“A third of a line,” he repeated, shaking his fist furiously in the air
like Ajax or Capaneus. All my limbs trembled.
He gradually fell into a state of deep depression.
The poor man lived only to suffer. He repeated from time to time, “The
third of a line!” and wrung his hands, while I kept saying, in an
undertone, “Confusion to books and typhus fever!”
“Calm yourself, my friend,” I whispered gently in his ear, each time the
paroxysm was renewed. “A third of a line is not much, even in the most
particular things of life.”
“Not much?” he cried; “a third of a line in the 1676 Virgil! It was the
third of a line that raised the price of the Nerli Homer at M. de
Cotte’s[10] a hundred louis. A third of a line! Ah! would you count the
third of a line nothing in the length of a dagger that pierced your
heart?”
His expression again wholly changed, his arms became rigid, his legs
were seized with cramps as in a vise. The typhus was visibly reaching
the extremities. I did not desire to lengthen by even the third of a
line the short distance that separated us from the house.
At last we arrived there.
“A third of a line,” he said to the concierge.
“A third of a line,” he said to the cook, who opened the door.
“A third of a line,” he said to his wife, with a flood of tears.
“My parrot has flown away!” cried his little girl, likewise weeping.
“Why did you leave the cage open?” replied Theodore. “A third of a
line!”
[Illustration]
“There is an uprising in the South and in the Rue du Cadran,” said the
old aunt, who was reading the evening paper.
“What the devil are the people meddling with?” answered Theodore. “A
third of a line!”
“Your farm at la Beauce has been burned,” said his servant in putting
him to bed.
[Illustration]
“It must be rebuilt,” said Theodore, “if it is worth the trouble. A
third of a line!”
“Do you think that this is serious?” the nurse asked me.
“Your question proves, my good woman, that you have not read the
‘Journal des Sciences Médicales.’ Why do you delay in getting a priest?”
Happily at that minute the curé came in to converse, as was his custom,
about the thousand and one literary and bibliographical trifles from
which his breviary had not wholly distracted him; but he forgot them all
when he felt Theodore’s pulse.
“Alas! my child,” he said, “the life of man is only a journey, and even
the world itself is not set upon everlasting foundations. It must end
like everything that has a beginning.”
“Have you read, on this subject,” said Theodore, “the ‘Treatise on the
World, its Origin and its Antiquity’?”
“I learned all that I know from the book of Genesis,” said the
conservative pastor; “but I have heard it said that M. de Mirabeau, a
sophist of the last century, had written a book upon this subject.”
“_Sub judice lis est_,” Theodore interrupted brusquely. “I have proved
in my ‘Stromates’ that the first two parts of ‘Le Monde’ were by that
dreadfully pedantic Mirabeau, and the third was by the Abbé Lemascrier.”
[Illustration]
“Ah! my goodness,” said the old aunt, taking off her spectacles; “then
who was it that made America?”
“This is not the question now,” continued the abbé. “Do you believe in
the Trinity?”
“How could I disbelieve the famous volume of Servetus, ‘De Trinitate,’”
said Theodore, half raising himself on his pillow, “when I have seen an
example go, _ipsissimis oculis_, for the trifling sum of two hundred and
fifteen francs at the MacCarthy sale, while at the dispersal of the La
Vallière collection it brought seven hundred?”[11]
“We are straying from the point,” exclaimed the priest, a little
disconcerted. “I wish to know, my son, what you think of the divinity of
Jesus Christ.”
“Well!” said Theodore, “it depends upon what you mean by it. I shall
maintain against every one that the ‘Toldos-Jeschu,’ which was written
by that ignorant railler Voltaire, who wasted on it a lot of foolish
fables worthy of the ‘Thousand and One Nights,’ is nothing but evil
rabbinesque nonsense, unworthy to be placed in the library of a
scholar.”
“That is well!” sighed the worthy ecclesiastic.
