your crime,
and could still respect you; but if you were to turn spy, I should shun
you with abhorrence, for a spy is systematically shameless and base.
There you have journalism summed up in a sentence. Friendship can pardon
error and the hasty impulse of passion; it is bound to be inexorable
when a man deliberately traffics in his own soul, and intellect, and
opinions."

"Why cannot I turn journalist to sell my volume of poetry and the novel,
and then give up at once?"

"Machiavelli might do so, but not Lucien de Rubempre," said Leon Giraud.

"Very well," exclaimed Lucien; "I will show you that I can do as much as
Machiavelli."

"Oh!" cried Michel, grasping Leon's hand, "you have done it,
Leon.--Lucien," he continued, "you have three hundred francs in hand;
you can live comfortably for three months; very well, then, work hard
and write another romance. D'Arthez and Fulgence will help you with the
plot; you will improve, you will be a novelist. And I, meanwhile, will
enter one of those _lupanars_ of thought; for three months I will be
a journalist. I will sell your books to some bookseller or other by
attacking his publications; I will write the articles myself; I will get
others for you. We will organize a success; you shall be a great man,
and still remain our Lucien."

"You must despise me very much, if you think that I should perish while
you escape," said the poet.

"O Lord, forgive him; it is a child!" cried Michel Chrestien.

When Lucien's intellect had been stimulated by the evenings spent in
d'Arthez's garret, he had made some study of the jokes and articles
in the smaller newspapers. He was at least the equal, he felt, of the
wittiest contributors; in private he tried some mental gymnastics of the
kind, and went out one morning with the triumphant idea of finding some
colonel of such light skirmishers of the press and enlisting in their
ranks. He dressed in his best and crossed the bridges, thinking as he
went that authors, journalists, and men of letters, his future comrades,
in short, would show him rather more kindness and disinterestedness than
the two species of booksellers who had so dashed his hopes. He should
meet with fellow-feeling, and something of the kindly and grateful
affection which he found in the _cenacle_ of the Rue des Quatre-Vents.
Tormented by emotion, consequent upon the presentiments to which men of
imagination cling so fondly, half believing, half battling with their
bel