will write for the trade,if you do work of that kind.
"Now,a sub-prefect's salary only amounts to a thousand crowns,and there he stops in his arrondissement,wearing away time like the rung of a chair.I say nothing of the pleasure of going to the theatre without paying for your seat,for that is a delight which quickly palls;but you can go behind the scenes in four theatres.Be hard and sarcastic for a month or two,and you will be simply overwhelmed with invitations from actresses,and their adorers will pay court to you;you will only dine at Flicoteaux's when you happen to have less than thirty sous in your pocket and no dinner engagement.At the Luxembourg,at five o'clock,you did not know which way to turn;now,you are on the eve of entering a privileged class,you will be one of the hundred persons who tell France what to think.In three days'time,if all goes well,you can,if you choose,make a man's life a curse to him by putting thirty jokes at his expense in print at the rate of three a day;you can,if you choose,draw a revenue of pleasure from the actresses at your theatres;you can wreck a good play and send all Paris running after a bad one.If Dauriat declines to pay you for your Marguerites,you can make him come to you,and meekly and humbly implore you to take two thousand francs for them.If you have the ability,and knock off two or three articles that threaten to spoil some of Dauriat's speculations,or to ruin a book on which he counts,you will see him come climbing up your stairs like a clematis,and always at the door of your dwelling.As for your novel,the booksellers who would show you more or less politely to the door at this moment will be standing outside your attic in a string,and the value of the manu,which old Doguereau valued at four hundred francs will rise to four thousand.These are the advantages of the journalist's profession.So let us do our best to keep all newcomers out of it.It needs an immense amount of brains to make your way,and a still greater amount of luck.And here are you quibbling over your good fortune!If we had not met to-day,you see,at Flicoteaux's,you might have danced attendance on the booksellers for another three years,or starved like d'Arthez in a garret.By the time that d'Arthez is as learned as Bayle and as great a writer of prose as Rousseau,we shall have made our fortunes,you and I,and we shall hold his in our hands--wealth and fame to give or to hold.Finot will be a deputy and proprietor of a great newspaper,and we shall be whatever we meant to be--peers of France,or prisoner for debt in Sainte-Pelagie.""So Finot will sell his paper to the highest bidder among the Ministers,just as he sells favorable notices to Mme.Bastienne and runs down Mlle.Virginie,saying that Mme.Bastienne's bonnets are superior to the millinery which they praised at first!"said Lucien,recollecting that scene in the office.
