Part 2

publisher’s office, or the bookseller, into the ten-cent box. Authors of every kind and sort, philosophers, historians, poets, novelists, who could not be wafted to immortality by the most alluring advertisements, and whose works go unheeded from the shelves of the store to the banks of the Seine, a deep Lethe, where they contemplate, while decaying, the certain end of their presumptive flight. I turned over there the pages of some of my octavos, which were placed between those of five or six of my friends.

Theodore sighed, but it was not because he saw the works of my brain exposed to the rain, owing to the scanty protection of an oil-cloth cover.

“What has become of the golden age of the outdoor venders of old books? It was here, certainly, that my famous friend Barbier collected his treasures until he was able to make a precise bibliography of several thousand items. It was here that Monmerqué, on his way to the Palais, and wise Labouderie, while leaving the city, walked for hours with instruction and profit. It was from here that old Boulard carried away daily a yard of rarities, measuring them with his surveyor’s cane,--volumes for which there was no place reserved in his six houses stuffed with books. How often on such occasions had he desired the modest _angulus_[5] of Horace, or the elastic cover of the fairies’ tent, which if necessary could shield the whole army of Xerxes, and which might be carried as easily in one’s belt as the knife-sheath of Jeannot’s grandfather. Now, more’s the pity, you see only fragments of modern literature which will never become ancient, whose life will have evaporated in twenty-four hours, like that of the flies of the river Hypanis: a literature worthy in truth of the charcoal ink and pulp paper used by mercenary printers, who are almost as foolish as the books. It is profaning the name of books to give it to these black-blotted rags, whose destinies have not even changed in leaving the basket on the rag-picker’s shoulders. The quays henceforth are the morgue for contemporary celebrities.”

He sighed again, and I sighed too, but it was for a different reason.

I was in a hurry to lead him away, because his increasing excitement seemed to threaten him at any moment with a fatal attack. It must have been an unlucky day, for everything combined to increase his melancholy.

“See,” he said, in passing the showy shop-front of Ladvocat, “the _Galliot du Pré_[6] of the debased literature of the nineteenth century; a liberal, industrious bookseller, who deserved to have been born in a better time, but whose deplorable activity has cruelly multiplied new books, to the everlasting injury of the old; an unpardonable patron of cotton-made paper, of incorrect spelling, and of stilted illustrations; a fatal protector of academic prose and fashionable poetry: as if France had produced any poetry since Ronsard, or any prose after Montaigne! This bookseller’s palace is like the Trojan horse that held the thieves of the Palladium--like Pandora’s box, which let loose all the evils of the earth. But yet I like this cannibal, and I shall be a chapter in his book, but I shall not see him again!”

“Look,” he continued, “there is Crozet’s store with the green walls. He is the most agreeable of our young booksellers, the man of all Paris who can best distinguish between a binding by Derome the elder and Derome the younger, and the last hope of a passing generation of amateurs, if the cult of old books should return in the midst of our barbarity. But I shall not enjoy his conversation to-day, even though I always learn something from it. He is in England, where he is competing, by the right of retaliation, with the greedy usurers of Soho Square and Fleet Street for the precious fragments of the monuments of our beautiful language which have been forgotten for two centuries on the ungrateful soil that produced them. _Macte animo, generoso puer!_...”

“Here,” he said, retracing his steps,--“here is the Pont-des-Arts, with its useless side-rails only a few centimeters wide, affording no support for the noble folios of three centuries, majestic volumes with pigskin covers and bronze clasps, which have delighted the eyes of ten generations. This is truly an emblematic bridge, leading from the Palais to the Institute by a path which is not the path of science. I do not know whether I am mistaken, but the invention of a bridge of this kind should be a startling illustration to the erudite of the decadence of good literature.”

“There,” said Theodore, passing the white sign of an active and ingenious bookseller in the Place du Louvre, “that sign has made my heart palpitate for a long time; but I no longer see it without a sensation of pain, since Techener has reprinted with Tastu’s characters, on showy paper, and under an enticing cover, the gothic marvels of Jehan Bonfons of Paris, Jehan Mareschal of Lyons, and Jehan de Chaney of Avignon, unobtainable trifles until he produced them in delightful facsimile. Snow-white paper fills me with horror, my friend; and there is nothing that I like less, except this same paper when it has received from the stroke of a cruel pressman, the deplorable imprint of the visions and idiocies of this iron age.”

Theodore sighed more frequently, and was rapidly growing worse.

