WHEREIN THE MYSTERY BEGINS
At seven o'clock on the evening of that day, having as usual replaced
all the books which had been taken from their shelves, and having
assured himself that he was leaving everything in good order, he quitted
the library, double-locking the door after him. According to his usual
habit, he dined at the _Crèmerie des Quatre Évêques_, read his
newspaper, _La Croix_, and at ten o'clock went home to his little house
in the Rue du Regard. The good man had no trouble and no presentiment of
evil; his sleep was peaceful. The next morning at seven o'clock to the
minute, he entered the little room leading to the library, and,
according to his daily habit, doffed his grand frock-coat, and taking
down an old one which hung in a cupboard over his washstand, put it on.
Then he went in to his workroom, where for sixteen years he had been
cataloguing six days out of the seven, under the lofty gaze of Alexandre
d'Esparvieu. Preparing to make a round of the various rooms, he entered
the first and largest, which contained works on theology and religion
in huge cupboards whose cornices were adorned with bronze-coloured busts
of poets and orators of ancient days.
Two enormous globes representing the earth and the heavens filled the
window-embrasures. But at his first step Monsieur Sariette stopped dead,
stupefied, powerless alike to doubt or to credit what his eyes beheld.
On the blue cloth cover of the writing-table books lay scattered about
pell-mell, some lying flat, some standing upright. A number of quartos
were heaped up in a tottering pile. Two Greek lexicons, one inside the
other, formed a single being more monstrous in shape than the human
couples of the divine Plato. A gilt-edged folio was all a-gape, showing
three of its leaves disgracefully dog's-eared.
Having, after an interval of some moments, recovered from his profound
amazement, the librarian went up to the table and recognised in the
confused mass his most valuable Hebrew, French, and Latin Bibles, a
unique Talmud, Rabbinical treatises printed and in manuscript, Aramaic
and Samaritan texts and scrolls from the synagogues--in fine, the most
precious relics of Israel all lying in a disordered heap, gaping and
crumpled.
Monsieur Sariette found himself confronted with an inexplicable
phenomenon; nevertheless he sought to account for it. How eagerly he
would have welcomed the idea that Monsieur Gaétan, who, being a
thoroughly unprincipled man, presumed on the right gained him by his
fatal liberality towards the library to rummage there unhindered during
his sojourns in Paris, had been the author of this terrible disorder.
But Monsieur Gaétan was away travelling in Italy. After pondering for
some minutes Monsieur Sariette's next supposition was that Monsieur René
d'Esparvieu had entered the library late in the evening with the keys of
his manservant Hippolyte, who, for the past twenty-five years, had
looked after the second floor and the attics. Monsieur René d'Esparvieu,
however, never worked at night, and did not read Hebrew. Perhaps,
thought Monsieur Sariette, perhaps he had brought or allowed to be
brought to this room some priest, or Jerusalem monk, on his way through
Paris; some Oriental _savant_ given to scriptural exegesis. Monsieur
Sariette next wondered whether the Abbé Patouille, who had an enquiring
mind, and also a habit of dog's-earing his books, had, peradventure,
flung himself on these talmudic and biblical texts, fired with sudden
zeal to lay bare the soul of Shem. He even asked himself for a moment
whether Hippolyte, the old manservant, who had swept and dusted the
library for a quarter of a century, and had been slowly poisoned by the
dust of accumulated knowledge, had allowed his curiosity to get the
better of him, and had been there during the night, ruining his eyesight
and his reason, and losing his soul poring by moonlight over these
undecipherable symbols. Monsieur Sariette even went so far as to imagine
that young Maurice, on leaving his club or some nationalist meeting,
might have torn these Jewish volumes from their shelves, out of hatred
for old Jacob and his modern posterity; for this young man of family was
a declared anti-semite, and only consorted with those Jews who were as
anti-semitic as himself. It was giving a very free rein to his
imagination, but Monsieur Sariette's brain could not rest, and went
wandering about among speculations of the wildest extravagance.
Impatient to know the truth, the zealous guardian of the library called
the manservant.
Hippolyte knew nothing. The porter at the lodge could not furnish any
clue. None of the domestics had heard a sound. Monsieur Sariette went
down to the study of Monsieur René d'Esparvieu, who received him in
nightcap and dressing-gown, listened to his story with the air of a
serious man bored with idle chatter, and dismissed him with words which
conveyed a cruel implication of pity.
