What was the good of disturbing him in his ant-like activity? Lagier went towards the window, resolved to await him patiently. At the approach of a group of litigants, who had reached the court house before the doors were opened, two pigeons who were pecking in the sunny square, flew away and perched on the trefoil of the pointed arches ornamenting the belfry of Saint André. The over-restored monument opposite him reminded Lagier of Albert Derize's vehement invectives against architects; and, reading between the lines of the technical, obsolete expressions of the petition, he recalled the three actors of the drama which was soon to reach its conclusion before the amused magistrates. By a singular coincidence, all three had been factors of varying influence in his life. Albert Derize was a college friend whom Lagier had chosen with that unerring instinct of youth, which, in later years, gives way to self-consciousness and hesitation. How brilliant was his career at the early age of thirty-nine! After graduating from the Charter School, he had gone to the Arsenal for a short time as assistant librarian. Faithful to his province while away, he had published a history of Lesdiguières, king of the mountains, in which the hard and cunning rogue of the 16th century stood out like the hero of a novel, and also a History of the Assembly at Vizille in 1789, which set forth in brief the spiritual and material conditions in Dauphiné on the eve of the Revolution. From that time fortune smiled on him. Despite his youth, the Academy awarded him the Grand Prix Gobert. A publisher, impressed by his self-confidence and success placed him at the head of a publishing enterprise in which he had long been stimulating interest in the best literary circles:--a monthly collection of biographies of great men, short, clear, eloquent and accurate and very cheap; by means of which he hoped to rouse young men from their apathy and to incite them by example to a more profitable use of their time. With that versatility of mind which is attracted by every great realization of life, Derize reserved for himself the treatment of some of the more pathetic and inspiring life stories, such as Pascal, Lavoisier, Marceau and Beethoven. In spite of this work, he continued to labor from year to year with tireless activity, on his "History of the Workman in Modern Life," in six volumes, a splendid treatise on the development of unions, of machinery, of manual labor and of economic and moral conditions. He was also writing a "History of the Peasant in the 19th Century" in which he gave free rein to his love of the soil, of agricultural labor and of country life, inherited from a line of husbandmen ancestors, and in which he showed by the reconstruction of vanished communities, both French and foreign, and by comparison with new social units, the inspiriting force of inheritance and of family ties. This work was to consist of four volumes: the second had just appeared.