We thus came in the Rue des Bons-Enfants, to the literary bazaar where Silvestre held his auction sales. It was a place honored by learned men, which has seen more priceless curios during a quarter of a century than the library of the Ptolemies ever held (which library perhaps was not burned by Omar, whatever our twaddling historians may say). I had never seen so many splendid books on exhibition.

“Unfortunate people who have to sell them,” I said to Theodore.

“They are dead,” he said, “or it would kill them.”

But the hall was empty. No one was to be seen except the indefatigable M. Thour, who was patiently cataloguing upon cards the titles of the books which had escaped his notice the previous day. The happiest among all men is he who has at his command, and accurately arranged, a faithful transcription of the title-pages of all known books. It is nothing to him if all the productions of printing are destroyed in the next revolution which the perfection of progress promises us. He can leave to posterity the complete catalogue of the universal library. He would have admirable forethought in seeing from afar the necessity for compiling this inventory of civilization. A few years more, and civilization will be no longer spoken about.

“God forgive me, Theodore,” said Silvestre; “you have mistaken the day. Those books that you see were sold yesterday in the last session, and are waiting for the porter to deliver them.” Theodore reeled and turned pale. His face assumed the tint of old citron morocco. I felt the blow that had struck him, to the bottom of my own heart.

“It is no matter,” he said, with an altered manner. “I recognize only my usual ill luck in this bad news. But to whom do these things belong, these pearls and diamonds, these wonderful riches in which the libraries of de Thou and Grolier would have gloried?”

“As usual, sir,” Silvestre answered, “these original editions of the classics, these perfect old copies with the autographs of celebrated scholars, these piquant philological curiosities, of which academy and university have never heard, rightfully revert to Richard Heber.[7] It is the British lion’s share, to whom we are willing to surrender, with good grace, the Greek and Latin classics which we have ceased to understand. These fine collections of natural history, these masterpieces of workmanship and pictorial art, belong to Prince ----, who uses his studious tastes to still further enhance his great fortune. These mysteries of the middle ages, these phœnix-like precepts whose counterpart[8] is no longer in existence, these curious dramatic attempts of our ancestors, will swell the model library of M. de Soleine. These well-preserved facetiæ, so strikingly subtle and enjoyable, have been purchased by your friend M. Aimé-Martin. I need not tell you to whom these fresh, brilliant morocco bindings belong, with the triple fillets, wide dentelle, and sumptuous panels. He is the Shakespeare among the minor collectors, the Corneille of melodrama, the graceful and often eloquent interpreter of the feelings and virtues of the populace, who, after having depreciated the value of books in the morning, bought them for their weight in gold in the evening, not, however, without grinding his teeth like a mortally wounded boar, and turning a tragic eye, veiled by black eyebrows, upon his rivals.”

Theodore had ceased to listen. He was handling a beautiful volume that he

hurriedly measured with his Elzevirometer, a six-inch measure divided almost to infinity, by which he regulated the price, and, alas! the intrinsic merit also, of his books. He measured the accursed book ten times and as many times verified the troublesome calculation, muttered some words that I did not understand, finally changed color, and fainted in my arms. I had great difficulty in getting him into a passing carriage.

For a long time my attempts to learn the cause of his sudden grief were futile. He did not speak. He did not hear my words. It is the typhus fever, I thought, and the crisis of the fever.

I held him in my arms. I continued to question him. At last he spoke.

“You see in me,” he said, “the most unhappy of men. That book is the 1676 Virgil, on large paper, of which I thought that I had the best example known, and yet this is taller than mine, by the third of a line.[9] Prejudiced or spiteful minds might even call it half a line. A third of a line, good God!”

I was confounded. I saw that the delirium was increasing.

“A third of a line,” he repeated, shaking his fist furiously in the air like Ajax or Capaneus. All my limbs trembled.

He gradually fell into a state of deep depression.

The poor man lived only to suffer. He repeated from time to time, “The third of a line!” and wrung his hands, while I kept saying, in an undertone, “Confusion to books and typhus fever!”

“Calm yourself, my friend,” I whispered gently in his ear, each time the paroxysm was renewed. “A third of a line is not much, even in the most particular things of life.”

“Not much?” he cried; “a third of a line in the 1676 Virgil! It was the third of a line that raised the price of the Nerli Homer at M. de Cotte’s[10] a hundred louis. A third of a line! Ah! would you count the third of a line nothing in the length of a dagger that pierced your heart?”

His expression again wholly changed, his arms became rigid, his legs were seized with cramps as in a vise. The typhus was visibly reaching the extremities. I did not desire to lengthen by even the third of a line the short distance that separated us from the house.

