Surely, in any heap of straw, there is one strand which, if planted and tended, watered and nurtured, will live and grow.

Honoré de Balzac trotted along behind Calvin, growing more annoyed by the moment. “Slow down, girder-legs, you will wear me down to a stub trying to keep up with you.”

“You always walk so slow,” said Calvin. “Sometimes I got to stride out or my legs get jumpy.”

“If your legs are jumpy then jump.” But the argument was over—Calvin was walking more slowly now. “This sister-in-law of yours, what makes you think she’ll pay for dinner?”

“I told you, she’s a torch. The Napoleon of torches. She’ll know before she comes downstairs to meet us that I don’t have a dime. Or a shilling. Whatever they call it here.”

“So she’ll turn around and go back upstairs.”

“No,” said Calvin. “She’ll want to meet me.”

“But Calvin, my friend, if she is a torch then she must know what is in your heart. Who could want to meet you then?”

Calvin rounded on him, his face a mask of anger. “What do you mean by that?”

For a moment, Honoré was frightened. “Please don’t turn me into a frog, Monsieur le Maker.”

“If you don’t like me, why are you always tagging along?”

“I write novels, Calvin. I study people.”

“You’re studying me?”

“No, of course not, I already have you in my mind, ready to write. What I study is the people you meet. How they respond to you. You seem to wake up something inside them.”

“What?”

“Different things. That is what I study.”

“So you’re using me.”

“But of course. Were you under some delusion that I stayed with you for love? Do you think we are Damon and Pythias? Jonathan and David? I would be a fool to love you like such a friend.”

Calvin’s expression grew darker yet. “Why would you be a fool?”

“Because there is no room for a man like me in your life. You are already locked in a dance with your brother. Cain and Abel had no friends—but then, they were the only two men alive. Perhaps the better comparison is Romulus and Remus.”

“Which one am I?” asked Calvin.

“The younger brother,” said Honoré.

“So you think he’ll try to kill me?”

“I spoke of the closeness of the brothers, not the end of the story.”

“You’re playing with me.”

“I always play with everybody,” said Honoré. “It is my vocation. God put me on the earth to do with people what cats do to mice. Play with them, chew the last bit of life out of them, then pick them up in my mouth and drop them on people’s doorsteps. That is the business of literature.”

“You take a lot of airs for a writer who ain’t had a book printed up yet.”

“There is no book big enough to contain the stories that fill me up. But I will soon be ready to write. I will go back to France, I will write my books, I will be arrested from time to time, I will be in debt, I will make huge amounts of money but never enough, and in the end my books will last far longer than Napoleon’s empire.”