A week after the day of this secret conference Abbé Guitrel had successfully accomplished his mission. The prophetess of the Place Saint-Exupère, disowned by the archbishopric, abandoned by the clergy, abjured by le Libéral, kept on her side none save the two corresponding members of the academy of psychical research, one of whom regarded her as a subject worthy of study and the other as a dangerous charlatan. Freed from this mad woman, and delighted at the municipal elections, which had brought forth neither new measures nor new men, M. le préfet Worms-Clavelin rejoiced from the bottom of his heart.
XII
M.Paillot was the bookseller at the corner of the Place Saint-Exupère and the Rue des Tintelleries. For the most part the houses which surrounded this square were ancient; those that leant against the church bore carved and painted signboards. Several had a pointed gable and a wooden frontage. One of these, which had kept its carved beams, was a gem admired by connoisseurs. The main joists were upheld by carved corbels, some in the shape of angels bearing shields, the others in the form of monks crouching low. To the left of the door, against a post, rose the mutilated figure of a woman, her brow encircled by a floreated crown. The townsfolk declared that this was Queen Marguerite. And the building was known by the name of Queen Marguerite’s house.
It was believed, on the authority of Dom Maurice, author of a Trésor d’antiquités, printed in 1703, that Margaret of Scotland lodged in this house for several months of the year 1438. But M. de Terremondre, president of the Society of Agriculture and Archæology, proves in a substantially constructed memoir that this house was built in 1488 for a prominent citizen named Philippe Tricouillard. The archæologists of the town, whenever they conduct sightseers to the front of this building, seizing a moment when the ladies are inattentive, take pleasure in showing the canting arms of Philippe Tricouillard, carved on a shield held by two angels. These arms, which M. de Terremondre has judiciously compared with those of the Coleoni of Bergamo, are represented on the corbel which stands over the doorway, under the left lintel. The figures on it are very shadowy, and are only recognisable by those who have had them pointed out. As for the figure of a woman wearing a crown, which leans against the perpendicular joist, M. de Terremondre found no difficulty in proving that it must be regarded as a Saint Marguerite. In fact, there may still be made out at the feet of the saint the remains of a hideous shape which is none other than that of the devil; and the right arm of the principal figure, which is lacking to-day, ought to hold the holy-water sprinkler which the blessed saint shook over the enemy of the human race. It is clear what Saint Marguerite typifies in this place, now that M. Mazure, the archivist of the department, has brought to light a document proving that in the year 1488 Philippe Tricouillard, then about seventy years of age, had lately married Marguerite Larrivée, daughter of a magistrate. By a confusion which is not very surprising, Marguerite Larrivée’s celestial patron was taken for the young princess of Scotland whose sojourn in the town of … has left a deep impression. Few ladies have bequeathed a memory more full of pity than that princess who died at twenty with this last sigh on her lips: “Out upon thee, life!”
The house of M. Paillot, the bookseller, joins on to Queen Marguerite’s house. Originally it was built, like its neighbour, with a wooden front, and the visible timber-work was no less carefully carved. But, in 1860, M. Paillot’s father, bookseller to the Archbishopric, had it pulled down in order to rebuild it simply, in the modern style, without any pretence at wealth or art, merely taking care to make it convenient as a dwelling-house and place of business. A tree of Jesse, in Renaissance style, which covered the entire front of Paillot’s house, at the corner formed by the Place Saint-Exupère and the Rue des Tintelleries, was torn down with the rest, but not destroyed. M. de Terremondre, coming upon it afterwards in a timber-merchant’s yard, purchased it for the museum. This monument is in good style. Unfortunately the prophets and patriarchs, who cluster on each branch like marvellous fruits, and the Virgin, blossoming on the summit of the prophetic tree, were mutilated by the Terrorists in 1793, and the tree suffered fresh damage in 1860, when it was carried to the timber-yard as firewood. M. Quatrebarbe, the diocesan architect, expatiates on these mutilations in his interesting pamphlet on Les Vandales modernes. “One shudders,” says he, “at the thought that this precious relic of an age of faith ran the risk of being sawn up and burnt before our very eyes.”
This sentiment, being expressed by a man whose clerical tendencies were well known, was trenchantly criticised by le Phare in an anonymous paragraph in which was recognised, rightly or wrongly, the hand of the archivist of the department, M. Mazure. “In twenty words,” said this paragraph, “the architect of the diocese supplies us with several occasions for surprise. The first is that any one should be able to shudder at the mere idea of the loss of an indifferently carved beam, and one so much mutilated that the details are not recognisable; the second is that this beam should stand to M. Quatrebarbe, whose creed is well known, as a relic of an age of faith, since it dates from 1530—that is to say, from the year when the Protestant Diet of Augsburg assembled; the third is that M. Quatrebarbe should omit to say that the precious beam was torn down and sent to the timber-yard by his own father-in-law, M. Nicolet, the diocesan architect, who, in 1860, transformed the Paillot house in the way which one can now see; the fourth is that M. Quatrebarbe ignores the fact that it was none other than M. Mazure, the archivist, who discovered the carved beam in Clouzot’s wood-yard, where it had been rotting for ten years under M. Quatrebarbe’s very nose, and who pointed it out to M. de Terremondre, president of the Society of Agriculture and Archæology, who purchased it for the museum.”
In its actual condition the house of M. Paillot, the bookseller, showed a uniform white frontage, three storeys in height. The shop, ornamented with woodwork painted green, bore, in letters of gold, the words, “Paillot, libraire.” The shop-window displayed terrestrial and celestial globes of different diameters, boxes of mathematical instruments, school books and little text-books for the officers of the garrison, with a few novels and new memoirs: these were what M. Paillot called works of literature. A window, narrower and not so deep, that gave on the Rue des Tintelleries, contained works on agriculture and law, and thus completed the supply of instruments required by the intellectual life of the county town. On a counter inside the shop were to be found works of literature, novels, essays, and memoirs.
“Classics in sets” were stacked in pigeon-holes, and quite at the bottom, by the side of the door which opened on the staircase, some shelves were reserved for old books. For M. Paillot combined in his shop the business of a new and second-hand bookseller. This dark corner of the old books attracted the bibliophiles of the district, who in days gone by had found treasure-trove there. A certain copy of the first edition of the third book of Pantagruel was recalled, unearthed in excellent condition in 1871 by M. de Terremondre, father of the present president of the Agricultural Society, at Paillot’s, in the old-book corner. There was still more mysterious talk of a Mellin de Saint-Gelais, containing on the back of the title-page some autograph verses by Marie Stuart, that M. Dutilleul, the notary, had found, about the same time, and in the same place, and for which he paid three francs. But, since then, no one had announced any marvellous discovery. The gloomy, monotonous corner of the old books scarcely changed. There was always to be seen there l’Abrégé de l’Histoire des Voyages, in fifty-six volumes, and the odd volumes of Kehl’s Voltaire, in large paper. M. Dutilleul’s discovery, doubted by many, was by some openly denied. They based their opinion on the idea that the old notary was quite capable of having lied through vanity, and on the fact that after M. Dutilleul’s death no copy of the poems of Mellin de Saint-Gelais was found in his library. Yet the bibliophiles of the town, who frequented Paillot’s shop, never failed to explore the old-book corner, at least once a month. M. de Terremondre was one of the most assiduous visitors.