“At least,” Theodore continued, “unless some one should discover the
large-paper copy, of which there is a hint, if my memory serves me, in
the bibliographic jumble of David Clement.”[12]
The curé groaned audibly, and, rising from his chair, bent over Theodore
to make him clearly understand, without ambiguity or equivocation, that
he was in the last stage of the bibliomaniac’s typhus which is spoken of
in the “Journal des Sciences Médicales,” and that he should not think of
anything but his salvation.
Theodore had never intrenched himself behind that insolent negation of
unbelievers which is the science of fools; but the dear man had pushed
the useless study of the letter, in books, too far to comprehend the
spirit. In a perfect state of health a doctrine of any kind would give
him a fever, or a dogma induce lockjaw. In a theological matter he would
have lowered his colors before a Saint-Simonian. He turned his face to
the wall.
A long time passed without a word, and we should have thought that he
was dead, except as I bent close to him I heard him murmur feebly, “A
third of a line! God of goodness and justice! but where will you give me
back that third of a line, and how far can your omnipotence retrieve the
irreparable error of that binder?”
One of his friends, a bibliophile, came in a minute later. They told him
that Theodore was in the last agony; that he was delirious to the point
of thinking that the Abbé Lemascrier had made the third part of the
world; and that he had lost his power of speech a quarter of an hour
before.
[Illustration]
“I am going to make sure of it,” said the amateur. “By what mistake in
pagination do we recognize the genuine 1635 Elzevir edition of Cæsar?”
he asked Theodore.
“153 for 149.”
“Very good. And of the Terence of the same year?”
“108 for 104.”
“The devil!” I said; “the Elzevirs played in bad luck with their figures
that year. They were wise not to choose it for the printing of their
logarithms.”
“Wonderful!” continued Theodore’s friend. “If I had listened to these
people here, I should have believed that you were at the point of
death.”
“A third of a line,” replied Theodore, whose voice was failing by
degrees.
“I know your story, but it is nothing in comparison with mine. Think
what I lost, eight days ago, in one of those bastard, nameless sales
which are advertised only by a placard on the door,--a Boccaccio of
1527,[13] as beautiful as your own, the binding of Venetian vellum,
with the pointed a’s proved throughout, and not a leaf repaired.”
All Theodore’s faculties concentrated in one idea.
“Are you very sure that the a’s were pointed?”
“As pointed as the iron tip of a lancer’s halberd.”
“It was then, doubtless, the ‘Vintisettine’ itself.”
[Illustration]
“Its very self. We had a jolly dinner that day: charming women, fresh
oysters, intelligent people, and champagne. I reached the sale three
minutes after the hammer fell.”
“Sir,” cried Theodore in a fury, “when the ‘Vintisettine’ is to be sold,
one does not dine!”
[Illustration]
His vitality, which had been sustained by the excitement of the
conversation, as the bellows revives a dying spark, was exhausted by
his last effort. His lips muttered once more, “A third of a line!” but
they were his last words.
At the time that we gave up all hope of his recovery, we moved his bed
near to his book-shelves, from which we took down, one by one, every
book for which he seemed to ask with his eyes, letting him look the
longest at those that we thought would please him the most.
[Illustration]
He died at midnight, lying between a Du Seuil and a Padeloup, his hands
lovingly clasping a Thouvenin.
The next day we followed his hearse, at the head of a great crowd of
sorrowful morocco-finishers, and we sealed his tomb with a stone bearing
the following inscription, which he had parodied for himself from
Franklin’s epitaph:
[Illustration:
HERE LIES, IN
ITS WOODEN BINDING,
A FOLIO COPY OF THE BEST
EDITION OF MAN, WRITTEN IN
THE LANGUAGE OF A GOLDEN
AGE, WHICH THE WORLD
NO LONGER UNDERSTANDS.
TO-DAY
IT IS A SPOILED
OLD BOOK,
STAINED AND
IMPERFECT, LACKING THE TITLE-PAGE,
WORM-EATEN AND INJURED
BY DECAY. WE
DARE NOT ANTICIPATE
FOR IT THE USELESS
HONOR OF A
REPRINT.
]