e relating to
Galileo. I can dispose of it.' People were coming in and taking their
places at the little tables, the sort of people who prowl and hunt in
libraries, colourless and taciturn as diggers from the mines, with an
air as if they had themselves been dug up out of somewhere close and
damp. 'Come to my private room, upstairs, not here,' whispered the
librarian in the big ear of the humpback as he moved away, displaying
his gloves, oiled hair, and middle parting with the self-sufficiency
often observable in his species.

The collection of Mademoiselle du Mesnil-Case, a name disclosed by Albin
Fage only under solemn promise of secrecy, proved to be an inexhaustible
treasure of papers relating to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
which threw all sorts of interesting lights upon the past, and
sometimes, by a word or a date, overturned completely the established
opinions about facts or persons. Whatever the price, Leonard Astier took
and kept every one of the documents, which almost always fitted in with
his commenced or projected works. Without a shadow of doubt he accepted
the little man's account of the masses of originals that were still
accumulating dust in the attic of an ancient mansion at Menilmontant.
If, after some venomous criticism from 'the first collector' in France,
his trust was slightly disturbed the suspicion could not but vanish when
the book-binder, seated at his table or watering his vegetables in the
quiet grass-grown yard, met it with perfect composure, and offered in
particular a quite natural explanation of certain marks of erasure and
restoration, visible on some of the pages, as due to the submergence
of the collection in sea-water, when it was sent to England during the
emigration. After this fresh assurance Astier-Rehu would go back to the
gate with a lively step, carrying off each time a purchase for which
he had given, according to its historical value, a cheque for twenty,
forty, or even as much as eighty pounds.

These extravagances, unsuspected as yet by those around him, were
prompted, whatever he might say to quiet his conscience, not so much by
the motives of the historian as by those of the collector. This, even in
a place so ill-adapted for seeing and hearing as the attic in the Rue de
Beaune, where the bargains were usually struck, would have been patent
to any observer. The tone of pretended indifference, the 'Let me see'
muttered with dry lips, the quivering of the cov