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
v