ing
themselves a pedestal with the ruins they are to make,--until
disenchantment follows. As our intention is to specify this
peculiarity so characteristic of our epoch, let us take from among
the various personages the one whom the author has elsewhere called
_A Distinguished Provencal_.

Adolphe has discovered that the most admirable trade is that which
consists in buying a bottle of ink, a bunch of quills, and a ream of
paper, at a stationer's for twelve francs and a half, and in selling
the two thousand sheets in the ream over again, for something like
fifty thousand francs, after having, of course, written upon each leaf
fifty lines replete with style and imagination.

This problem,--twelve francs and a half metamorphosed into fifty
thousand francs, at the rate of five sous a line--urges numerous
families who might advantageously employ their members in the
retirement of the provinces, to thrust them into the vortex of Paris.

The young man who is the object of this exportation, invariably passes
in his natal town for a man of as much imagination as the most famous
author. He has always studied well, he writes very nice poetry, he is
considered a fellow of parts: he is besides often guilty of a charming
tale published in the local paper, which obtains the admiration of the
department.

His poor parents will never know what their son has come to Paris to
learn at great cost, namely: That it is difficult to be a writer and
to understand the French language short of a dozen years of heculean
labor: That a man must have explored every sphere of social life, to
become a genuine novelist, inasmuch as the novel is the private
history of nations: That the great story-tellers, Aesop, Lucian,
Boccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, La Fontaine, Lesage, Sterne,
Voltaire, Walter Scott, the unknown Arabians of the _Thousand and One
Nights_, were all men of genius as well as giants of erudition.

Their Adolphe serves his literary apprenticeship in two or three
coffee-houses, becomes a member of the Society of Men of Letters,
attacks, with or without reason, men of talent who don't read his
articles, assumes a milder tone on seeing the powerlessness of his
criticisms, offers novelettes to the papers which toss them from one
to the other as if they were shuttlecocks: and, after five or six
years of exercises more or less fatiguing, of dreadful privations
which seriously tax his parents, he attains a certain position.

This