Toto then met the young Prince de Harnac, who invited him to dine at the Mirlitons; he refused, alleging a headache. Then he called on Pelisson, and found him out. He was wearily entering the Place de l’Opéra, when the devil flung him into the arms of Gaillard.
Gaillard’s collar seemed higher than ever, and he had a distracted air.
“I am running about looking for my dinner,” said Gaillard. “That infernal De Brie has gone off to his country house, and forgotten my check and left me to starve. I will turn an editor, and write no more poetry nor little articles for his journal. Dear Toto, come and give me my dinner, and lend me a thousand francs, and comfort me. Sit here with me, and have an absinthe, and look at Paris as it passes; and then we will go to the Maison Dorée and dine.”
“You are just the man I want,” said Toto, as they took their seats at a café, where the marble-topped tables had ventured out now that the weather was fine, and even a bit warm. “I want your help and advice. I’ve been with that villain Struve, and he has depressed me, and flung cold water on me.”
“Struve is a critic,” said Gaillard in a vicious voice; “he is one of the sorrows of art. I do not know what criticism is coming to. Have you seen that article in the Tribune on Mallarmé?—Mallarmé, that divine shadow moving in the twilight of the gods, even he is not safe from their mud. But what is this, Toto, you say about help and advice? Are you being worried by some woman? Is your mother tormenting? Unfold yourself to me.”
“Look here, Gaillard: you are a man of sense, you have sympathy. I am sick of life, living like a cabbage, and I want to live really, I want to be famous without the assistance of anyone; I have a talent.”
“You have an undoubted genius.”
“And I want to use it. I go to Struve, and he sneers at me, tells me to grind a coffee mill.”
“Oh, that Struve!” mourned Gaillard. “What led you to a critic for advice or sympathy? He told you to grind a coffee mill? Give me a cigarette, Toto; my case is empty; I will take three. He told you that! They fancy their cheap wit kills, these critics do; but you are not alone, Toto. Did you see the critique on my little poem ‘Satanitie’ in the Écho de Paris? Well, that is what they fling nowadays at an artist, and call it wit. But Pelisson is replying by a counterblast in the Débats. Dear old Pelisson! He knows no more of poetry than a rhinoceros; but he roars, and he has reduced the art of slaying a critic to a fine edge.”