, 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 position may be described as follows: Thanks to a sort of
reciprocal support extended to each other, and which an ingenious writer
has called "Mutual Admiration," Adolphe often sees his name cited among
the names of celebrities, either in the prospectuses of the book-trade,
or in the lists of newspapers about to appear. Publishers print the
title of one of his works under the deceitful heading "IN PRESS," which
might be called the typographical menagerie of bears.[*] Chodoreille is
sometimes mentioned among the promising young men of the literary world.

[*] A bear (_ours_) is a play which has been refused by a
multitude of theatres, but which is finally represented at a
time when some manager or other feels the need of one. The
word has necessarily passed from the language of the stage
into the jargon of journalism, and is applied to novels
which wander the streets in search of a publisher.

For eleven years Adolphe Chodoreille remains in the ranks of the
promising young men: he finally obtains a free entrance to the theatres,
thanks to some dirty work or certain articles of dramatic criticism:
he tries to pass for a good fellow; and as he loses his illusions
respecting glory and the world of Paris, he gets into debt and his years
begin to tell upon him.

A paper which finds itself in a tight place asks him for one of his
bears revised by his friends. This has been retouched and revamped every
five years, so that it smells of the pomatum of each prevailing and then
forgotten fashion. To Adolphe it becomes what the famous cap, which
he was constantly staking, was to Corporal Trim, for during five years
"Anything for a Woman" (the title decided upon) "wil