far between in that great fermenting vat; rare as
love in love-making, rare as fortunes honestly made in business, rare
as the journalist whose hands are clean. The experience of the first man
who told me all that I am telling you was thrown away upon me, and mine
no doubt will be wasted upon you. It is always the same old story year
after year; the same eager rush to Paris from the provinces; the same,
not to say a growing, number of beardless, ambitious boys, who advance,
head erect, and the heart that Princess Tourandocte of the _Mille et un
Jours_--each one of them fain to be her Prince Calaf. But never a one of
them reads the riddle. One by one they drop, some into the trench where
failures lie, some into the mire of journalism, some again into the
quagmires of the book-trade.

"They pick up a living, these beggars, what with biographical notices,
penny-a-lining, and scraps of news for the papers. They become
booksellers' hacks for the clear-headed dealers in printed paper,
who would sooner take the rubbish that goes off in a fortnight than a
masterpiece which requires time to sell. The life is crushed out of
the grubs before they reach the butterfly stage. They live by shame and
dishonor. They are ready to write down a rising genius or to praise
him to the skies at a word from the pasha of the _Constitutionnel_,
the _Quotidienne_, or the _Debats_, at a sign from a publisher, at the
request of a jealous comrade, or (as not seldom happens) simply for
a dinner. Some surmount the obstacles, and these forget the misery of
their early days. I, who am telling you this, have been putting the
best that is in me into newspaper articles for six months past for a
blackguard who gives them out as his own and has secured a _feuilleton_
in another paper on the strength of them. He has not taken me on as his
collaborator, he has not give me so much as a five-franc piece, but I
hold out a hand to grasp his when we meet; I cannot help myself."

"And why?" Lucien, asked, indignantly.

"I may want to put a dozen lines into his _feuilleton_ some day,"
Lousteau answered coolly. "In short, my dear fellow, in literature you
will not make money by hard work, that is not the secret of success; the
point is to exploit the work of somebody else. A newspaper proprietor
is a contractor, we are the bricklayers. The more mediocre the man,
the better his chance of getting on among mediocrities; he can play the
toad-eater, put up with any treat