The Bibliomaniac

You all know Theodore. I have come to strew some flowers upon his grave, praying heaven that the earth may touch him lightly.

These two familiar phrases will tell you plainly that I am about to consecrate some pages to him as an obituary notice or funeral oration.

It is twenty years since Theodore retired from the world, to work or to be idle: which of the two was a great secret. He dreamed, and no one knew what he dreamed about. He passed his life surrounded by books, and occupied himself with nothing else, which gave some people the idea that he was writing a book which would supersede all other books; but they were evidently mistaken.

Theodore had studied too much not to know that this book had been written three hundred years ago. It was the thirteenth chapter of the first book of Rabelais.

Theodore no longer talked, nor laughed, neither played cards or gambled, nor ate, no longer went to balls or to the theatre. The women whom he had loved in his youth no longer attracted him, or at most he looked only at their feet; and when some elegant and brilliantly colored footgear caught his attention, alas! he would say, heaving a sigh from the depths of his chest, there is a great waste of good morocco! He had formerly followed the fashions. Those who remember the time, tell us that he was the first to tie his cravat on the left side, notwithstanding the dictum of Garat, who tied his on the right, and in spite of the common herd, who still continue to tie theirs in the middle.

Theodore was no longer worried by the fashions. He had only one dispute with his tailor during twenty years: “Sir,” he said to him one day, “it will be the last coat I shall take from you, if you again forget to make my pockets in quarto.”

Politics, by whose vagaries so many fools have made their fortunes, had never tempted him from his reveries for more than a moment. Politics put him in a bad temper. After Napoleon’s futile enterprise in the North, which raised the price of russia leather, he welcomed the French intervention in the Spanish revolution. “This,” he said, “is a good chance to bring chivalric romances and the Cancioneros from the Peninsula.” But the expeditionary army did not think of it, and he was vexed. When any one said Trocadero to him, he would reply ironically, Romancero, which made him pass for a Liberal.

M. de Bourmont’s campaign on the African coast transported him with joy. “Thank heaven!” he said, rubbing his hands; “we shall have cheap levant morocco.” This made him pass for a Carlist.

He was walking one summer’s day in a crowded street, collating a book, when some men, who were coming with a staggering gait from a saloon, commanded him, knife at throat, to cry in the name

of liberty, “Long live the Poles!” “I ask nothing better,” said Theodore, whose perpetual thought was an eternal cry in favor of the human race; “but may I ask why?” “Because we declare war against Holland, who oppresses Poland under the pretext that they do not like the Jesuits,” replied the friend of light, who was a rude geographer and a fearless logician. “God forgive us!” muttered our friend, crossing his hands piteously. “Shall we not in this case be obliged to use M. Montgolfier’s imitation Holland paper?”

The product of modern civilization answered by breaking Theodore’s leg with a blow of his stick.

Theodore stayed in his bed for three months, examining book-catalogues. Always disposed to carry his feelings to extremes, this reading fevered his blood.

Even in his convalescence his sleep was horribly uneasy. One night his wife roused him from the tortures of the nightmare. “You came just in time,” he said, embracing her, “to save me from dying of grief and fear. I was surrounded by monsters who would give me no quarter.”

“What monsters do you dread, my dear?” she said,--“you who have never injured any one.”

“It was, if I remember rightly, the ghost of Purgold whose fatal shears devoured an inch and a half of the margins of my uncut Aldus, while the shade of Heudier pitilessly plunged my most beautiful editio princeps into a devouring acid, withdrawing it entirely bleached; but I have good reason to think that they are at least both in purgatory.”

His wife thought that he was talking Greek, because he knew a little Greek, and as a proof of his knowledge three shelves in his library were filled with Greek books with uncut leaves. He never opened them either, but was satisfied to show them by the side or back to his most intimate acquaintances, telling with calm assurance the place where they were printed, the date, and the printer’s name. The simple-minded considered him a sorcerer. But about this there is a difference of opinion.

As he was wasting away under their very eyes, his family called in a physician, who was both a philosopher and a man of intelligence.

You will discover if this was the case. This physician saw that congestion of the brain was imminent, and made an elaborate report of this disease in the “Journal des Sciences Médicales,” where it figures under the name of morocco monomania or bibliomaniac’s typhus; but it was not a question for the Academy of Sciences, because the illness was in conjunction with cholera morbus.

They advised him to take exercise; and, as the idea amused him, we started out early one day, for I could not trust him to go a step alone. We turned toward the quays, and I was rejoicing because I thought that the sight of the river would revive him; but he never took his eyes from the level of the parapets. They were as free from show-cases as if they had been visited early in the morning by the public censor, who in February had sent the archiepiscopal library in swimming.[4] We were more fortunate at the Quai aux Fleurs, where books were in profusion. But what books! All the works which the newspapers had puffed during the last month, and which had gone from the

publisher’s office, or the bookseller, into the ten-cent box. Authors of every kind and sort, philosophers, historians, poets, novelists, who could not be wafted to immortality by the most alluring advertisements, and whose works go unheeded from the shelves of the store to the banks of the Seine, a deep Lethe, where they contemplate, while decaying, the certain end of their presumptive flight. I turned over there the pages of some of my octavos, which were placed between those of five or six of my friends.

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.”

“There,” said Theodore, passing the white sign of an active and ingenious bookseller in the Place du Louvre, “that sign has made my heart palpitate for a long time; but I no longer see it without a sensation of pain, since Techener has reprinted with Tastu’s characters, on showy paper, and under an enticing cover, the gothic marvels of Jehan Bonfons of Paris, Jehan Mareschal of Lyons, and Jehan de Chaney of Avignon, unobtainable trifles until he produced them in delightful facsimile. Snow-white paper fills me with horror, my friend; and there is nothing that I like less, except this same paper when it has received from the stroke of a cruel pressman, the deplorable imprint of the visions and idiocies of this iron age.”