The Memoirs of Victor Hugo | Page 6

coronation of Charles X.
itself. The Duke of Northumberland, the representative of England at
the coronation ceremonies, was reputed fabulously wealthy. Wealthy
and English, how could he be otherwise than ~a la mode~? The English,

at that period, were very popular in French society, although not among
the people. They were liked in certain salons because of Waterloo,
which was still fairly recent, and to Anglicize the French language was
a recommendation in ultra-fashionable society. Lord Northumberland,
therefore, long before his arrival, was popular and legendary in Rheims.
A coronation was a godsend to Rheims. A flood of opulent people
inundated the city. It was the Nile that was passing. Landlords rubbed
their hands with glee.
There was in Rheims in those days, and there probably is to-day, at the
corner of a street giving on to the square, a rather large house with a
carriage-entrance and a balcony, built of stone in the royal style of
Louis XIV., and facing the cathedral. About this house and Lord
Northumberland the following was related:
In January, 1825, the balcony of the house bore the notice: "House for
Sale." All at once the "Moniteur" announced that the coronation of
Charles X. would take place at Rheims in the spring. There was great
rejoicing in the city. Notices of rooms to let were immediately hung out
everywhere. The meanest room was to bring in at least sixty francs a
day. One morning a man of irreproachable appearance, dressed in black,
with a white cravat, an Englishman who spoke broken French,
presented himself at the house in the square. He saw the proprietor,
who eyed him attentively.
"You wish to sell your house?" queried the Englishman.
"How much?"
"Ten thousand francs."
"But I don't want to buy it."
"What do you want, then?"
"Only to hire it."
"That's different. For a year?"
"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 Christian art. One speaks of the "nave of
Amiens, the bell towers of Chartres, the façade of Rheims." A month
before the coronation of Charles X a swarm of masons, perched on

ladders and clinging to knotted ropes, spent a week smashing with
hammers every bit of jutting sculpture on the façade, for fear a stone
might become detached from one of these reliefs and fall on the King's
head. The