In fine, before three years had passed away, not a
cent was left of Monsieur Philoxene Boyer's estate, and in return he had
acquired neither talents nor fame. He is scarcely thirty years old: he
looks like a man of sixty. I know no man in the world who, for the hope
of half a million of dollars and a place in the French Academy, would
consent to bear the burden of tortures, privations, and humiliations
which make up Monsieur Philoxene Boyer's existence. He undergoes the
torments of the damned; he fasts; he flounders in all the sewers of
Paris. But he is riveted to this horrible existence as the galley-slave
to his chain; he can breathe no other air than this mephitic atmosphere;
he can lead no other life. When I saw him on the threshold of that
sombre and humid reading-room, muddied, wet, pale, thin, almost in rags,
I could not help thinking of this wretched galley-slave of literary
ambition as he might have been at home in his old Norman mansion, cozily
stretched before a blazing fire, with a cellar full of cider and a
larder groaning beneath the fat of that favored land, smiling at a young
wife on whose lap merry children were gambolling.
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