"Yes, twelve hundred folios, monsieur, twelve hundred splendid and rare folios; I even believe there are quite unknown ones among them, so rare are they! I put all those in the garret and I was intending to put more there, for there was room for another twelve hundred; when, suddenly, the house trembled, uttered a groan and cracked."
"Why, you must have thought it was an earthquake?"
"Exactly!... but when we found the damage was limited we sent for an architect. The architect examined the house from the cellar to the second floor and declared that the accident could only have been caused by too heavy a weight. And, consequently, he asked to be allowed to look at the attics. Alas! this was what I dreaded. Oh! if it had only been a question of myself, I would never have given him the key; but one has to sacrifice oneself for the general good.... He visited the attics, discovered the folios, reckoned that the weight must come to eight thousand pounds, and declared that they must be sold or he would not answer for the consequences.... And they were sold, monsieur!"
"At a loss?"
"No.... Alas! I made a profit of five or six thousand francs on them, because, you know, books increase in value from having been in the possession of a bibliophile; but the poor folios were lost to me—hounded from beneath the roof that had sheltered them.... I shall never come across such a collection again. But pray take a chair."
The chairs were in a similar condition to the easy-chairs and couches—not one was unoccupied. I decided to change the conversation.
"Oh!" I said to M. Villenave, approaching towards his recess, at the back of which an open door leading to the corridor permitted me to see what was there. "Oh! monsieur, what a beautiful pastel you have down there!"
"Yes, yes," replied M. Villenave, with that old-fashioned courtly air that I have only met with in two or three old men who were as vain as he. "Yes, that is the portrait of an old friend of mine—I say old, because I am no longer young, and she, if I remember correctly, was five or six years older than I. We became acquainted in the year 1784; you see that is not yesterday. We have not seen each other again since 1802, but that has not prevented us from writing to one another every week, or from looking forward to the weekly letters with exactly the same pleasure.... Yes, you are right, the pastel is charming, but if you had known the original you would have thought her still more charming!"
And a sweet reflection of youth, like a ray of sunlight, passed over the handsome face of the old man, making it look forty years younger.
Alas! I only entered that sacred tabernacle of the intellect twice: I have described what happened on my first visit, and I will immediately tell what happened at the second. But I ought previously to answer the question as to how M. Villenave managed to collect all these valuable treasures since he had not a large fortune. It was by patience and perseverance, as la Fontaine would say. This collection had been the work of his whole life. Just as Ghiberti began the gates of the Baptistery at Florence when he was a young man and finished them as an old one, so M. Villenave had given up fifty years to this task. He never burnt a single paper or destroyed a letter. I wrote two or three times to M. Villenave to ask for information; well, my unworthy epistles were put into their wrappers, classified and labelled. Why was I thus honoured? Who can tell? Perhaps he thought even I might some day become a great celebrity. It will readily be imagined that, if he preserved such letters as mine, he would religiously preserve other things. Notices of meetings of learned societies, invitations to marriage ceremonies, funeral cards, all were kept, classified and put in their place. I cannot say what M. Villenave's collection did not contain; I saw amongst it a collection of half-burnt volumes which had been snatched out of the fire of the Bastille on 14 July.