“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.” [Illustration] 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. [Illustration] “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!”