His dealings with the bookbinder had begun some years before, when the little man had come one day to the Library of the Foreign Office to request the opinion of its learned and illustrious Keeper respecting a letter from Marie de Médicis to Pope Urban VIII. in favour of Galileo. It happened that Petit-Séquard had just announced as forthcoming, among a series of short light volumes on history, entitled ‘Holiday Studies,’ a ‘Galileo’ by Astier-Réhu of the Académie Française. When therefore the librarian’s trained judgment had assured him that the MS. was genuine, and he was told that Fage possessed also the letter of the Pope in reply, a letter of thanks from Galileo to the Queen, and others, he conceived instantaneously the idea of writing, instead of the ‘slight trifle,’ a great historical work. But his probity suggesting at the same moment a doubt as to the source of these documents, he looked the dwarf steadily in the face, and after examining, as he would have examined an original, the long pallid visage and the reddened, blinking eye-lids, said, with an inquisitorial snap of the jaw, ‘Are these manuscripts your own, M. Fage?’ ‘Oh no, sir,’ said Fage. He was merely acting on behalf of a third person, an old maiden lady of good birth, who was obliged to part gradually with a very fine collection, which had belonged to the family ever since Louis XVI. Nor had he been willing to act, till he had taken the opinion of a scholar of the highest learning and character. Now, relying upon so competent a judgment, he should go to rich collectors, such as Baron Huchenard, for instance--but Astier-Réhu stopped him, saying, ‘Do not trouble yourself. Bring me all you have relating to Galileo. I can dispose of it.’ People were coming in and taking their places at the little tables, the sort of people who prowl and hunt in libraries, colourless and taciturn as diggers from the mines, with an air as if they had themselves been dug up out of somewhere close and damp. ‘Come to my private room, upstairs, not here,’ whispered the librarian in the big ear of the humpback as he moved away, displaying his gloves, oiled hair, and middle parting with the self-sufficiency often observable in his species.