“I am not a journalist yet,” returned Lucien.
“Aha! So much the better,” said Michel Chrestien.
“I told you so!” said d’Arthez. “Lucien knows the value of a clean conscience. When you can say to yourself as you lay your head on the pillow at night, ‘I have not sat in judgment on another man’s work; I have given pain to no one; I have not used the edge of my wit to deal a stab to some harmless soul; I have sacrificed no one’s success to a jest; I have not even troubled the happiness of imbecility; I have not added to the burdens of genius; I have scorned the easy triumphs of epigram; in short, I have not acted against my convictions,’ is not this a viaticum that gives one daily strength?”
“But one can say all this, surely, and yet work on a newspaper,” said Lucien. “If I had absolutely no other way of earning a living, I should certainly come to this.”
“Oh! oh! oh!” cried Fulgence, his voice rising a note each time; “we are capitulating, are we?”
“He will turn journalist,” Léon Giraud said gravely. “Oh, Lucien, if you would only stay and work with us! We are about to bring out a periodical in which justice and truth shall never be violated; we will spread doctrines that, perhaps, will be of real service to mankind——”
“You will not have a single subscriber,” Lucien broke in with Machiavellian wisdom.
“There will be five hundred of them,” asserted Michel Chrestien, “but they will be worth five hundred thousand.”
“You will néed a lot of capital,” continued Lucien.
“No, only devotion,” said d’Arthez.