“See here,” said Marmier, “dead or alive he is not worth more than thirty sous.”
“Well, then, you may have it.”
And Marmier, very happy, took the book, intending to give it to some old friend, “who perhaps will not sell it before to-morrow,” he said.
Dear, good man, who from searching in many boxes had found true wisdom—not to be deceived, and to be lenient. “Ah! book-hunting is the best passion that I can wish you,” he said, the last time that I saw him, when he was weak, and walked with difficulty, but looked calmly into the face of death.
Bouquinistes, bibliophiles, and bibliomaniacs all live happily because of this passion, and bless it. Charles Nodier knew its delightful anxieties so well that, a few hours before he died, his last thought—so his daughter Madame Mennessier-Nodier writes, in the book that she has affectionately consecrated to him—was to dictate an account of a few trifling debts that he owed his binders and the booksellers.
R. Vallery-Radot.