remarked:

"There is no man whose brain is equal to containing all the knowledge
which is piled upon these shelves. Happily it doesn't matter."

Monseigneur Cachepot, who worked there often when a curate in Paris, was
in the habit of saying:

"I see here the stuff to make many a Thomas Aquinas and many an Arius,
if only the modern mind had not lost its ancient ardour for good and
evil."

There was no gainsaying that the manuscripts formed the more valuable
portion of this immense collection. Noteworthy indeed was the
unpublished correspondence of Gassendi, of Father Mersenne, and of
Pascal, which threw a new light on the spirit of the seventeenth
century. Nor must we forget the Hebrew Bibles, the Talmuds, the
Rabbinical treatises, printed and in manuscript, the Aramaic and
Samaritan texts, on sheepskin and on tablets of sycamore; in fine, all
these antique and valuable copies collected in Egypt and in Syria by the
celebrated Moise de Dina, and acquired at a small cost by Alexandre
d'Esparvieu in 1836, when the learned Hebraist died of old age and
poverty in Paris.

The Esparvienne library occupied the whole of the second floor of the
old house. The works thought to be of but mediocre interest, such as
books of Protestant exegesis of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
the gift of Monsieur Gaetan, were relegated unbound to the limbo of the
upper regions. The catalogue, with its various supplements, ran into no
less than eighteen folio volumes. It was quite up to date, and the
library was in perfect order. Monsieur Julien Sariette, archivist and
palaeographer, who, being poor and retiring, used to make his living by
teaching, became, in 1895, tutor to young Maurice on the recommendation
of the Bishop of Agra, and with scarcely an interval found himself
curator of the Bibliotheque Esparvienne. Endowed with business-like
energy and dogged patience, Monsieur Sariette himself classified all the
members of this vast body. The system he invented and put into practice
was so complicated, the labels he put on the books were made up of so
many capital letters and small letters, both Latin and Greek, so many
Arabic and Roman numerals, asterisks, double asterisks, triple
asterisks, and those signs which in arithmetic express powers and roots,
that the mere study of it would have involved more time and labour than
would have been required for the complete mastery of algebra, and as no
one could be found who would give the h