ht?"
suggested Lousteau. "We might say that M. de Bonald has sweaty feet."

"Let us begin a series of sketches of Ministerialist orators," suggested
Hector Merlin.

"You do that, youngster; you know them; they are your own party," said
Lousteau; "you could indulge any little private grudges of your own.
Pitch into Beugnot and Syrieys de Mayrinhac and the rest. You might have
the sketches ready in advance, and we shall have something to fall back
upon."

"How if we invented one or two cases of refusal of burial with
aggravating circumstances?" asked Hector.

"Do not follow in the tracks of the big Constitutional papers; they have
pigeon-holes full of ecclesiastical _canards_," retorted Vernou.

"_Canards_?" repeated Lucien.

"That is our word for a scrap of fiction told for true, put in to
enliven the column of morning news when it is flat. We owe the discovery
to Benjamin Franklin, the inventor of the lightning conductor and the
republic. That journalist completely deceived the Encyclopaedists by
his transatlantic _canards_. Raynal gives two of them for facts in his
_Histoire philosophique des Indes_."

"I did not know that," said Vernou. "What were the stories?"

"One was a tale about an Englishman and a negress who helped him to
escape; he sold the woman for a slave after getting her with child
himself to enhance her value. The other was the eloquent defence of a
young woman brought before the authorities for bearing a child out of
wedlock. Franklin owned to the fraud in Necker's house when he came to
Paris, much to the confusion of French philosophism. Behold how the New
World twice set a bad example to the Old!"

"In journalism," said Lousteau, "everything that is probable is true.
That is an axiom."

"Criminal procedure is based on the same rule," said Vernou.

"Very well, we meet here at nine o'clock," and with that they rose, and
the sitting broke up with the most affecting demonstrations of intimacy
and good-will.

"What have you done to Finot, Lucien, that he should make a special
arrangement with you? You are the only one that he has bound to
himself," said Etienne Lousteau, as they came downstairs.

"I? Nothing. It was his own proposal," said Lucien.

"As a matter of fact, if you should make your own terms with him, I
should be delighted; we should, both of us, be the better for it."

On the ground floor they found Finot. He stepped across to Lousteau and
asked him into the so-called privat