ABSTRACT
“My dear fellow,” said Étienne, looking at the toes of Lucien's boots (they were the pair he had brought from Angoulême, and he was wearing them out), “I strongly recommend you to black your boots with ink to save blacking, to turn your pens into tooth-picks so that when you take a walk in this picturesque alley after eating at Flicoteaux people will think that you have dined well, and to take any job you can get. Become a bailiff's under-clerk if you have a weak heart, or a shop assistant if you have a strong back, or a soldier if you like military music. You have the makings of three poets; but before you become known you will have had time to die of starvation six times over, if you are hoping to live on your poetry. Now I gather from your highly unsophisticated discourse, that you are hoping to earn a living by writing. I am not criticising your poems— they are a good deal better than all those volumes of verses that are taking up shelf-space in the booksellers’. The elegant nightingales that are sold for a little more than the rest because they are printed on hand-made paper generally end up on the bookstalls beside the Seine, where you can go and study their verses if you ever feel inclined to make an instructive pilgrimage 398to the Quais between old Jérome's bookstall on the Pont Notre-Dame and the Pont Royal. There you will find all those Essais poetiques and Inspirations and Elevations, all the Hymnes and Chants and Ballades and Odes, in fact the entire brood hatched during the last seven years. There are all those muses, covered with dust, spattered with mud from the passing cabs, violated by every passer-by who only wants to look at the vignette on the title-page. You know nobody; you have no influence with any newspaper—your Marguerites will remain as chastely closed as they are at this moment; they will never expand in the sun of publicity, on pages with wide margins, decorated with all those daring little flowerets that the illustrious Dauriat, King of the Wooden Galleries, who publishes all the well-known poets, scatters so liberally. My poor young poet, I came to Paris, like you, full of illusions, impelled by the love of art, and by an unconquerable desire for glory; I discovered the realities of the literary world, the difficulties of publication, and the hard facts of poverty. My lofty ideals—which I now have well under control—my first youthful enthusiasm—prevented me from seeing the workings of the social machinery; I was compelled to see it in the end by bumping against its wheels, knocking into its shafts, getting covered with its grease, and hearing the constant clatter of its chains and fly-wheels. You will have to learn, as I did, that behind all those fine things we once dreamed of there are human intrigues, and passions, and necessities. You will find yourself involved, willy-nilly, in the horrible struggle of book against book, man against man, party against party, and you must fight your way systematically unless you want to find yourself deserted by your own party. These mean contests are disillusioning. They leave you exhausted and depraved, and all to no purpose, because more often than not you will have expended your efforts to crown a man whom you dislike, a writer of second-rate talent whom you are obliged to put forward as a genius whether you like it or not.
