in the greenroom, in every literary or artistic centre,
you will find the Recruiting-Academician, smiling on young budding
talent. "The Academie has its eye on you, my young friend." If a man has
got some reputation, and has just written his third or fourth book, like
you, then the invitation takes a more direct form. "Don't forget us, my
dear fellow; now's your time." Or perhaps, brusquely, with a friendly
scolding, "Well, so you don't mean to be one of us." When it's a man
in society who is to be caught a translator of Ariosto or a writer of
amateur plays, there is a gentler and more insinuating way of playing
off the trick. And if our fashionable writer protests that he is not
a gun of sufficient calibre, the Recruiting-Academidan brings out the
regular phrase, that "the Academie is a club." Lord bless us, how useful
that phrase has been! "The Academie is a club, and its admission is not
only for the work, but the worker." Meantime the Recruiting-Academician
is welcomed everywhere, made much of, asked to dinner and other
entertainments. He becomes a parasite, fawned upon by those whose hopes
he arouses--and is careful to maintain.'

But at this point kind-hearted Freydet protested indignantly. Never
would his old master lend himself to such base uses. Vedrine shrugged
his shoulders: 'Why, the worst of the lot is the recruiter who is
sincere and disinterested. He believes in the Academie; his whole life
is centred in the Academie; and when he says to you, "If you only knew
the joy of it," with a smack of the tongue like a man eating a ripe
peach, he is saying what he really means, and so his bait is the more
alluring and dangerous. But when once the hook has been swallowed and
struck, then the Academician takes no more notice of the victim, but
leaves him to struggle and dangle at the end of the line. You are an
angler; well, when you have taken a fine perch or a big pike, and you
drag it along behind your boat, what do you call that?'

'Drowning your fish.'

'Just so. Well, look at Moser! Does he not look like a drowned fish?
He has been carried along in tow for these ten years. And there's De
Salele, and Guerineau, and I don't know how many others, who have even
given up struggling.'

'But still people do get into the Academie sooner or later.'

'Not those once taken in tow. And suppose a man does succeed, where's
the good? What does it bring you? Money? Not as much as your hay-crop.
Fame? Yes, a hole-and-corne