“Here comes the pungent Andoche!” shouted Gaudissart.
A stout, chubby-faced fellow of medium height, from head to foot the evident son of a hat-maker, with round features whose shrewdness was hidden under a restrained and subdued manner, suddenly appeared. His face, which was melancholy, like that of a man weary of poverty, lighted up hilariously when he caught sight of the table, and the bottles swathed in significant napkins. At Gaudissart’s shout, his pale-blue eyes sparkled, his big head, hollowed like that of a Kalmuc Tartar, bobbed from right to left, and he bowed to Popinot with a queer manner, which meant neither servility nor respect, but was rather that of a man who feels he is not in his right place and will make no concessions. He was just beginning to find out that he possessed no literary talent whatever; he meant to stay in the profession, however, by living on the brains of others, and getting astride the shoulders of those more able than himself, making his profit there instead of struggling any longer at his own ill-paid work. At the present moment he had drunk to the dregs the humiliation of applications and appeals which constantly failed, and he was now, like people in the higher walks of finance, about to change his tone and become insolent, advisedly. But he needed a small sum in hand on which to start, and Gaudissart gave him a share in the present affair of ushering into the world the oil of Popinot.
“You are to negotiate on his account with the newspapers. But don’t play double; if you do I’ll fight you to the death. Give him his money’s worth.”
Popinot gazed at “the author” which much uneasiness. People who are purely commercial look upon an author with mingled sentiments of fear, compassion, and curiosity. Though Popinot had been well brought up, the habits of his relations, their ideas, and the obfuscating effect of a shop and a counting-room, had lowered his intelligence by bending it to the use and wont of his calling,—a phenomenon which may often be seen if we observe the transformations which take place in a hundred comrades, when ten years supervene between the time when they leave college or a public school, to all intents and purposes alike, and the period when they meet again after contact with the world. Andoche accepted Popinot’s perturbation as a compliment.
“Now then, before dinner, let’s get to the bottom of the prospectus; then we can drink without an afterthought,” said Gaudissart. “After dinner one reads askew; the tongue digests.”
“Monsieur,” said Popinot, “a prospectus is often a fortune.”
“And for plebeians like myself,” said Andoche, “fortune is nothing more than a prospectus.”
“Ha, very good!” cried Gaudissart, “that rogue of a Finot has the wit of the forty Academicians.”
“Of a hundred Academicians,” said Popinot, bewildered by these ideas.
The impatient Gaudissart seized the manuscript and began to read in a loud voice, with much emphasis, “CEPHALIC OIL.”