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