Dinah begged him to give her one day more, and the lovers parted after the manner of certain theatres, which give ten last performances of a piece that is paying. And how many promises they made! How many solemn pledges did not Dinah exact and the unblushing journalist give her! Dinah, with superiority of the Superior Woman, accompanied Lousteau, in the face of all the world, as far as Cosne, with her mother and little La Baudraye. When, ten days later, Madame de la Baudraye saw in her drawing-room at La Baudraye, Monsieur de Clagny, Gatien, and Gravier, she found an opportunity of saying to each in turn: “I owe it to Monsieur Lousteau that I discovered that I had not been loved for my own sake.” And what noble speeches she uttered, on man, on the nature of his feelings, on the end of his base passions, and so forth. Of Dinah’s three worshipers, Monsieur de Clagny only said to her: “I love you, come what may”--and Dinah accepted him as her confidant, lavished on him all the marks of friendship which women can devise for the Gurths who are ready thus to wear the collar of gilded slavery. In Paris once more, Lousteau had, in a few weeks, lost the impression of the happy time he had spent at the Chateau d’Anzy. This is why: Lousteau lived by his pen. In this century, especially since the triumph of the _bourgeoisie_--the commonplace, money-saving citizen--who takes good care not to imitate Francis I. or Louis XIV.--to live by the pen is a form of penal servitude to which a galley-slave would prefer death. To live by the pen means to create--to create to-day, and to-morrow, and incessantly--or to seem to create; and the imitation costs as dear as the reality. So, besides his daily contribution to a newspaper, which was like the stone of Sisyphus, and which came every Monday, crashing down on to the feather of his pen, Etienne worked for three or four literary magazines. Still, do not be alarmed; he put no artistic conscientiousness into his work. This man of Sancerre had a facility, a carelessness, if you call it so, which ranked him with those writers who are mere scriveners, literary hacks. In Paris, in our day, hack-work cuts a man off from every pretension to a literary position. When he can do no more, or no longer cares for advancement, the man who can write becomes a journalist and a hack.