A
government situation worth eight thousand francs, three thousand
francs' annuity from the literary fund, two thousand from the Academy,
three thousand more from the paternal estate (less the taxes and the
cost of keeping it in order),--a total fixed income of fifteen
thousand francs, plus the ten thousand bought in, one year with
another, by his poetry; in all twenty-five thousand francs,--this for
Modeste's hero was so precarious and insufficient an income that he
usually spent five or six thousand francs more every year; but the
king's privy purse and the secret funds of the foreign office had
hitherto supplied the deficit. He wrote a hymn for the king's
coronation which earned him a whole silver service,--having refused a
sum of money on the ground that a Canalis owed his duty to his
sovereign.
But about this time Canalis had, as the journalists say, exhausted his
budget. He felt himself unable to invent any new form of poetry; his
lyre did not have seven strings, it had one; and having played on that
one string so long, the public allowed him no other alternative but to
hang himself with it, or to hold his tongue.
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