"Do not worry, my good Monsieur Sariette; be sure that the books were
lying where you left them last night."
Monsieur Sariette reiterated his enquiries a score of times, discovered
nothing, and suffered such anxiety that sleep entirely forsook him.
When, on the following day at seven o'clock he entered the room with
the busts and globes, and saw that all was in order, he heaved a sigh of
relief. Then suddenly his heart beat fit to burst. He had just seen
lying flat on the mantelpiece a paper-bound volume, a modern work, the
boxwood paper-knife which had served to cut its pages still thrust
between the leaves. It was a dissertation on the two parallel versions
of Genesis, a work which Monsieur Sariette had relegated to the attic,
and which had never left it up to now, no one in Monsieur d'Esparvieu's
circle having had the curiosity to differentiate between the parts for
which the polytheistic and monotheistic contributors were respectively
responsible in the formation of the first of the sacred books. This book
bore the label R > 3214-VIII/2. And this painful truth was suddenly
borne in upon the mind of Monsieur Sariette: to wit, that the most
scientific system of numbering will not help to find a book if the book
is no longer in its place. Every day of the ensuing month found the
table littered with books. Greek and Latin lay cheek by jowl with
Hebrew. Monsieur Sariette asked himself whether these nocturnal
flittings were the work of evil-doers who entered by the skylights to
steal valuable and precious volumes. But he found no traces of burglary,
and, notwithstanding the most minute search, failed to discover that
anything had disappeared. Terrible anxiety took possession of his mind,
and he fell to wondering whether it was possible that some monkey in the
neighbourhood came down the chimney and acted the part of a person
engaged in study. Deriving his knowledge of the habits of these animals
in the main from the paintings of Watteau and Chardin, he took it that,
in the art of imitating gestures or assuming characters they resembled
Harlequin, Scaramouch, Zerlin, and the Doctors of the Italian comedy; he
imagined them handling a palette and brushes, pounding drugs in a
mortar, or turning over the leaves of an old treatise on alchemy beside
an athanor. And so it was that, when, on one unhappy morning, he saw a
huge blot of ink on one of the leaves of the third volume of the
polyglot Bible bound in blue morocco and adorned with the arms of the
Comte de Mirabeau, he had no doubt that a monkey was the author of the
evil deed. The monkey had been pretending to take notes and had upset
the inkpot. It must be a monkey belonging to a learned professor.
Imbued with this idea, Monsieur Sariette carefully studied the
topography of the district, so as to draw a cordon round the group of
houses amid which the d'Esparvieu house stood. Then he visited the four
surrounding streets, asking at every door if there was a monkey in the
house. He interrogated porters and their wives, washer-women, servants,
a cobbler, a greengrocer, a glazier, clerks in bookshops, a priest, a
bookbinder, two guardians of the peace, children, thus testing the
diversity of character and variety of temper in one and the same people;
for the replies he received were quite dissimilar in nature; some were
rough, some were gentle; there were the coarse and the polished, the
simple and the ironical, the prolix and the abrupt, the brief and even
the silent. But of the animal he sought he had had neither sight nor
sound, when under the archway of an old house in the Rue Servandoni, a
small freckled, red-haired girl who looked after the door, made reply:
"There is Monsieur Ordonneau's monkey; would you care to see it?"
And without another word she conducted the old man to a stable at the
other end of the yard. There on some rank straw and old bits of cloth, a
young macaco with a chain round his middle sat and shivered. He was no
taller than a five-year-old child. His livid face, his wrinkled brow,
his thin lips were all expressive of mortal sadness. He fixed on the
visitor the still lively gaze of his yellow eyes. Then with his small
dry hand he seized a carrot, put it to his mouth, and forthwith flung it
away. Having looked at the newcomers for a moment, the exile turned away
his head, as if he expected nothing further of mankind or of life.
Sitting huddled up, one knee in his hand, he made no further movement,
but at times a dry cough shook his breast.
"It's Edgar," said the small girl. "He is for sale, you know."
But the old book-lover, who had come armed with anger and resentment,
thinking to find a cynical enemy, a monster of malice, an
antibibliophile, stopped short, surprised, saddened, and overcome,
before this little being devoid of strength and joy and hope.
Recognising his mistake, troubled by the almost human face which sorrow
and suffering made more human still, he murmured "Forgive me" and bowed
his head.