Alas! I only entered that sacred tabernacle of the intellect twice: I have described what happened on my first visit, and I will immediately tell what happened at the second. But I ought previously to answer the question as to how M. Villenave managed to collect all these valuable treasures since he had not a large fortune. It was by patience and perseverance, as la Fontaine would say. This collection had been the work of his whole life. Just as Ghiberti began the gates of the Baptistery at Florence when he was a young man and finished them as an old one, so M. Villenave had given up fifty years to this task. He never burnt a single paper or destroyed a letter. I wrote two or three times to M. Villenave to ask for information; well, my unworthy epistles were put into their wrappers, classified and labelled. Why was I thus honoured? Who can tell? Perhaps he thought even I might some day become a great celebrity. It will readily be imagined that, if he preserved such letters as mine, he would religiously preserve other things. Notices of meetings of learned societies, invitations to marriage ceremonies, funeral cards, all were kept, classified and put in their place. I cannot say what M. Villenave's collection did _not_ contain; I saw amongst it a collection of half-burnt volumes which had been snatched out of the fire of the Bastille on 14 July. M. Villenave employed two aides-de-camp, or, rather, bloodhounds: one named Fontaine, himself the author of a book called the _Manuel des Autographes_; the other an employé in the War Office. Twice a week they went a hunting; they rummaged the shops of the grocers, who, accustomed to these visits, would put aside all the papers that they thought might be rare or curiosities. From amongst these papers the two visitors would make a selection, paying the grocers fifteen sous a pound, M. Villenave paying them at the rate of thirty sous. There also were what might be described as royal hunting-days; on these days M. Villenave hunted in person; every grocer in Paris knew him, and came up to him with his hands full of papers, far more precious to him than roses and lilies.