At last we arrived there.

“A third of a line,” he said to the concierge.

“A third of a line,” he said to the cook, who opened the door.

“A third of a line,” he said to his wife, with a flood of tears.

“My parrot has flown away!” cried his little girl, likewise weeping.

“Why did you leave the cage open?” replied Theodore. “A third of a line!”

“There is an uprising in the South and in the Rue du Cadran,” said the old aunt, who was reading the evening paper.

“What the devil are the people meddling with?” answered Theodore. “A third of a line!”

“Your farm at la Beauce has been burned,” said his servant in putting him to bed.

“It must be rebuilt,” said Theodore, “if it is worth the trouble. A third of a line!”

“Do you think that this is serious?” the nurse asked me.

“Your question proves, my good woman, that you have not read the ‘Journal des Sciences Médicales.’ Why do you delay in getting a priest?”

Happily at that minute the curé came in to converse, as was his custom, about the thousand and one literary and bibliographical trifles from which his breviary had not wholly distracted him; but he forgot them all when he felt Theodore’s pulse.

“Alas! my child,” he said, “the life of man is only a journey, and even the world itself is not set upon everlasting foundations. It must end like everything that has a beginning.”

“Have you read, on this subject,” said Theodore, “the ‘Treatise on the World, its Origin and its Antiquity’?”

“I learned all that I know from the book of Genesis,” said the conservative pastor; “but I have heard it said that M. de Mirabeau, a sophist of the last century, had written a book upon this subject.”

“_Sub judice lis est_,” Theodore interrupted brusquely. “I have proved in my ‘Stromates’ that the first two parts of ‘Le Monde’ were by that dreadfully pedantic Mirabeau, and the third was by the Abbé Lemascrier.”

“Ah! my goodness,” said the old aunt, taking off her spectacles; “then who was it that made America?”

“This is not the question now,” continued the abbé. “Do you believe in the Trinity?”

“How could I disbelieve the famous volume of Servetus, ‘De Trinitate,’” said Theodore, half raising himself on his pillow, “when I have seen an example go, _ipsissimis oculis_, for the trifling sum of two hundred and fifteen francs at the MacCarthy sale, while at the dispersal of the La Vallière collection it brought seven hundred?”[11]

“We are straying from the point,” exclaimed the priest, a little disconcerted. “I wish to know, my son, what you think of the divinity of Jesus Christ.”

“Well!” said Theodore, “it depends upon what you mean by it. I shall maintain against every one that the ‘Toldos-Jeschu,’ which was written by that ignorant railler Voltaire, who wasted on it a lot of foolish fables worthy of the ‘Thousand and One Nights,’ is nothing but evil rabbinesque nonsense, unworthy to be placed in the library of a scholar.”

“That is well!” sighed the worthy ecclesiastic.

“At least,” Theodore continued, “unless some one should discover the large-paper copy, of which there is a hint, if my memory serves me, in the bibliographic jumble of David Clement.”[12]

The curé groaned audibly, and, rising from his chair, bent over Theodore to make him clearly understand, without ambiguity or equivocation, that he was in the last stage of the bibliomaniac’s typhus which is spoken of in the “Journal des Sciences Médicales,” and that he should not think of anything but his salvation.

Theodore had never intrenched himself behind that insolent negation of unbelievers which is the science of fools; but the dear man had pushed the useless study of the letter, in books, too far to comprehend the spirit. In a perfect state of health a doctrine of any kind would give him a fever, or a dogma induce lockjaw. In a theological matter he would have lowered his colors before a Saint-Simonian. He turned his face to the wall.

A long time passed without a word, and we should have thought that he was dead, except as I bent close to him I heard him murmur feebly, “A third of a line! God of goodness and justice! but where will you give me back that third of a line, and how far can your omnipotence retrieve the irreparable error of that binder?”

One of his friends, a bibliophile, came in a minute later. They told him that Theodore was in the last agony; that he was delirious to the point of thinking that the Abbé Lemascrier had made the third part of the world; and that he had lost his power of speech a quarter of an hour before.

“I am going to make sure of it,” said the amateur. “By what mistake in pagination do we recognize the genuine 1635 Elzevir edition of Cæsar?” he asked Theodore.

“153 for 149.”

“Very good. And of the Terence of the same year?”

“108 for 104.”

“The devil!” I said; “the Elzevirs played in bad luck with their figures that year. They were wise not to choose it for the printing of their logarithms.”

