第116章

"The name of your street my dear fellow,is particularly appropriate for your lodgings;you are up in the sky,"he said,by way of greeting."Let us be first upon the ground on the road to Clignancourt;it is good form,and we ought to set them an example.""Here is the programme,"said de Marsay,as the cab rattled through the Faubourg Saint-Denis:"You stand up at twenty-five paces,coming nearer,till you are only fifteen apart.You have,each of you,five paces to take and three shots to fire--no more.Whatever happens,that must be the end of it.We load for your antagonist,and his seconds load for you.The weapons were chosen by the four seconds at a gunmaker's.We helped you to a chance,I will promise you;horse pistols are to be the weapons."For Lucien,life had become a bad dream.He did not care whether he lived or died.The courage of suicide helped him in some sort to carry things off with a dash of bravado before the spectators.He stood in his place;he would not take a step,a piece of recklessness which the others took for deliberate calculation.They thought the poet an uncommonly cool hand.Michel Chrestien came as far as his limit;both fired twice and at the same time,for either party was considered to be equally insulted.Michel's first bullet grazed Lucien's chin;Lucien's passed ten feet above Chrestien's head.The second shot hit Lucien's coat collar,but the buckram lining fortunately saved its wearer.The third bullet struck him in the chest,and he dropped.

"Is he dead?"asked Michel Chrestien.

"No,"said the surgeon,"he will pull through.""So much the worse,"answered Michel.

"Yes;so much the worse,"said Lucien,as his tears fell fast.

By noon the unhappy boy lay in bed in his own room.With untold pains they had managed to remove him,but it had taken five hours to bring him to the Rue de la Lune.His condition was not dangerous,but precautions were necessary lest fever should set in and bring about troublesome complications.Coralie choked down her grief and anguish.

She sat up with him at night through the anxious weeks of his illness,studying her parts by his bedside.Lucien was in danger for two long months;and often at the theatre Coralie acted her frivolous role with one thought in her heart,"Perhaps he is dying at this moment."Lucien owed his life to the skill and devotion of a friend whom he had grievously hurt.Bianchon had come to tend him after hearing the story of the attack from d'Arthez,who told it in confidence,and excused the unhappy poet.Bianchon suspected that d'Arthez was generously trying to screen the renegade;but on questioning Lucien during a lucid interval in the dangerous nervous fever,he learned that his patient was only responsible for the one serious article in Hector Merlin's paper.

Before the first month was out,the firm of Fendant and Cavalier filed their schedule.Bianchon told Coralie that Lucien must on no account hear the news.The famous Archer of Charles IX.,brought out with an absurd title,had been a complete failure.Fendant,being anxious to realize a little ready money before going into bankruptcy,had sold the whole edition (without Cavalier's knowledge)to dealers in printed paper.These,in their turn,had disposed of it at a cheap rate to hawkers,and Lucien's book at that moment was adorning the bookstalls along the Quays.The booksellers on the Quai des Augustins,who had previously taken a quantity of copies,now discovered that after this sudden reduction of the price they were like to lose heavily on their purchases;the four duodecimo volumes,for which they had paid four francs fifty centimes,were being given away for fifty sous.Great was the outcry in the trade;but the newspapers preserved a profound silence.Barbet had not foreseen this "clearance;"he had a belief in Lucien's abilities;for once he had broken his rule and taken two hundred copies.The prospect of a loss drove him frantic;the things he said of Lucien were fearful to hear.Then Barbet took a heroic resolution.He stocked his copies in a corner of his shop,with the obstinacy of greed,and left his competitors to sell their wares at a loss.Two years afterwards,when d'Arthez's fine preface,the merits of the book,and one or two articles by Leon Giraud had raised the value of the book,Barbet sold his copies,one by one,at ten francs each.

Lucien knew nothing of all this,but Berenice and Coralie could not refuse to allow Hector Merlin to see his dying comrade,and Hector Merlin made him drink,drop by drop,the whole of the bitter draught brewed by the failure of Fendant and Cavalier,made bankrupts by his first ill-fated book.Martainville,the one friend who stood by Lucien through thick and thin,had written a magnificent article on his work;but so great was the general exasperation against the editor of L'Aristarque,L'Oriflamme,and Le Drapeau Blanc,that his championship only injured Lucien.In vain did the athlete return the Liberal insults tenfold,not a newspaper took up the challenge in spite of all his attacks.

Coralie,Berenice,and Bianchon might shut the door on Lucien's so-called friends,who raised a great outcry,but it was impossible to keep out creditors and writs.After the failure of Fendant and Cavalier,their bills were taken into bankruptcy according to that provision of the Code of Commerce most inimical to the claims of third parties,who in this way lose the benefit of delay.

Lucien discovered that Camusot was proceeding against him with great energy.When Coralie heard the name,and for the first time learned the dreadful and humiliating step which her poet had taken for her sake,the angelic creature loved him ten times more than before,and would not approach Camusot.The bailiff bringing the warrant of arrest shrank back from the idea of dragging his prisoner out of bed,and went back to Camusot before applying to the President of the Tribunal of Commerce for an order to remove the debtor to a private hospital.