arted to his eyes an inestimable value.

But the third day of the sale brought a slight diminution of his
happiness. He had chosen for his editor a young man, doing business at
a breakneck pace, who had lately established himself in the Passage
des Panoramas, where he was paying a ruinous rent. He was the nephew
of Barbet the publisher, whom Brigitte had had as a tenant in the rue
Saint-Dominique d'Enfer. This Barbet junior was a youth who flinched at
nothing; and when he was presented to Thuillier by his uncle, he pledged
himself, provided he was not shackled in his advertising, to sell off
the first edition and print a second within a week.

Now, Thuillier had spent about fifteen hundred francs himself on costs
of publication, such, for instance, as copies sent in great profusion
to the newspapers; but at the close of the third day _seven_ copies only
had been sold, and three of those on credit. It might be believed that
in revealing to the horror-stricken Thuillier this paltry result the
young publisher would have lost at least something of his assurance. On
the contrary, this Guzman of the book-trade hastened to say:--

"I am delighted at what has happened. If we had sold a hundred copies
it would trouble me far more than the fifteen hundred now on our hands;
that's what I call hanging fire; whereas this insignificant sale only
proves that the edition will go off like a rocket."

"But when?" asked Thuillier, who thought this view paradoxical.

"Parbleu!" said Barbet, "when we get notices in the newspapers.
Newspaper notices are only useful to arouse attention. 'Dear me!' says
the public, 'there's a publication that must be interesting.' The title
is good,--'Taxation and the Sliding-Scale,'--but I find that the more
piquant a title is, the more buyers distrust it, they have been taken in
so often; they wait for the notices. On the other hand, for books
that are destined to have only a limited sale, a hundred ready-made
purchasers will come in at once, but after that, good-bye to them; we
don't place another copy."

"Then you don't think," said Thuillier, "that the sale is hopeless?"

"On the contrary, I think it is on the best track. When the 'Debats,'
the 'Constitutionnel,' the 'Siecle,' and the 'Presse' have reviewed it,
especially if the 'Debats' mauls it (they are ministerial, you know), it
won't be a week before the whole edition is snapped up."

"You say that easily enough," replied Thuillier; "but how a