“When can I come back?”
“I am going into the country this evening; I shall be back again the day after to-morrow. I shall have read your manuscript by that time; and if it suits me, we might come to terms that very day.”
Seeing his acquaintance so easy, Lucien was inspired with the unlucky idea of bringing the Marguerites upon the scene.
“I have a volume of poetry as well, sir——” he began.
“Oh! you are a poet! Then I don’t want your romance,” and the old man handed back the manuscript. “The rhyming fellows come to grief when they try their hands at prose. In prose you can’t use words that mean nothing; you absolutely must say something.”
“But Sir Walter Scott, sir, wrote poetry as well as——”
“That is true,” said Doguereau, relenting. He guessed that the young fellow before him was poor, and kept the manuscript. “Where do you live? I will come and see you.”
Lucien, all unsuspicious of the idea at the back of the old man’s head, gave his address; he did not see that he had to do with a bookseller of the old school, a survival of the eighteenth century, when booksellers tried to keep Voltaires and Montesquieus starving in garrets under lock and key.
“The Latin Quarter. I am coming back that very way,” said Doguereau, when he had read the address.
“Good man!” thought Lucien, as he took his leave. “So I have met with a friend to young authors, a man of taste who knows something. That is the kind of man for me! It is just as I said to David—talent soon makes its way in Paris.”