Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics) (31 page)

‘From what date, Monsieur, do you wish your subscription to begin?’ the Imperial officer asked him.

‘I have not come to take out a subscription,’ Lucien replied, looking towards a card on the door opposite the one through which he had entered: on it was written EDITORIAL OFFICE, with ‘No admittance to the public’ underneath.

‘A complaint no doubt,’ the Napoleonic soldier rejoindered. ‘Yes indeed, we were hard on Mariette. Believe me, I still don’t know why. But if you are demanding satisfaction I am ready,’ he added, with a glance at an array of foils and pistols, an up-to-date panoply, bundled together in a corner.

‘That still less, Monsieur. I have come for a word with the editor.’

‘There’s never anyone here before four.’

‘Look here, Giroudeau old chap. My count is eleven
columns, and at five francs each that makes fifty-five francs. I’ve only had forty, therefore you still owe me fifteen francs as I said…’

These words came from a small, weasel face as pale as the white of an undercooked egg, from which gleamed two soft blue though alarmingly malicious eyes. They belonged to a slim young man concealed behind the ex-soldier’s opaque body. This voice chilled Lucien to the marrow: it was a cross between the miaowing of a cat and the asthmatic choke of a hyena.

‘Yes, my little militiaman,’ the retired officer answered. ‘But you are counting in the titles and the blanks. Finot told me to add up the total number of lines and divide it by the number required for each column. I have performed this garrotting operation on your article and find it is three columns short.’

‘He doesn’t pay for the blanks, the old screw, but he charges his partner for them in the overall cost of his copy. I’m going to see Etienne Lousteau, Vernou, and…’

‘I can’t go against orders, young man,’ said the officer. ‘What! For a matter of fifteen francs you bite the hand that feeds you – and you can toss off an article as easily as I can smoke a cigar! Come now, you’ll stand your friends one bowl of punch less or win one game of billiards more, and all will be square!’

‘Finot’s cheese-parings will cost him dear,’ the journalist retorted as he got up and went out.

‘You’d think he was Voltaire and Rousseau rolled into one,’ the cashier murmured to himself, casting his eyes on the provincial poet.

‘Monsieur,’ said Lucien, ‘I will return at four o’clock.’

During the discussion, he had seen hanging on the walls the portraits of Benjamin Constant, General Foy, the seventeen illustrious spokesmen of the Liberal party and a medley of caricatures attacking the Government. Above all, he had been looking at the door of the sanctum in which, no doubt, was concocted the witty news-sheet which amused him every day, enjoying as it did the right of ridiculing kings and the gravest events of the day, in short of using a
bon mot
to call
everything into question. He wandered along the boulevards – a new pleasure for him, but one so attractive that he saw the clock-hands in the jewellers’ shops pointing to four without noticing that he had had no lunch. The poet promptly turned back down the rue du Fiacre, climbed the stairs, opened the door, found that the old officer had gone and saw the disabled pensioner sitting on his stamped paper munching a crust of bread and keeping watch over the editorial bureau as resignedly as he had formerly done his fatigue-duty, and having no more idea of what it was all about than he had understood the why and wherefore of the rapid marches ordered by the Emperor. The bold idea came to Lucien of stealing a march on this redoubtable functionary: he passed by him with his hat on and opened the door of the sanctum as if he belonged to the staff. The editor’s office offered to his eager gaze a round table covered with a green cloth and six cherry-wood chairs with straw seats which were still new. The floor of this room was stained but not yet polished; it was however clean, and this indicated that few people were allowed in it. On the mantelpiece stood a mirror, a cheap clock covered with dust, two sconces into which two tallow candles had been carelessly thrust and, finally, a scattering of visiting cards. On the table rumpled old newspapers lay about an ink-stand in which the ink was dried as hard as lacquer and the quills on it twisted into circles. He read a few articles written in an illegible and almost hieroglyphic script on grubby scraps of paper torn length-wise by the printing-press compositors, for whom this serves as an indication that an article has been set up. Also, here and there, he gazed admiringly at witty caricatures sketched on grey paper by people who no doubt had sought to kill time by killing something else to keep their hand in. On the cheap, sea-green wall-paper were pinned nine different pen-and-ink sketches burlesquing
Le Solitaire
, a novel whose unprecedented success at that time was giving it a European reputation and whose abuse of inversions must have wearied the journalists.

