第42章

People made appointments to meet in the Galleries before or after 'Change;on showery days the Palais Royal was often crowded with weather-bound capitalists and men of business.The structure which had grown up,no one knew how,about this point was strangely resonant,laughter was multiplied;if two men quarreled,the whole place rang from one end to the other with the dispute.In the daytime milliners and booksellers enjoyed a monopoly of the place;towards nightfall it was filled with women of the town.Here dwelt poetry,politics,and prose,new books and classics,the glories of ancient and modern literature side by side with political intrigue and the tricks of the bookseller's trade.Here all the very latest and newest literature were sold to a public which resolutely decline to buy elsewhere.

Sometimes several thousand copies of such and such a pamphlet by Paul-Louis Courier would be sold in a single evening;and people crowded thither to buy Les aventures de la fille d'un Roi--that first shot fired by the Orleanists at The Charter promulgated by Louis XVIII.

When Lucien made his first appearance in the Wooden Galleries,some few of the shops boasted proper fronts and handsome windows,but these in every case looked upon the court or the garden.As for the centre row,until the day when the whole strange colony perished under the hammer of Fontaine the architect,every shop was open back and front like a booth in a country fair,so that from within you could look out upon either side through gaps among the goods displayed or through the glass doors.As it was obviously impossible to kindle a fire,the tradesmen were fain to use charcoal chafing-dishes,and formed a sort of brigade for the prevention of fires among themselves;and,indeed,a little carelessness might have set the whole quarter blazing in fifteen minutes,for the plank-built republic,dried by the heat of the sun,and haunted by too inflammable human material,was bedizened with muslin and paper and gauze,and ventilated at times by a thorough draught.

The milliners'windows were full of impossible hats and bonnets,displayed apparently for advertisement rather than for sale,each on a separate iron spit with a knob at the top.The galleries were decked out in all the colors of the rainbow.On what heads would those dusty bonnets end their careers?--for a score of years the problem had puzzled frequenters of the Palais.Saleswomen,usually plain-featured,but vivacious,waylaid the feminine foot passenger with cunning importunities,after the fashion of market-women,and using much the same language;a shop-girl,who made free use of her eyes and tongue,sat outside on a stool and harangued the public with "Buy a pretty bonnet,madame?--Do let me sell you something!"--varying a rich and picturesque vocabulary with inflections of the voice,with glances,and remarks upon the passers-by.Booksellers and milliners lived on terms of mutual understanding.

But it was in the passage known by the pompous title of the "Glass Gallery"that the oddest trades were carried on.Here were ventriloquists and charlatans of every sort,and sights of every deion,from the kind where there is nothing to see to panoramas of the globe.One man who has since made seven or eight hundred thousand francs by traveling from fair to fair began here by hanging out a signboard,a revolving sun in a blackboard,and the inion in red letters:"Here Man may see what God can never see.Admittance,two sous."The showman at the door never admitted one person alone,nor more than two at a time.Once inside,you confronted a great looking-glass;and a voice,which might have terrified Hoffmann of Berlin,suddenly spoke as if some spring had been touched,"You see here,gentlemen,something that God can never see through all eternity,that is to say,your like.God has not His like."And out you went,too shamefaced to confess to your stupidity.

Voices issued from every narrow doorway,crying up the merits of Cosmoramas,views of Constantinople,marionettes,automatic chess-players,and performing dogs who would pick you out the prettiest woman in the company.The ventriloquist Fritz-James flourished here in the Cafe Borel before he went to fight and fall at Montmartre with the young lads from the Ecole polytechnique.Here,too,there were fruit and flower shops,and a famous tailor whose gold-laced uniforms shone like the sun when the shops were lighted at night.

Of a morning the galleries were empty,dark,and deserted;the shopkeepers chatted among themselves.Towards two o'clock in the afternoon the Palais began to fill;at three,men came in from the Bourse,and Paris,generally speaking,crowded the place.Impecunious youth,hungering after literature,took the opportunity of turning over the pages of the books exposed for sale on the stalls outside the booksellers'shops;the men in charge charitably allowed a poor student to pursue his course of free studies;and in this way a duodecimo volume of some two hundred pages,such as Smarra or Pierre Schlemihl,or Jean Sbogar or Jocko,might be devoured in a couple of afternoons.There was something very French in this alms given to the young,hungry,starved intellect.Circulating libraries were not as yet;if you wished to read a book,you were obliged to buy it,for which reason novels of the early part of the century were sold in numbers which now seem well-nigh fabulous to us.