! do you mean to
say that you will ask that druggist, through Mlle. Florine, to pay
thirty thousand francs for one-half a share, when Finot gave no more
for the whole of it? And ask without the slightest scruple?----"

Lousteau interrupted Lucien before he had time to finish his
expostulation. "My dear boy, what country can you come from? The
druggist is not a man; he is a strong box delivered into our hands by
his fancy for an actress."

"How about your conscience?"

"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