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. [Illustration] 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 [Illustration] 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.