ike the charter, democracy,
legitimacy, monarchy, the republic, etc., when there were in the world
all sorts of mosses, grasses, and shrubs which they might be looking at,
and heaps of folios, and even of 32mos, which they might turn over. He
took good care not to become useless; having books did not prevent his
reading, being a botanist did not prevent his being a gardener. When
he made Pontmercy's acquaintance, this sympathy had existed between the
colonel and himself--that what the colonel did for flowers, he did for
fruits. M. Mabeuf had succeeded in producing seedling pears as savory
as the pears of St. Germain; it is from one of his combinations,
apparently, that the October Mirabelle, now celebrated and no less
perfumed than the summer Mirabelle, owes its origin. He went to mass
rather from gentleness than from piety, and because, as he loved the
faces of men, but hated their noise, he found them assembled and silent
only in church. Feeling that he must be something in the State, he had
chosen the career of warden. However, he had never succeeded in loving
any woman as much as a tulip bulb, nor any man as much as an Elzevir.
He had long passed sixty, when, one day, some one asked him: "Have you
never been married?" "I have forgotten," said he. When it sometimes
happened to him--and to whom does it not happen?--to say: "Oh! if I were
only rich!" it was not when ogling a pretty girl, as was the case with
Father Gillenormand, but when contemplating an old book. He lived alone
with an old housekeeper. He was somewhat gouty, and when he was asleep,
his aged fingers, stiffened with rheumatism, lay crooked up in the folds
of his sheets. He had composed and published a Flora of the Environs of
Cauteretz, with colored plates, a work which enjoyed a tolerable
measure of esteem and which sold well. People rang his bell, in the Rue
Mesieres, two or three times a day, to ask for it. He drew as much as
two thousand francs a year from it; this constituted nearly the whole of
his fortune. Although poor, he had had the talent to form for himself,
by dint of patience, privations, and time, a precious collection of rare
copies of every sort. He never went out without a book under his arm,
and he often returned with two. The sole decoration of the four rooms
on the ground floor, which composed his lodgings, consisted of framed
herbariums, and engravings of the old masters. The sight of a sword or
a gun chilled his blood. He had never