of penal
servitude to which a galley-slave would prefer death. To live by the pen
means to create--to create to-day, and to-morrow, and incessantly--or
to seem to create; and the imitation costs as dear as the reality. So,
besides his daily contribution to a newspaper, which was like the
stone of Sisyphus, and which came every Monday, crashing down on to the
feather of his pen, Etienne worked for three or four literary magazines.
Still, do not be alarmed; he put no artistic conscientiousness into his
work. This man of Sancerre had a facility, a carelessness, if you call
it so, which ranked him with those writers who are mere scriveners,
literary hacks. In Paris, in our day, hack-work cuts a man off from
every pretension to a literary position. When he can do no more, or no
longer cares for advancement, the man who can write becomes a journalist
and a hack.

The life he leads is not unpleasing. Blue-stockings, beginners in
every walk of life, actresses at the outset or the close of a career,
publishers and authors, all make much of these writers of the ready
pen. Lousteau, a thorough man about town, lived at scarcely any expense
beyond paying his rent. He had boxes at all the theatres; the sale of
the books he reviewed or left unreviewed paid for his gloves; and he
would say to those authors who published at their own expense, "I have
your book always in my hands!" He took toll from vanity in the form of
drawings or pictures. Every day had its engagements to dinner, every
night its theatre, every morning was filled up with callers, visits,
and lounging. His serial in the paper, two novels 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 ri