When M. Bergeret entered the shop, Paillot, the bookseller, with a pencil thrust behind his ear, was collecting his “returns.” He was stacking up the volumes whose yellow covers, after long exposure to the sunlight, had turned brown and become covered with fly-marks. These were the unsaleable copies, which he was sending back to the publishers. M. Bergeret recognised among the “returns” several works that he liked. He felt no chagrin at this, having too much taste to hope to see his favourite authors winning the votes of the crowd.
He sank down, as he was accustomed to do, in the old-book corner, and through mere habit took up the thirty-eighth volume of l’Histoire Générale des Voyages. The book, bound in green leather, opened of its own accord at p. 212, and M. Bergeret once more read these fatal lines:
“a passage to the North. ‘It is to this check,’ said he, ‘that we owe the opportunity of being able to visit the Sandwich Isles again …’”
And M. Bergeret sank into melancholy.
M. Mazure, the archivist of the department, and M. de Terremondre, president of the Society of Agriculture and Archæology, who both had their rush-bottomed chairs in the old-book corner, came in opportunely to join the professor. M. Mazure was a paleographer of great merit. But his manners were not elegant. He had married the servant of the archivist, his predecessor, and appeared in the town in a straw hat with battered crown. He was a radical, and published documents concerning the history of the county town during the Revolution. He enjoyed inveighing against the royalists of the department; but having applied for academic honours without having received them, he began invectives against his political friends, and particularly against M. Worms-Clavelin, the préfet.
Being insulting by nature, his professional practice of discovering secrets disposed him to slander and calumny. Nevertheless he was good company, especially at table, where he used to sing drinking songs.
“You know,” said he to M. de Terremondre and M. Bergeret, “that the préfet uses the house of Rondonneau junior for assignations with women. He has been caught there. Abbé Guitrel also haunts the place. And, appropriately enough, the house is called, in a land-survey of 1783, the House of the Two Satyrs.”
“But,” said M. de Terremondre, “there are no women of loose life in the house of Rondonneau junior.”
“They are taken there,” answered Mazure, the archivist.
“Talking of that,” said M. de Terremondre, “I have heard, my dear Monsieur Bergeret, that you have been shocking my old friend Lantaigne, on the Mall, by a cynical confession of your political and social immorality. They say that you know neither law nor curb …”