Theodore sighed, but it was not because he saw the works of my brain exposed to the rain, owing to the scanty protection of an oil-cloth cover.
“What has become of the golden age of the outdoor venders of old books? It was here, certainly, that my famous friend Barbier collected his treasures until he was able to make a precise bibliography of several thousand items. It was here that Monmerqué, on his way to the Palais, and wise Labouderie, while leaving the city, walked for hours with instruction and profit. It was from here that old Boulard carried away daily a yard of rarities, measuring them with his surveyor’s cane,—volumes for which there was no place reserved in his six houses stuffed with books. How often on such occasions had he desired the modest angulus[5] of Horace, or the elastic cover of the fairies’ tent, which if necessary could shield the whole army of Xerxes, and which might be carried as easily in one’s belt as the knife-sheath of Jeannot’s grandfather. Now, more’s the pity, you see only fragments of modern literature which will never become ancient, whose life will have evaporated in twenty-four hours, like that of the flies of the river Hypanis: a literature worthy in truth of the charcoal ink and pulp paper used by mercenary printers, who are almost as foolish as the books. It is profaning the name of books to give it to these black-blotted rags, whose destinies have not even changed in leaving the basket on the rag-picker’s shoulders. The quays henceforth are the morgue for contemporary celebrities.”
He sighed again, and I sighed too, but it was for a different reason.
I was in a hurry to lead him away, because his increasing excitement seemed to threaten him at any moment with a fatal attack. It must have been an unlucky day, for everything combined to increase his melancholy.
“See,” he said, in passing the showy shop-front of Ladvocat, “the Galliot du Pré[6] of the debased literature of the nineteenth century; a liberal, industrious bookseller, who deserved to have been born in a better time, but whose deplorable activity has cruelly multiplied new books, to the everlasting injury of the old; an unpardonable patron of cotton-made paper, of incorrect spelling, and of stilted illustrations; a fatal protector of academic prose and fashionable poetry: as if France had produced any poetry since Ronsard, or any prose after Montaigne! This bookseller’s palace is like the Trojan horse that held the thieves of the Palladium—like Pandora’s box, which let loose all the evils of the earth. But yet I like this cannibal, and I shall be a chapter in his book, but I shall not see him again!”
“Look,” he continued, “there is Crozet’s store with the green walls. He is the most agreeable of our young booksellers, the man of all Paris who can best distinguish between a binding by Derome the elder and Derome the younger, and the last hope of a passing generation of amateurs, if the cult of old books should return in the midst of our barbarity. But I shall not enjoy his conversation to-day, even though I always learn something from it. He is in England, where he is competing, by the right of retaliation, with the greedy usurers of Soho Square and Fleet Street for the precious fragments of the monuments of our beautiful language which have been forgotten for two centuries on the ungrateful soil that produced them. Macte animo, generoso puer!...”
“Here,” he said, retracing his steps,—“here is the Pont-des-Arts, with its useless side-rails only a few centimeters wide, affording no support for the noble folios of three centuries, majestic volumes with pigskin covers and bronze clasps, which have delighted the eyes of ten generations. This is truly an emblematic bridge, leading from the Palais to the Institute by a path which is not the path of science. I do not know whether I am mistaken, but the invention of a bridge of this kind should be a startling illustration to the erudite of the decadence of good literature.”
