“Why, I shall be delighted, quite delighted, sir. Mlle. Florentine can come to my shop and choose anything she likes. Ribbons are in my department. So it is all quite settled. You will say no more about Virginie, a botcher that cannot design a new shape, while I have ideas of my own, I have.” Lucien heard a sound as of coins dropping into a cashbox, and the veteran began to make up his books for the day. “I have been waiting here for an hour, sir,” Lucien began, looking not a little annoyed. “And ‘they’ have not come yet!” exclaimed Napoleon’s veteran, civilly feigning concern. “I am not surprised at that. It is some time since I have seen ‘them’ here. It is the middle of the month, you see. Those fine fellows only turn up on pay days—the 29th or the 30th.” “And M. Finot?” asked Lucien, having caught the editor’s name. “He is in the Rue Feydeau, that’s where he lives. Coloquinte, old chap, just take him everything that has come in to-day when you go with the paper to the printers.” “Where is the newspaper put together?” Lucien said to himself. “The newspaper?” repeated the officer, as he received the rest of the stamp money from Coloquinte, “the newspaper?—broum! broum!—(Mind you are round at the printers’ by six o’clock to-morrow, old chap, to send off the porters.)—The newspaper, sir, is written in the street, at the writers’ houses, in the printing-office between eleven and twelve o’clock at night. In the Emperor’s time, sir, these shops for spoiled paper were not known. Oh! he would have cleared them out with four men and a corporal; they would not have come over _him_ with their talk. But that is enough of prattling. If my nephew finds it worth his while, and so long as they write for the son of the Other (broum! broum!)——after all, there is no harm in that. Ah! by the way, subscribers don’t seem to me to be advancing in serried columns; I shall leave my post.” “You seem to know all about the newspaper, sir,” Lucien began. “From a business point of view, broum! broum!” coughed the soldier, clearing his throat. “From three to five francs per column, according to ability.—Fifty lines to a column, forty letters to a line; no blanks; there you are! As for the staff, they are queer fish, little youngsters whom I wouldn’t take on for the commissariat; and because they make fly tracks on sheets of white paper, they look down, forsooth, on an old Captain of Dragoons of the Guard, that retired with a major’s rank after entering every European capital with Napoleon.” The soldier of Napoleon brushed his coat, and made as if he would go out, but Lucien, swept to the door, had courage enough to make a stand. “I came to be a contributor of the paper,” he said. “I am full of respect, I vow and declare, for a captain of the Imperial Guard, those men of bronze——”