A Distinguished Provincial at Paris

He spent his mornings in studying history at the Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevieve. His very first researches made him aware of frightful errors in the memoirs of The Archer of Charles IX. When the library closed, he went back to his damp, chilly room to correct his work, cutting out whole chapters and piecing it together anew. And after dining at Flicoteaux’s, he went down to the Passage du Commerce to see the newspapers at Blosse’s reading-room, as well as new books and magazines and poetry, so as to keep himself informed of the movements of the day. And when, towards midnight, he returned to his wretched lodgings, he had used neither fuel nor candle-light. His reading in those days made such an enormous change in his ideas, that he revised the volume of flower-sonnets, his beloved Marguerites, working them over to such purpose, that scarce a hundred lines of the original verses were allowed to stand.

So in the beginning Lucien led the honest, innocent life of the country lad who never leaves the Latin Quarter; devoting himself wholly to his work, with thoughts of the future always before him; who finds Flicoteaux’s ordinary luxurious after the simple home-fare; and strolls for recreation along the alleys of the Luxembourg, the blood surging back to his heart as he gives timid side glances to the pretty women. But this could not last. Lucien, with his poetic temperament and boundless longings, could not withstand the temptations held out by the play-bills.

The Theatre-Francais, the Vaudeville, the Varietes, the Opera-Comique relieved him of some sixty francs, although he always went to the pit. What student could deny himself the pleasure of seeing Talma in one of his famous roles? Lucien was fascinated by the theatre, that first love of all poetic temperaments; the actors and actresses were awe-inspiring creatures; he did not so much as dream of the possibility of crossing the footlights and meeting them on familiar terms. The men and women who gave him so much pleasure were surely marvelous beings, whom the newspapers treated with as much gravity as matters of national interest. To be a dramatic author, to have a play produced on the stage! What a dream was this to cherish! A dream which a few bold spirits like Casimir Delavigne had actually realized. Thick swarming thoughts like these, and moments of belief in himself, followed by despair gave Lucien no rest, and kept him in the narrow way of toil and frugality, in spite of the smothered grumblings of more than one frenzied desire.

Carrying prudence to an extreme, he made it a rule never to enter the precincts of the Palais Royal, that place of perdition where he had spent fifty francs at Very’s in a single day, and nearly five hundred francs on his clothes; and when he yielded to temptation, and saw Fleury, Talma, the two Baptistes, or Michot, he went no further than the murky passage where theatre-goers used to stand in a string from half-past five in the afternoon till the hour when the doors opened, and belated comers were compelled to pay ten sous for a place near the ticket-office. And after waiting for two hours, the cry of “All tickets are sold!” rang not unfrequently in the ears of disappointed students. When the play was over, Lucien went home with downcast eyes, through streets lined with living attractions, and perhaps fell in with one of those commonplace adventures which loom so large in a young and timorous imagination.

One day Lucien counted over his remaining stock of money, and took alarm at the melting of his funds; a cold perspiration broke out upon him when he thought that the time had come when he must find a publisher, and try also to find work for which a publisher would pay him. The young journalist, with whom he had made a one-sided friendship, never came now to Flicoteaux’s. Lucien was waiting for a chance – which failed to present itself. In Paris there are no chances except for men with a very wide circle of acquaintance; chances of success of every kind increase with the number of your connections; and, therefore, in this sense also the chances are in favor of the big battalions. Lucien had sufficient provincial foresight still left, and had no mind to wait until only a last few coins remained to him. He resolved to face the publishers.

So one tolerably chilly September morning Lucien went down the Rue de la Harpe, with his two manuscripts under his arm. As he made his way to the Quai des Augustins, and went along, looking into the booksellers’ windows on one side and into the Seine on the other, his good genius might have counseled him to pitch himself into the water sooner than plunge into literature. After heart-searching hesitations, after a profound scrutiny of the various countenances, more or less encouraging, soft-hearted, churlish, cheerful, or melancholy, to be seen through the window panes, or in the doorways of the booksellers’ establishments, he espied a house where the shopmen were busy packing books at a great rate. Goods were being despatched. The walls were plastered with bills:

LE SOLITAIRE, by M. le Vicomte d’Arlincourt.

Third edition.

