ilful restorer of
old books, to see in his work-shop a Dance Macabre in quarto, imprinted on
paper, at Paris, toward the end of the Fifteenth Century; a rare volume
which he was restoring for M. Techner.

The portions already cleaned and restored, compared with those still
untouched, excited my admiration. The numerous worm holes, the torn
places, had disappeared through an application of paper-paste, so well
joined, so well blended in the mass, that I could hardly detect the
boundaries of the restorations. The letters and wood-cuts suffering from
lacunae had been reformed with great skill on a new foundation. The soiled
surfaces of the pages had entirely disappeared before I know not what
scraping or chemical action. In a word, M. Farrens was putting into use
every secret of restoration to give again to this volume its original
lustre.

Ah well! today, I confess, that if I possessed this book in the
dilapidated state in which I saw it, I would leave it just as it stood,
and limit myself to the indispensable repair of a new and solid binding.
Its worn and soiled condition came, very probably, from the frequent and
pious turning of its pages, in that monachal perseverance of prayer of
which our century knows nothing. Its shocking and decrepit condition had,
to my eyes, a secret in harmony with all books of the kind, which, from
each page, recall to us our insignificance.

No doubt many amateurs will not agree with me in this; some, perhaps, will
declare I have arrived at a monstrous degree of cynicism for a
bibliophile. However, I will supply the means of restoring at least a part
of their original freshness to books and old prints badly treated by time
or by the indifference of their earlier possessors.

When a print is soiled with spots or foreign color, especially in the most
interesting places, one can hardly lay it away in a portfolio without
making some attempt to remove or reduce the strange tints which appear on
it. This is the part of my present work most difficult to discuss, while
being the most useful. My simple notions of chemistry are not always
sufficient and perhaps, some day, some chemist especially trained in
analysis and decomposition may, with advantage, rewrite this portion of my
work. I will at least record, however, a large number of satisfactory
results which I have obtained and even repeated on fragments of proofs on
unsized paper, this last being the most unfavorable of all conditions.[4]