ble cries, and,
turning a deaf ear alike to threats and entreaties, refused to come out.
He had spent the night in a condition of extreme restlessness, for all
night long the lamp had been seen passing rapidly to and fro behind the
curtains. In the morning, hearing Hippolyte shouting to him from the
court below, he opened the window of the Hall of the Spheres and the
Philosophers, and heaved two or three rather weighty tomes on to the old
valet's head. The whole of the domestic staff--men, women, and
boys--hurried to the spot, and the librarian proceeded to throw out
books by the armful on to their heads. In view of the gravity of the
situation, Monsieur Rene d'Esparvieu did not disdain to intervene. He
appeared in night-cap and dressing-gown, and attempted to reason with
the poor lunatic, whose only reply was to pour forth torrents of abuse
on the man whom till then he had worshipped as his benefactor, and to
endeavour to crush him beneath all the Bibles, all the Talmuds, all the
sacred books of India and Persia, all the Greek Fathers, and all the
Latin Fathers, Saint John Chrysostom, Saint Gregory Nazianzen, Saint
Augustine, Saint Jerome, all the apologists, ay! and under the _Histoire
des Variations_, annotated by Bossuet himself! Octavos, quartos, folios
came crashing down, and lay in a sordid heap on the courtyard pavement.
The letters of Gassendi, of Pere Mersenne, of Pascal, were blown about
hither and thither by the wind. The lady's-maid who had stooped down to
rescue some of the sheets from the gutter got a blow on the head from an
enormous Dutch atlas. Madame Rene d'Esparvieu had been terrified by the
ominous sounds, and appeared on the scene without waiting to apply the
finishing touches of powder and paint. When he caught sight of her, old
Sariette became more violent than ever. Down they came one after another
as hard as he could pelt them; the busts of the poets, philosophers,
and historians of antiquity--Homer, AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides,
Herodotus, Thucydides, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Cicero,
Virgil, Horace, Seneca, Epictetus--all lay scattered on the ground. The
celestial sphere and the terrestrial globe descended with a terrifying
crash that was followed by a ghastly hush, broken only by the shrill
laughter of little Leon, who was looking down on the scene from a window
above. A locksmith having opened the library door, all the household
hastened to enter, and found the aged Sariette