LEONIDE, by Victor Ducange; five volumes 12mo, printed on fine paper. 12 francs.

INDUCTIONS MORALES, by Keratry.

“They are lucky, that they are!” exclaimed Lucien.

The placard, a new and original idea of the celebrated Ladvocat, was just beginning to blossom out upon the walls. In no long space Paris was to wear motley, thanks to the exertions of his imitators, and the Treasury was to discover a new source of revenue.

Anxiety sent the blood surging to Lucien’s heart, as he who had been so great at Angouleme, so insignificant of late in Paris, slipped past the other houses, summoned up all his courage, and at last entered the shop thronged with assistants, customers, and booksellers – “And authors too, perhaps!” thought Lucien.

“I want to speak with M. Vidal or M. Porchon,” he said, addressing a shopman. He had read the names on the sign-board – VIDAL & PORCHON (it ran), French and foreign booksellers’ agents.

“Both gentlemen are engaged,” said the man.

“I will wait.”

Left to himself, the poet scrutinized the packages, and amused himself for a couple of hours by scanning the titles of books, looking into them, and reading a page or two here and there. At last, as he stood leaning against a window, he heard voices, and suspecting that the green curtains hid either Vidal or Porchon, he listened to the conversation.

“Will you take five hundred copies of me? If you will, I will let you have them at five francs, and give fourteen to the dozen.”

“What does that bring them in at?”

“Sixteen sous less.”

“Four francs four sous?” said Vidal or Porchon, whichever it was.

“Yes,” said the vendor.

“Credit your account?” inquired the purchaser.

“Old humbug! you would settle with me in eighteen months’ time, with bills at a twelvemonth.”

“No. Settled at once,” returned Vidal or Porchon.

“Bills at nine months?” asked the publisher or author, who evidently was selling his book.

“No, my dear fellow, twelve months,” returned one of the firm of booksellers’ agents.

There was a pause.

“You are simply cutting my throat!” said the visitor.

“But in a year’s time shall we have placed a hundred copies of Leonide?” said the other voice. “If books went off as fast as the publishers would like, we should be millionaires, my good sir; but they don’t, they go as the public pleases. There is some one now bringing out an edition of Scott’s novels at eighteen sous per volume, three livres twelve sous per copy, and you want me to give you more for your stale remainders? No. If you mean me to push this novel of yours, you must make it worth my while. – Vidal!”

A stout man, with a pen behind his ear, came down from his desk.

“How many copies of Ducange did you place last journey?” asked Porchon of his partner.

“Two hundred of Le Petit Vieillard de Calais, but to sell them I was obliged to cry down two books which pay in less commission, and uncommonly fine ‘nightingales’ they are now.”

(A “nightingale,” as Lucien afterwards learned, is a bookseller’s name for books that linger on hand, perched out of sight in the loneliest nooks in the shop.)

“And besides,” added Vidal, “Picard is bringing out some novels, as you know. We have been promised twenty per cent on the published price to make the thing a success.”

“Very well, at twelve months,” the publisher answered in a piteous voice, thunderstruck by Vidal’s confidential remark.

“Is it an offer?” Porchon inquired curtly.

“Yes.” The stranger went out. After he had gone, Lucien heard Porchon say to Vidal:

“We have three hundred copies on order now. We will keep him waiting for his settlement, sell the Leonides for five francs net, settlement in six months, and – ”

“And that will be fifteen hundred francs into our pockets,” said Vidal.

“Oh, I saw quite well that he was in a fix. He is giving Ducange four thousand francs for two thousand copies.”

Lucien cut Vidal short by appearing in the entrance of the den.

“I have the honor of wishing you a good day, gentlemen,” he said, addressing both partners. The booksellers nodded slightly.

“I have a French historical romance after the style of Scott. It is called The Archer of Charles IX.; I propose to offer it to you – ”

Porchon glanced at Lucien with lustreless eyes, and laid his pen down on the desk. Vidal stared rudely at the author.

“We are not publishing booksellers, sir; we are booksellers’ agents,” he said. “When we bring out a book ourselves, we only deal in well-known names; and we only take serious literature besides – history and epitomes.”

