"For six months?"

"No. I want to hire it for three days."

"How much will you charge?"

"Thirty thousand francs."

The gentleman was Lord Northumberland's steward, who was looking for a
lodging for his master for the coronation ceremonies. The proprietor
had smelled the Englishman and guessed the steward. The house was
satisfactory, and the proprietor held out for his price; the Englishman,
being only a Norman, gave way to the Champenois; the duke paid the
30,000 francs, and spent three days in the house, at the rate of 400
francs an hour.

Nodier and I were two explorers. When we travelled together, as we
occasionally did, we went on voyages of discovery, he in search of rare
books, I in search of ruins. He would go into ecstasies over a _Cymbalum
Mound_ with margins, and I over a defaced portal. We had given each
other a devil. He said to me: "You are possessed of the demon Ogive."
"And you," I answered, "of the demon Elzevir."

At Soissons, while I was exploring Saint Jean-des-Vignes, he had
discovered, in a suburb, a ragpicker. The ragpicker's basket is the
hyphen between rags and paper, and the ragpicker is the hyphen between
the beggar and the philosopher. Nodier who gave to the poor, and
sometimes to philosophers, had entered the ragpicker's abode. The
ragpicker turned out to be a book dealer. Among the books Nodier noticed
a rather thick volume of six or eight hundred pages, printed in Spanish,
two columns to a page, badly damaged by worms, and the binding missing
from the back. The ragpicker, asked what he wanted for it, replied,
trembling lest the price should be refused: "Five francs," which Nodier
paid, also trembling, but with joy. This book was the _Romancero_
complete. There are only three complete copies of this edition now in
existence. One of these a few years ago sold for 7,500 francs. Moreover,
worms are vying with each other in eating up these three remaining
copies. The peoples, feeders of princes, have something else to do than
spend their money to preserve for new editions the legacies of human
intellect, and the _Romancero_, being merely an Iliad, has not been
reprinted.

During the three days of the coronation there were great crowds in the
streets of Rheims, at the Archbishop's palace, and on the promenades
along the Vesdre, eager to catch a glimpse of Charles X. I said to
Charles Nodier: "Let us go and see his majesty the cathedral."

Rheims is a proverb in Gothic Christia