These men were brothers leading lives of intellectual
effort, loyally helping each other, making no reservations, not even
of their worst thoughts; men of vast acquirements, natures tried in
the crucible of poverty. Once admitted as an equal among such elect
souls, Lucien represented beauty and poetry. They admired the sonnets
which he read to them; they would ask him for a sonnet as he would ask
Michel Chrestien for a song. And, in the desert of Paris, Lucien found
an oasis in the Rue des Quatre-Vents.
At the beginning of October, Lucien had spent the last of his money on
a little firewood; he was half-way through the task of recasting his
work, the most strenuous of all toil, and he was penniless. As for
Daniel d'Arthez, burning blocks of spent tan, and facing poverty like
a hero, not a word of complaint came from him; he was as sober as any
elderly spinster, and methodical as a miser. This courage called out
Lucien's courage; he had only newly come into the circle, and shrank
with invincible repugnance from speaking of his straits. One morning
he went out, manuscript in hand, and reached the Rue du Coq; he would
sell _The Archer of Charles IX._ to Doguereau; but Doguereau was out.
Lucien little knew how indulgent great natures can be to the
weaknesses of others. Every one of the friends had thought of the
peculiar troubles besetting the poetic temperament, of the prostration
which follows upon the struggle, when the soul has been overwrought by
the contemplation of that nature which it is the task of art to
reproduce.
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