“Wonderful!” continued Theodore’s friend. “If I had listened to these people here, I should have believed that you were at the point of death.”

“A third of a line,” replied Theodore, whose voice was failing by degrees.

“I know your story, but it is nothing in comparison with mine. Think what I lost, eight days ago, in one of those bastard, nameless sales which are advertised only by a placard on the door,--a Boccaccio of 1527,[13] as beautiful as your own, the binding of Venetian vellum, with the pointed a’s proved throughout, and not a leaf repaired.”

All Theodore’s faculties concentrated in one idea.

“Are you very sure that the a’s were pointed?”

“As pointed as the iron tip of a lancer’s halberd.”

“It was then, doubtless, the ‘Vintisettine’ itself.”

“Its very self. We had a jolly dinner that day: charming women, fresh oysters, intelligent people, and champagne. I reached the sale three minutes after the hammer fell.”

“Sir,” cried Theodore in a fury, “when the ‘Vintisettine’ is to be sold, one does not dine!”

His vitality, which had been sustained by the excitement of the conversation, as the bellows revives a dying spark, was exhausted by his last effort. His lips muttered once more, “A third of a line!” but they were his last words.

At the time that we gave up all hope of his recovery, we moved his bed near to his book-shelves, from which we took down, one by one, every book for which he seemed to ask with his eyes, letting him look the longest at those that we thought would please him the most.

He died at midnight, lying between a Du Seuil and a Padeloup, his hands lovingly clasping a Thouvenin.

The next day we followed his hearse, at the head of a great crowd of sorrowful morocco-finishers, and we sealed his tomb with a stone bearing the following inscription, which he had parodied for himself from Franklin’s epitaph:

NOTES

[1] In the bibliography of Nodier’s writings, published with the catalogue of his library, Paris, 1844, the first edition of “Le Bibliomane” is registered 1832-1833, as in tome I of “Livre des Cent et un.”

[2] Fermier général. An association existed in France, from the reign of Philip the Fair until the Revolution of 1789, possessing the right, by purchase, to levy taxes on various articles of consumption. These “farmers” were mostly uneducated parvenus, and their extortions were so great that though they paid no less than one hundred and eighty millions of francs for the monopoly the last year of its existence, immense fortunes were made by all concerned. The Revolution caused the abolition of the privilege, and all the “farmers” were executed.

[3] “The Enemies of Books,” by William Blades.

[4] During the riots of February, 1831, a mob of self-elected “public censors” attacked the palace of the Archbishop of Paris at Notre Dame, destroyed many valuable paintings, ruined the furniture, and threw a large part of the library into the Seine.

[5] ANGULUS. A secret nook or corner, meaning, in this instance, the Sabine farm presented to Horace by Mæcenas, which the poet declared in his “Odes” to be all-sufficient for his needs.

[6] Galliot du Pré flourished in Paris during the middle of the sixteenth century. His publications, for the most part, bear the device of a galley propelled by sails and oars, with the legend “Vogue la Gualee.”

[7] The library of Richard Heber was sold a few years after this supposed incident. The various sessions of the auction occupied portions of two hundred days, from 1834 to 1836.

[8] Nodier used the term “ménecheme,” or twin brother, a word taken from a comedy by Plautus.

[9] The thirty-sixth part of an inch.

[10] “HOMERI OPERA, græce. Florentiæ, sumptibus Bern. et Nerii Nerliorum. 1488.” Two volumes, folio. The first edition of Homer, printed at the expense of the brothers Nerli, after a copy prepared by Demetrius Chalcondyles of Athens. The De Cotte copy was uncut, and sold for 3601 francs. It was bought by M. Caillard, and passed into the Bibliothèque du Roi after his death, where it replaced a vellum copy that the French were constrained to return to the library of Saint Marc, Venice.

[11] The “Trinitate” of Servetus: a small octavo, printed in 1531. A copy was sold as indicated. See Brunet’s “Manuel du Libraire.”

[12] “BIBLIOTHÈQUE CURIEUSE, ou catalogue raisonné de livres difficiles à trouver. Par David Clement. Göttingen, 1750-1760.” Nine volumes, 4to. Many of the books described in this catalogue, which was carried only to the letter H, have yet to be found; in fact, it is largely conceded that they do not--perhaps never did--exist.

[13] The Giunta edition of Boccaccio, printed at Firenze, 1527, is esteemed the best edition of this famous book. A so-called facsimile was printed at Venice in 1729, but the counterfeit is discovered by the formation of the a, as indicated.