Ah! my dear Mr. Cobden, you with whom I once spent several dull days and shared some melancholy dinners in Spain, the idea of this Peace Congress did not originate with you; it came from our unfortunate King Henri IV.,-"Let us render to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's."
And so all you who visit the Arsenal should know that those beautiful rooms which now form the library were decorated by Sully with Henri IV.'s money.
In 1823, Charles Nodier was appointed librarian of this library, and left the rue de Choiseul, where he lived, to establish himself in his new habitation. But the building that was often the subject of illustrations was not a very magnificent place to live in! On the first landing of a flight of steps with massive balustrades, you came upon a badly fitting door on the left which led to a bricked corridor; the dining-room and the office were paved with bricks like the corridor. Three other rooms completed the suite—three luxurious rooms, with parquetried floors and panelled walls: one was Madame Nodier's bedroom; the other the salon; and the third the workroom, library and bedchamber of Charles. Charles led two separate existences: his week's existence was that of a worker and bibliophile; his Sunday existence was that of a society man and host. Nodier was an adorable personality; I have never met nor ever known anyone so learned, so much of an artist and yet so kindly in disposition as he, save, perhaps, Méry. And though he possessed plenty of faults he hadn't a vice, and his winning faults sprang from the originality of the man of genius. Nodier was extravagant, careless, dilatory; but his was the delightful idleness of a Figaro. He might, perhaps, have been accused of being rather too worldly; but that, too, sprang from his carelessness, in not taking the trouble to examine into his feelings. It was rather the whole community of martyrs, so to speak, that Nodier loved after this fashion; he had an inner circle of privileged friends whom he loved with all his heart; others, he liked only intellectually. Nodier was par excellence a man of learning: he knew everything and a host of things besides; for he exercised the prerogative of men of genius: if he did not know a thing he invented his knowledge of it, and it must be confessed his invention was generally far more likely, far more ingenious and romantic and specious and, I will venture to say, far nearer the truth than the reality itself. It will be readily guessed that, with this gift of invention, Nodier was a veritable mine of paradoxes. But he never tried to force you to accept these paradoxes; he created three-fourths of his paradoxes for his own diversion.
One day, when I had been lunching with a minister, I was asked—
"How did the luncheon pass off?"
"All right," I replied; "but if I hadn't been there myself I should have been horribly bored!"
And so it was with Nodier; for fear of being bored, he made up paradoxes, just as I told stories.
I must return to what I said about Nodier being a little too much inclined to love everybody. My sentence sounds somewhat reproachful, but it must not be taken so. Nodier was the philanthropist of Terence, the man unto whom nothing is alien. Nodier loved, as fire warms, as a torch lightens, as the sun shines; he loved because to love and make friendships were as much the fruition of his nature as grapes are the fruit of the vine. Let me be permitted to coin a mot to describe the man who himself coined so many, he was a lover (aimeur). I have said he loved and made friendships because, for Nodier, women existed as well as men. As he loved all men of goodwill, so, in his youth (and Nodier was never old), did he love all lovable women. How he managed this he himself would have found it impossible to explain. But, in common with all eminently poetic minds, Nodier always confused the dream with the ideal, and the ideal with the material world; for Nodier, every fancy of his imagination really existed—Thérèse Aubert, la Fée aux miettes, Inès de las Sierras—he lived in the midst of all these creations of his genius, and never sultan had a more magnificent harem.
It is interesting to know how a writer who produced so many books, and such entertaining ones too, as he did, worked. I am going to tell you. We will take the Nodier of the week-days, romance-writer, savant and bibliophile, the writer of the Dictionnaire des Onomatopées, Trilby, the Souvenirs de Jeunesse. In the morning, after two or three hours of easy work, when he had covered a dozen or fourteen pages of paper six inches long by four wide, with a regular, legible handwriting, without a single erasure, he considered his morning task done, and went out. When he was out of doors, Nodier wandered about aimlessly, going up now one street of the boulevards, now another, now along this or that quay. No matter what road he took, three things preoccupied him: the stalls of the second-hand bookshops, booksellers' windows and book-binders' shops; for Nodier was almost as fond of fine bindings as of rare books, and I believe he really classed Deneuil, Derome, Thouvenin and the three Elzevirs in the same rank in his mind. These adventurous walks of Nodier, which were protracted by discoveries of books or by meetings with his friends, usually began at noon and nearly always ended between three and four o'clock at Crozet's or at Techener's. In these houses, at about that hour, the book-lovers of Paris gathered together: the Marquis de Ganay, the Marquis de Châteaugiron, the Marquis de Chalabre; Bérard, the Elzevir collector, who, in his spare moments, made the Charter of 1830; finally, the bibliophile Jacob, king of bibliographical knowledge when Nodier was not present, viceroy when Nodier came on the scenes. Here they exchanged opinions and discussed de omni rescibili et quibusdam aliis. These causeries lasted till five o'clock. At five o'clock, Nodier went home by some other route than that which he had traversed in the morning; thus, if he had come by the quays he would return by the boulevards, and if he had gone along the boulevards, he would return by the quays. At six o'clock, Nodier dined with his family. After dinner, came a cup of coffee sipped like a true Sybarite, in little and big draughts, then the cloth was removed with everything on it, and three candles were placed on the bare table. Three tallow candles, not three wax ones. Nodier preferred tallow to wax—why, no one ever knew: it was one of Nodier's caprices. These three candles, never more, never fewer, were placed triangularly. Then Nodier brought out the work on which he was engaged and his quill pens—he detested steel pens—and he worked until nine or ten o'clock at night. At that hour, he went out a second time; but, this time, he invariably followed the course of the boulevards; and, according to what might be on, he would go to the Porte-Saint-Martin, to the Ambigu or to the Funambules. It will be remembered that it was at the Porte-Saint-Martin that I met him for the first time.