This etext was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of thefile for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making anentire meal of them. D.W.]
By CHARLES DE BERNARD
While the two friends are devouring to the very last morsel the feastprepared for them by Madame Gobillot, it may not be out of place toexplain in a few words the nature of the bonds that united these two men.
The Vicomte de Gerfaut was one of those talented beings who are theveritable champions of an age when the lightest pen weighs more in thesocial balance than our ancestors' heaviest sword. He was born in thesouth of France, of one of those old families whose fortune haddiminished each generation, their name finally being almost all that theyhad left. After making many sacrifices to give their son an educationworthy of his birth, his parents did not live to enjoy the fruits oftheir efforts, and Gerfaut became an orphan at the time when he had justfinished his law studies. He then abandoned the career of which hisfather had dreamed for him, and the possibilities of a red gown borderedwith ermine. A mobile and highly colored imagination, a passionate lovefor the arts, and, more than all, some intimacies contracted with men ofletters, decided his vocation and launched him into literature.
The ardent young man, without a murmur or any misgivings, drank to thevery dregs the cup poured out to neophytes in the harsh career of lettersby editors, theatrical managers, and publishers. With some, this courseends in suicide, but it only cost Gerfaut a portion of his slenderpatrimony; he bore this loss like a man who feels that he is strongenough to repair it. When his plans were once made, he followed them upwith indefatigable perseverance, and became a striking example of theirresistible power of intelligence united to will-power. Reputation, forhim, lay in the unknown depths of an arid and rocky soil; he was obliged,in order to reach it, to dig a sort of artesian well. Gerfaut acceptedthis heroic labor; he worked day and night for several years, hisforehead, metaphorically, bathed in a painful perspiration alleviatedonly by hopes far away. At last the untiring worker's drill struck theunderground spring over which so many noble ones breathlessly bend,although their thirst is never quenched. At this victorious stroke,glory burst forth, falling in luminous sparks, making this new name—hisname—flash with a brilliancy too dearly paid for not to be lasting.
At the time of which we speak, Octave had conquered every obstacle in theliterary field. With a versatility of talent which sometimes recalledVoltaire's "proteanism," he attacked in succession the most difficultstyles. Besides their poetic value, his dramas had this positive merit,the highest in the theatre world they were money-makers; so the managersgreeted him with due respect, while collaborators swarmed about him.The journals paid for his articles in their weight in gold; reviewssnatched every line of his yet unfinished novels; his works wereillustrated by Porret and Tony Johannot—the masters of the day—and shone resplendent behind the glass cases in the Orleans gallery.Gerfaut had at last made a place for himself among that baker's dozenof writers who call themselves, and justly, too, the field-marshals ofFrench literature, of which Chateaubriand was then commander-in-chief.
What was it that had brought such a per