vels a year for weekly
magazines, and his miscellaneous articles were the tax he paid for this
easy-going life. And yet, to reach this position, Etienne had struggled
for ten years.

At the present time, known to the literary world, liked for the good or
the mischief he did with equally facile good humor, he let himself float
with the stream, never caring for the future. He ruled a little set
of newcomers, he had friendships--or rather, habits of fifteen years'
standing, and men with whom he supped, and dined, and indulged his wit.
He earned from seven to eight hundred francs a month, a sum which
he found quite insufficient for the prodigality peculiar to the
impecunious. Indeed, Lousteau found himself now just as hard up as when,
on first appearing in Paris, he had said to himself, "If I had but five
hundred francs a month, I should be rich!"

The cause of this phenomenon was as follows: Lousteau lived in the Rue
des Martyrs in pretty ground-floor rooms with a garden, and splendidly
furnished. When he settled there in 1833 he had come to an agreement
with an upholsterer that kept his pocket money low for a long time.
These rooms were let for twelve hundred francs. The months of January,
April, July, and October were, as he phrased it, his indigent months.
The rent and the porter's account cleaned him out. Lousteau took no
fewer hackney cabs, spend a hundred francs in breakfasts all the same,
smoked thirty francs' worth of cigars, and could never refuse the
mistress of a day a dinner or a new dress. He thus dipped so deeply into
the fluctuating earnings of the following months, that he could no more
find a hundred francs on his chimney-piece now, when he was making seven
or eight hundred francs a month, than he could in 1822, when he was
hardly getting two hundred.

Tired, sometimes, by the incessant vicissitudes of a literary life, and
as much bored by amusement as a courtesan, Lousteau would get out of the
tideway and sit on the bank, and say to one and another of his intimate
allies--Nathan or Bixiou, as they sat smoking in his scrap of garden,
looking out on an evergreen lawn as big as a dinner-table:

"What will be the end of us? White hairs are giving us respectful
hints!"

"Lord! we shall marry when we choose to give as much thought to the
matter as we give to a drama or a novel," said Nathan.

"And Florine?" retorted Bixiou.

"Oh, we all have a Florine," said Etienne, flinging away the end of his
cigar