NOTES

“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 thatM. 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 famousvolume 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 tocomprehend 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 hadlost 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, wasexhausted 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:

HERE LIES, INITS WOODEN BINDING,A FOLIO COPY OF THE BESTEDITION OF MAN, WRITTEN INTHE LANGUAGE OF A GOLDENAGE, WHICH THE WORLDNO LONGER UNDERSTANDS.TO-DAYIT IS A SPOILEDOLD BOOK,STAINED ANDIMPERFECT, LACKING THE TITLE-PAGE,WORM-EATEN AND INJUREDBY DECAY. WEDARE NOT ANTICIPATEFOR IT THE USELESSHONOR OF AREPRINT.

[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.

THE DE VINNE PRESS

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