“But my book is very serious. It is an attempt to set the struggle between Catholics and Calvinists in its true light; the Catholics were supporters of absolute monarchy, and the Protestants for a republic.”

“M. Vidal!” shouted an assistant. Vidal fled.

“I don’t say, sir, that your book is not a masterpiece,” replied Porchon, with scanty civility, “but we only deal in books that are ready printed. Go and see somebody that buys manuscripts. There is old Doguereau in the Rue du Coq, near the Louvre, he is in the romance line. If you had only spoken sooner, you might have seen Pollet, a competitor of Doguereau and of the publisher in the Wooden Galleries.”

“I have a volume of poetry – ”

“M. Porchon!” somebody shouted.

“Poetry!” Porchon exclaimed angrily. “For what do you take me?” he added, laughing in Lucien’s face. And he dived into the regions of the back shop.

Lucien went back across the Pont Neuf absorbed in reflection. From all that he understood of this mercantile dialect, it appeared that books, like cotton nightcaps, were to be regarded as articles of merchandise to be sold dear and bought cheap.

“I have made a mistake,” said Lucien to himself; but, all the same, this rough-and-ready practical aspect of literature made an impression upon him.

In the Rue du Coq he stopped in front of a modest-looking shop, which he had passed before. He saw the inscription DOGUEREAU, BOOKSELLER, painted above it in yellow letters on a green ground, and remembered that he had seen the name at the foot of the title-page of several novels at Blosse’s reading-room. In he went, not without the inward trepidation which a man of any imagination feels at the prospect of a battle. Inside the shop he discovered an odd-looking old man, one of the queer characters of the trade in the days of the Empire.

Doguereau wore a black coat with vast square skirts, when fashion required swallow-tail coats. His waistcoat was of some cheap material, a checked pattern of many colors; a steel chain, with a copper key attached to it, hung from his fob and dangled down over a roomy pair of black nether garments. The booksellers’ watch must have been the size of an onion. Iron-gray ribbed stockings, and shoes with silver buckles completed is costume. The old man’s head was bare, and ornamented with a fringe of grizzled locks, quite poetically scanty. “Old Doguereau,” as Porchon styled him, was dressed half like a professor of belles-lettres as to his trousers and shoes, half like a tradesman with respect to the variegated waistcoat, the stockings, and the watch; and the same odd mixture appeared in the man himself. He united the magisterial, dogmatic air, and the hollow countenance of the professor of rhetoric with the sharp eyes, suspicious mouth, and vague uneasiness of the bookseller.

“M. Doguereau?” asked Lucien.

“That is my name, sir.”

“You are very young,” remarked the bookseller.

“My age, sir, has nothing to do with the matter.”

“True,” and the old bookseller took up the manuscript. “Ah, begad! The Archer of Charles IX., a good title. Let us see now, young man, just tell me your subject in a word or two.”

“It is a historical work, sir, in the style of Scott. The character of the struggle between the Protestants and Catholics is depicted as a struggle between two opposed systems of government, in which the throne is seriously endangered. I have taken the Catholic side.”

“Eh! but you have ideas, young man. Very well, I will read your book, I promise you. I would rather have had something more in Mrs. Radcliffe’s style; but if you are industrious, if you have some notion of style, conceptions, ideas, and the art of telling a story, I don’t ask better than to be of use to you. What do we want but good manuscripts?”

“When can I come back?”

“I am going into the country this evening; I shall be back again the day after to-morrow. I shall have read your manuscript by that time; and if it suits me, we might come to terms that very day.”

Seeing his acquaintance so easy, Lucien was inspired with the unlucky idea of bringing the Marguerites upon the scene.

“I have a volume of poetry as well, sir – ” he began.

“Oh! you are a poet! Then I don’t want your romance,” and the old man handed back the manuscript. “The rhyming fellows come to grief when they try their hands at prose. In prose you can’t use words that mean nothing; you absolutely must say something.”

“But Sir Walter Scott, sir, wrote poetry as well as – ”

“That is true,” said Doguereau, relenting. He guessed that the young fellow before him was poor, and kept the manuscript. “Where do you live? I will come and see you.”

