The placard, a new and original idea of the celebrated Ladvocat, was just beginning to blossom out upon the walls. In no long space Paris was to wear motley, thanks to the exertions of his imitators, and the Treasury was to discover a new source of revenue. Anxiety sent the blood surging to Lucien’s heart, as he who had been so great at Angoulême, so insignificant of late in Paris, slipped past the other houses, summoned up all his courage, and at last entered the shop thronged with assistants, customers, and booksellers—“And authors too, perhaps!” thought Lucien. “I want to speak with M. Vidal or M. Porchon,” he said, addressing a shopman. He had read the names on the sign-board—VIDAL & PORCHON (it ran), _French and foreign booksellers’ agents_. “Both gentlemen are engaged,” said the man. “I will wait.” Left to himself, the poet scrutinized the packages, and amused himself for a couple of hours by scanning the titles of books, looking into them, and reading a page or two here and there. At last, as he stood leaning against a window, he heard voices, and suspecting that the green curtains hid either Vidal or Porchon, he listened to the conversation. “Will you take five hundred copies of me? If you will, I will let you have them at five francs, and give fourteen to the dozen.” “What does that bring them in at?” “Sixteen sous less.” “Four francs four sous?” said Vidal or Porchon, whichever it was. “Yes,” said the vendor. “Credit your account?” inquired the purchaser. “Old humbug! you would settle with me in eighteen months’ time, with bills at a twelvemonth.” “No. Settled at once,” returned Vidal or Porchon. “Bills at nine months?” asked the publisher or author, who evidently was selling his book. “No, my dear fellow, twelve months,” returned one of the firm of booksellers’ agents. There was a pause. “You are simply cutting my throat!” said the visitor. “But in a year’s time shall we have placed a hundred copies of _Léonide_?” said the other voice. “If books went off as fast as the publishers would like, we should be millionaires, my good sir; but they don’t, they go as the public pleases. There is some one now bringing out an edition of Scott’s novels at eighteen sous per volume, three livres twelve sous per copy, and you want me to give you more for your stale remainders? No. If you mean me to push this novel of yours, you must make it worth my while.—Vidal!” A stout man, with a pen behind his ear, came down from his desk. “How many copies of Ducange did you place last journey?” asked Porchon of his partner. “Two hundred of _Le Petit Vieillard de Calais_, but to sell them I was obliged to cry down two books which pay in less commission, and uncommonly fine ‘nightingales’ they are now.” (A “nightingale,” as Lucien afterwards learned, is a bookseller’s name for books that linger on hand, perched out of sight in the loneliest nooks in the shop.)