During his sleepless nights it occurred to him that perhaps the books the angel had turned over before his incarnation might serve as a talisman. One morning, therefore, Maurice went up to the library and greeted Monsieur Sariette, who was cataloguing under the romantic gaze of Alexandre d’Esparvieu. Monsieur Sariette smiled, but his face was deathly pale. Now that an invisible hand no longer upset the books placed under his charge, now that tranquillity and order once more reigned in the library, Monsieur Sariette was happy, but his strength diminished day by day. There was little left of him but a frail and contented shadow.
“One dies, in full content, of sorrow past.”
“Monsieur Sariette,” said Maurice, “you remember that time when your books were disarranged every night, how armfuls disappeared, how they were dragged about, turned over, ruined, and sent rolling helter-skelter as far as the gutter in the Rue Palatine. Those were great days! Point out to me, Monsieur Sariette, the books which suffered most.”
This proposition threw Monsieur Sariette into a melancholy stupor, and Maurice had to repeat his request three times before he could make the aged librarian understand. At length he pointed to a very ancient Talmud from Jerusalem as having been frequently touched by those unseen hands. An apocryphal Gospel of the third century, consisting of twenty papyrus sheets, had also quitted its place time after time. Gassendi’s Correspondence too seemed to have been well thumbed.
“But,” added Monsieur Sariette, “the book to which the mysterious visitant devoted the most particular attention was undoubtedly a little copy of Lucretius adorned with the arms of Philippe de Vendôme, Grand Prieur de France, with autograph annotations by Voltaire, who, as is well known, frequently visited the Temple in his younger days. The fearsome reader who caused me such terrible anxiety never grew weary of this Lucretius and made it his bedside book, as it were. His taste was sound, for it’s a gem of a thing. Alas! the monster made a blot of ink on page 137 which perhaps the chemists with all the science at their disposal will be powerless to erase.”
And Monsieur Sariette heaved a profound sigh. He repented having said all this when young d’Esparvieu asked him for the loan of the precious Lucretius. Vainly did the jealous custodian affirm that the book was being repaired at the binder’s and was not available. Maurice made it clear that he wasn’t to be taken in like that. He strode resolutely into the abode of the philosophers and the globes and seating himself in an armchair said:
“I am waiting.”
Monsieur Sariette suggested his having another edition. There were some that, textually, were more correct, and were, therefore, preferable from the student’s point of view. He offered him Barbou’s edition, or Coustelier’s, or, better still, a French translation. He could have the Baron des Coutures’ version—which was perhaps a little old-fashioned—or La Grange’s, or those in the Nisard and Panckouke series; or, again, there were two versions of striking elegance, one in verse and the other in prose, both from the pen of Monsieur de Pongerville of the French Academy.
“I don’t need a translation,” said Maurice proudly. “Give me the Prior de Vendôme’s copy.”
Monsieur Sariette went slowly up to the cupboard in which the jewel in question was contained. The keys were rattling in his trembling hand. He raised them to the lock and withdrew them again immediately and suggested that Maurice should have the common Lucretius published by Garnier.
“It’s very handy,” said he with an engaging smile.
But the silence with which this proposal was received made it clear that resistance was useless. He slowly drew forth the volume from its place, and having taken the precaution to see that there wasn’t a speck of dust on the tablecloth, he laid it tremblingly thereon before the great-grandson of Alexandre d’Esparvieu.
Maurice began to turn the leaves, and when he got to page 137 he saw the stain which had been made with violet ink. It was about the size of a pea.
“Ay, that’s it,” said old Sariette, who had his eye on the Lucretius the whole time; “that’s the trace those invisible monsters left behind them.”
“What, there were several of them, Monsieur Sariette?” exclaimed Maurice.
“I cannot tell. But I don’t know whether I have a right to have this blot removed since, like the blot Paul Louis Courier made on the Florentine manuscript, it constitutes a literary document, so to speak.”
Scarcely were the words out of the old fellow’s mouth when the front door bell rang and there was a confused noise of voices and footsteps in the next room. Sariette ran forward at the sound and collided with Père Guinardon’s mistress, old Zéphyrine, who, with her tousled hair sticking up like a nest of vipers, her face aflame, her bosom heaving, her abdominal part like an eiderdown quilt puffed out by a terrific gale, was choking with grief and rage. And amid sobs and sighs and groans and all the innumerable sounds which, on earth, make up the mighty uproar to which the emotions of living beings and the tumult of nature give rise, she cried:
“He’s gone, the monster! He’s gone off with her. He’s cleared out the whole shanty and left me to shift for myself with eighteenpence in my purse.”
And she proceeded to give a long and incoherent account of how Michel Guinardon had abandoned her and gone to live with Octavie, the bread-woman’s daughter, and she let loose a torrent of abuse against the traitor.
“A man whom I’ve kept going with my own money for fifty years and more.