‘The Solitary
in the provinces appearing the ladies astonishes.’ – ‘The effect of
The Solitary
on domestic pets.’ – ‘Among the
savages,
The Solitary
explained, the most brilliant success obtains.’ – ‘
The Solitary
translated into Chinese and presented, by the author, of Pekin to the Emperor.’ – ‘By Mont-Sau-vage, Elodie raped.’ (Lucien thought this caricature very indecent, but it made him laugh) – ‘By the newspapers,
The Solitary
under a canopy carried round processionally.’ – ‘
The Solitary,
bursting a press, the bears injures.’ – ‘Read backwards, astonishes
The Solitary
the Academicians by its exceptional beauty.’

Lucien noticed a drawing on a newspaper band representing a journalist holding out his hand, with ‘Finot, my hundred francs!’ written underneath and signed with a name which, though now well-known, will never be illustrious. Between the fireplace and the window stood a writing-desk with drawers, a document tray and an oblong hearth-rug: the whole was covered with a thick coating of dust. The windows had only short curtains. On the top of the desk were about twenty works which had been desposited there during the day, engravings, sheets of music, snuff-boxes with the 1814 Charter inscribed on the lid, a copy of the ninth edition of
The Solitary,
which was still the great joke of the moment, and a dozen sealed letters. When Lucien had inventoried this odd furniture and pondered lengthily upon it, and when it struck five, he returned to the pensioner to question him. Colocynth had finished his crust and was waiting as patiently as a soldier on sentry-go for the bemedalled officer, who was probably strolling about in the boulevard. At this moment, after the swish of a skirt and an easily recognizable feminine trip had been heard on the staircase, a woman appeared in the doorway. She was quite pretty.

‘Monsieur,’ she said, addressing Lucien. ‘I know now why you cry up Mademoiselle Virginie’s hats so much, and I have come to take out a subscription, for a year to start with. But tell me what the terms are…’

‘Madame, I do not belong to the newspaper.’

‘Oh!’

‘A subscription to date from October?’ asked the pensioner.

‘What does Madame require?’ said the old officer as he came in.

He began to confer with the fair milliner. When Lucien, tired of waiting, went back to the outer room, he heard this final sentence: ‘But I shall be delighted, Monsieur. Mademoiselle Florentine can come to my shop and choose anything she wants. I have the ribbons in stock. So the matter is settled: you will say nothing more about Virginie. She’s a bungler incapable of inventing a new shape. I’m a woman with ideas!’

Lucien heard a certain number of crown pieces tumbling into the cash-box. Then the officer began to make up his day’s accounts.

‘Monsieur, I have been here an hour,’ said the poet with an air of annoyance.

‘They
haven’t turned up,’ said the Napoleonic veteran with a show of polite concern. ‘I’m not surprised. I haven’t seen them for some time. You see, it’s the beginning of the month. The beggars only come on the 29th or the 30th for their pay.’

‘And Monsieur Finot?’ asked Lucien, having noted the editor’s name.

‘He’s at his home in the rue Feydeau. – Colocynth, old boy, take him all that has come in today and get the copy off to the printer’s.’

‘Where then is the newspaper made up?’ asked Lucien as if he were talking to himself.

‘The newspaper?’ said the cashier, taking the remainder of the stamp-money from Colocynth. ‘The newspaper?’ Hrrum! Hrrum! – Old boy, go to the printing-office tomorrow at six to see that the carriers get a move on. – The newspaper, Monsieur, is made up in the street, in the contributor’s homes, in the printing-office, between eleven o’clock and midnight. In the Emperor’s time, Monsieur, there were none of these waste-paper dumps about.
He
would have shaken all that off with a corporal and four men;
he
wouldn’t have put up with all this claptrap. But I’ve said enough. If it suits my nephew’s book and if they’re writing for
his
son – Hrrum! Hrrum! – there’s no harm in it after all. Well well!
Subscribers don’t seem to be making a mass attack; I’m leaving the sentry-box.’

