oralie is smitten with you, I will
go and tell her that you have left the house."

"No! no!" cried Lousteau; "tell Coralie that this gentleman is coming
to supper, and that she can do as she likes with him, and she will play
like Mlle. Mars."

The manager went, and Lucien turned to Etienne. "What! 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. N