Lucien, all unsuspicious of the idea at the back of the old man’s head, gave his address; he did not see that he had to do with a bookseller of the old school, a survival of the eighteenth century, when booksellers tried to keep Voltaires and Montesquieus starving in garrets under lock and key.

“The Latin Quarter. I am coming back that very way,” said Doguereau, when he had read the address.

“Good man!” thought Lucien, as he took his leave. “So I have met with a friend to young authors, a man of taste who knows something. That is the kind of man for me! It is just as I said to David – talent soon makes its way in Paris.”

Lucien went home again happy and light of heart; he dreamed of glory. He gave not another thought to the ominous words which fell on his ear as he stood by the counter in Vidal and Porchon’s shop; he beheld himself the richer by twelve hundred francs at least. Twelve hundred francs! It meant a year in Paris, a whole year of preparation for the work that he meant to do. What plans he built on that hope! What sweet dreams, what visions of a life established on a basis of work! Mentally he found new quarters, and settled himself in them; it would not have taken much to set him making a purchase or two. He could only stave off impatience by constant reading at Blosse’s.

Two days later old Doguereau come to the lodgings of his budding Sir Walter Scott. He was struck with the pains which Lucien had taken with the style of this his first work, delighted with the strong contrasts of character sanctioned by the epoch, and surprised at the spirited imagination which a young writer always displays in the scheming of a first plot – he had not been spoiled, thought old Daddy Doguereau. He had made up his mind to give a thousand francs for The Archer of Charles IX.; he would buy the copyright out and out, and bind Lucien by an engagement for several books, but when he came to look at the house, the old fox thought better of it.

“A young fellow that lives here has none but simple tastes,” said he to himself; “he is fond of study, fond of work; I need not give more than eight hundred francs.”

“Fourth floor,” answered the landlady, when he asked for M. Lucien de Rubempre. The old bookseller, peering up, saw nothing but the sky above the fourth floor.

“This young fellow,” thought he, “is a good-looking lad; one might go so far as to say that he is very handsome. If he were to make too much money, he would only fall into dissipated ways, and then he would not work. In the interests of us both, I shall only offer six hundred francs, in coin though, not paper.”

He climbed the stairs and gave three raps at the door. Lucien came to open it. The room was forlorn in its bareness. A bowl of milk and a penny roll stood on the table. The destitution of genius made an impression on Daddy Doguereau.

“Let him preserve these simple habits of life, this frugality, these modest requirements,” thought he. – Aloud he said: “It is a pleasure to me to see you. Thus, sir, lived Jean-Jacques, whom you resemble in more ways than one. Amid such surroundings the fire of genius shines brightly; good work is done in such rooms as these. This is how men of letters should work, instead of living riotously in cafes and restaurants, wasting their time and talent and our money.”

He sat down.

“Your romance is not bad, young man. I was a professor of rhetoric once; I know French history, there are some capital things in it. You have a future before you, in fact.”

“Oh! sir.”

“No; I tell you so. We may do business together. I will buy your romance.”

Lucien’s heart swelled and throbbed with gladness. He was about to enter the world of literature; he should see himself in print at last.

“I will give you four hundred francs,” continued Doguereau in honeyed accents, and he looked at Lucien with an air which seemed to betoken an effort of generosity.

“The volume?” queried Lucien.

“For the romance,” said Doguereau, heedless of Lucien’s surprise. “In ready money,” he added; “and you shall undertake to write two books for me every year for six years. If the first book is out of print in six months, I will give you six hundred francs for the others. So, if you write two books each year, you will be making a hundred francs a month; you will have a sure income, you will be well off. There are some authors whom I only pay three hundred francs for a romance; I give two hundred for translations of English books. Such prices would have been exorbitant in the old days.”

“Sir, we cannot possibly come to an understanding. Give me back my manuscript, I beg,” said Lucien, in a cold chill.