‘Monsieur, you seem to know all about the editing of the newspaper.’

‘The money side of it – Hrrum! Hrrum!’ said the soldier, clearing his throat of all the phlegm it contained. ‘It goes by talent: two or three francs for a column of fifty lines, each line having forty letters not counting the spaces. There you are! As for the contributors, they’re a rum lot, these little whipper-snappers. I wouldn’t have taken them on as rank-and-file soldiers. Because they cover blank paper with scrawl they seem to look down on an old captain of dragoons in the Imperial Guard, a retired battalion commander who went with Napoleon into every capital in Europe.’

Lucien, pushed towards the door by the Napoleonic veteran who was brushing his blue frockcoat and showing every intention of leaving, had the courage to block the exit.

‘I have come for a job on the staff,’ he said. ‘And I assure you I have every respect for a captain of the Imperial Guard: they were men of bronze.’

‘Well said, my little civvie,’ the officer replied, giving him a tap on the stomach. ‘But what class of contributors do you want to join?’ the old trooper continued as he pushed by Lucien to go downstairs. He only halted in order to light his cigar at the concierge’s lodge.

‘Mother Chollet, if subscriptions come, take them in and make a note of them. – Subscriptions all the time, that’s all I’m concerned with,’ he added, turning to Lucien who had followed him. ‘Finot’s my nephew, the only one in my family who made things easier for me. And so whoever picks a quarrel with Finot finds himself up against old Giroudeau, captain of dragoons in the Imperial Guard, who started off as a cavalry trooper in the Sambre-et-Meuse army, and for five years was a fencing-master in the first Hussars, in the army of Italy. One, two! and the grouser’s a gonner!’ he imitated the lunge of a fencer as he said this.

‘So then, young fellow, we have different corps in the editorial staff. There’s the contributor who contributes and
draws his pay, the contributor who contributes and draws no pay – what we call a volunteer; thirdly, there’s the contributor who contributes nothing, and he’s not the biggest fool among them: he never goes wrong, he pretends he’s a writer, belongs to the newspaper, stands us dinners, loafs about in the theatres and keeps an actress; he’s a very lucky one. Which do you want to be?’

‘Why, a contributor who works well and therefore is paid well.’

‘There you go, like all rookies who want to be field-marshals! Take old Giroudeau’s advice: left wheel in single file, quick march, go and pick up nails in the gutter like that fine chap over there: you can see he’s been in the service by the way he moves. Isn’t it a scandal that an old soldier who’s looked straight into the cannon’s muzzle a thousand times should be picking up nails in Paris? God Almighty! You’re a poor sort of God not to have stood by the Emperor! – In short, young man, the party you met this morning earned forty francs last month. Will you do better? And Finot says he’s the cleverest man on his staff.’

‘When you went into the battle of the Sambre-et-Meuse, were you told it was dangerous?’

‘You bet I was!’

‘Well then?…’

‘Well then, go and see my nephew Finot, a fine chap, the straightest chap you’ll meet – if you manage to meet him, for he darts about like a fish. In his trade, you see, he doesn’t have to write but make other people write. It appears that these types prefer to dally with actresses rather than scribble on paper. Oh, they’re a rum lot! Here’s to our next meeting.’

The cashier thrust forward his fearful leaded cane – the sort that did good work at the first performance of
Germanicus
– and left Lucien standing in the street, as stupefied by this vision of an editor’s office as he had been by the final results of literary effort in the office of Vidal and Porchon. He called ten times on Andoche Finot, the editor of the newspaper, in the rue Feydeau, without ever finding him. Early in the mornings, Finot was not yet back home. At midday he was out on
business – he would be lunching, Lucien was told, at such and such a café. Lucien would go to that café and, overcoming his extreme repugnance, ask the barmaid for Finot: Finot had just left. Finally, worn out, Lucien looked on Finot as an apocryphal and fabulous personage, and found it simpler to watch for Etienne Lousteau at Flicoteaux’s restaurant. No doubt this young journalist would explain the mystery overhanging the existence of the newspaper to which he was attached.