Paul Bourget.

Paris, November 16, 1892.

COSMOPOLIS

BOOK 1.

CHAPTER I

A DILETTANTE AND A BELIEVER

Although the narrow stall, flooded with heaped-up books and papers, left the visitor just room enough to stir, and although that visitor was one of his regular customers, the old bookseller did not deign to move from the stool upon which he was seated, while writing on an unsteady desk.  His odd head, with its long, white hair, peeping from beneath a once black felt hat with a broad brim, was hardly raised at the sound of the opening and shutting of the door.  The newcomer saw an emaciated, shriveled face, in which, from behind spectacles, two brown eyes twinkled slyly.  Then the hat again shaded the paper, which the knotty fingers, with their dirty nails, covered with uneven lines traced in a handwriting belonging to another age, and from the thin, tall form, enveloped in a greenish, worn-out coat, came a faint voice, the voice of a man afflicted with chronic laryngitis, uttering as an apology, with a strong Italian accent, this phrase in French: 

“One moment, Marquis, the muse will not wait.”

“Very well, I will; I am no muse.  Listen to your inspiration comfortably, Ribalta,” replied, with a laugh, he whom the vendor of old books received with such original unconstraint.  He was evidently accustomed to the eccentricities of the strange merchant.  In Rome—­for this scene took place in a shop at the end of one of the most ancient streets of the Eternal City, a few paces from the Place d’Espagne, so well known to tourists—­in the city which serves as a confluent for so many from all points of the world, has not that sense of the odd been obliterated by the multiplicity of singular and anomalous types stranded and sheltering there?  You will find there revolutionists like boorish Ribalta, who is ending in a curiosity-shop a life more eventful than the most eventful of the sixteenth century.

Descended from a Corsican family, this personage came to Rome when very young, about 1835, and at first became a seminarist.  On the point of being ordained a priest, he disappeared only to return, in 1849, so rabid a republican that he was outlawed at the time of the reestablishment of the pontifical government.  He then served as secretary to Mazzini, with whom he disagreed for reasons which clashed with Ribalta’s honor.  Would passion for a woman have involved him in such extravagance?  In 1870 Ribalta returned to Rome, where he opened, if one may apply such a term to such a hole, a book-shop.  But he is an amateur bookseller, and will refuse you admission if you displease him.  Having inherited a small income, he sells or he does not, following his fancy or the requirements of his own purchases, to-day asking you twenty francs