“Here it is,” said the old bookseller. “You know nothing of business, sir. Before an author’s first book can appear, a publisher is bound to sink sixteen hundred francs on the paper and the printing of it. It is easier to write a romance than to find all that money. I have a hundred romances in manuscript, and I have not a hundred and sixty thousand francs in my cash box, alas! I have not made so much in all these twenty years that I have been a bookseller. So you don’t make a fortune by printing romances, you see. Vidal and Porchon only take them of us on conditions that grow harder and harder day by day. You have only your time to lose, while I am obliged to disburse two thousand francs. If we fail, habent sua fata libelli, I lose two thousand francs; while, as for you, you simply hurl an ode at the thick-headed public. When you have thought over this that I have the honor of telling you, you will come back to me. —You will come back to me!” he asserted authoritatively, by way of reply to a scornful gesture made involuntarily by Lucien. “So far from finding a publisher obliging enough to risk two thousand francs for an unknown writer, you will not find a publisher’s clerk that will trouble himself to look through your screed. Now that I have read it I can point out a good many slips in grammar. You have put observer for faire observer and malgre que. Malgre is a preposition, and requires an object.”

Lucien appeared to be humiliated.

“When I see you again, you will have lost a hundred francs,” he added. “I shall only give a hundred crowns.”

With that he rose and took his leave. On the threshold he said, “If you had not something in you, and a future before you; if I did not take an interest in studious youth, I should not have made you such a handsome offer. A hundred francs per month! Think of it! After all, a romance in a drawer is not eating its head off like a horse in a stable, nor will it find you in victuals either, and that’s a fact.”

Lucien snatched up his manuscript and dashed it on the floor.

“I would rather burn it, sir!” he exclaimed.

“You have a poet’s head,” returned his senior.

Lucien devoured his bread and supped his bowl of milk, then he went downstairs. His room was not large enough for him; he was turning round and round in it like a lion in a cage at the Jardin des Plantes.

At the Bibliotheque Saint-Genevieve, whither Lucien was going, he had come to know a stranger by sight; a young man of five-and-twenty or thereabouts, working with the sustained industry which nothing can disturb nor distract, the sign by which your genuine literary worker is known. Evidently the young man had been reading there for some time, for the librarian and attendants all knew him and paid him special attention; the librarian would even allow him to take away books, with which Lucien saw him return in the morning. In the stranger student he recognized a brother in penury and hope.

Pale-faced and slight and thin, with a fine forehead hidden by masses of black, tolerably unkempt hair, there was something about him that attracted indifferent eyes: it was a vague resemblance which he bore to portraits of the young Bonaparte, engraved from Robert Lefebvre’s picture. That engraving is a poem of melancholy intensity, of suppressed ambition, of power working below the surface. Study the face carefully, and you will discover genius in it and discretion, and all the subtlety and greatness of the man. The portrait has speaking eyes like a woman’s; they look out, greedy of space, craving difficulties to vanquish. Even if the name of Bonaparte were not written beneath it, you would gaze long at that face.

Lucien’s young student, the incarnation of this picture, usually wore footed trousers, shoes with thick soles to them, an overcoat of coarse cloth, a black cravat, a waistcoat of some gray-and-white material buttoned to the chin, and a cheap hat. Contempt for superfluity in dress was visible in his whole person. Lucien also discovered that the mysterious stranger with that unmistakable stamp which genius sets upon the forehead of its slaves was one of Flicoteaux’s most regular customers; he ate to live, careless of the fare which appeared to be familiar to him, and drank water. Wherever Lucien saw him, at the library or at Flicoteaux’s, there was a dignity in his manner, springing doubtless from the consciousness of a purpose that filled his life, a dignity which made him unapproachable. He had the expression of a thinker, meditation dwelt on the fine nobly carved brow. You could tell from the dark bright eyes, so clear-sighted and quick to observe, that their owner was wont to probe to the bottom of things. He gesticulated very little, his demeanor was grave. Lucien felt an involuntary respect for him.

Many times already the pair had looked at each other at the Bibliotheque or at Flicoteaux’s; many times they had been on the point of speaking, but neither of them had ventured so far as yet. The silent young man went off to the further end of the library, on the side at right angles to the Place de la Sorbonne, and Lucien had no opportunity of making his acquaintance, although he felt drawn to a worker whom he knew by indescribable tokens for a character of no common order. Both, as they came to know afterwards, were unsophisticated and shy, given to fears which cause a pleasurable emotion to solitary creatures. Perhaps they never would have been brought into communication if they had not come across each other that day of Lucien’s disaster; for as Lucien turned into the Rue des Gres, he saw the student coming away from the Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevieve.