We have divided up the ground floor into dining-room, kitchen, pantry; and on the first floor into the small and large salons and the bedrooms; there was nothing like that on the second floor. The second floor had five rooms, five rooms full of nothing else but books and boxes. These five rooms must have contained forty thousand volumes and four thousand boxes, piled up on the floor and on tables. The anteroom alone was a vast library. It had two entrances: that on the right led to M. Villenave's bedroom—a chamber to which we shall return. That on the left opened into a large room, which, in its turn, led into a much smaller one. These two rooms, be it understood, were nothing but two libraries. The four walls of them were tapestried with books upheld on a substratum of boxes. This was odd enough in itself, as will readily be imagined, but it was not the most original thing that caught one's notice. The most ingenious arrangement was a square construction which stood in the middle of the room like an enormous block and formed a second library within the first, leaving only space for a pathway round the room, bordered with books on left and right, just wide enough to allow a single person to move freely; a second person would have blocked the traffic. Moreover, only M. Villenave's most intimate friends ever presumed to be allowed the privilege of admission to this sanctum sanctorum. The substratum of boxes contained autographs. The age of Louis XIV. alone needed five hundred boxes! Herein were contained the result of fifty years of daily labour, concentrated on this one object; hour after hour taken up by this one passion. It was, in a word, the gentle and ardent passion of a born collector, into which he put his mind and happiness and joy and life!
There were to be found a portion of the papers of Louis XVI., discovered in the iron chest; there was the correspondence of Malesherbes, two hundred autographs of Rousseau, and four hundred of Voltaire together with autographs of all the kings of France, from Charlemagne down to our own time; there were drawings by Raphael and Jules Romain, by Leonardo da Vinci, Andrea del Sarto, Lebrun, Lesueur, Greuze, Vanloo, Watteau, Boucher, Vien, David, Girodet, etc.
M. Villenave would not have parted with the contents of those two rooms for a hundred thousand crowns.
I There now only remain the bedroom and the black cabinet behind M. Villenave's alcove, which was reached by a corridor, about which we shall have occasion to say a few words. Only those who saw that bedroom, wherein the bed was the least conspicuous piece of furniture, can conceive any idea of what the bedroom of a bibliomaniac is like. It was in this room that M. Villenave received his friends. After four or five months' intimacy in the household, I had the honour of being received in it. An old servant, called, I believe, Françoise, conducted me to it. I had promised M. Villenave an autograph—not that of Napoleon, of which he possessed five or six, or that of Bonaparte, of which he had three or four—but one of Buonaparte.
He had given orders that I was to be shown upstairs as soon as I arrived.
Françoise half opened the door.
"M. Dumas is here," she said.
Generally, when anyone was announced, even were he an intimate friend who had come unexpectedly, M. Villenave would utter a loud cry, scold Françoise and fling up his arms in despair; then, finally, when he had indulged his fit of despair, and moaned and sighed his fill, he would say—
"Very well, Françoise, as he is there, show him in."