shioned
frames. A very plain mahogany bookcase contained some select volumes,
which, though few, were frequently perused and were swollen with markers
covered with notes. The apartment was small and humble: a narrow bedroom
with an iron bedstead, a dressing room, a tiny dining-room furnished
with cane-seated chairs, and the well-lighted study with his portraits
and his frames of the old days. But with this simplicity, as neat as a
newly-shaved old man, all was orderly, and arranged and cared for with
scrupulous attention.

This modest establishment, the few books, the deep peace, the oblivion
found in this Batignolles lodging, in this home of clerks, poor, petty
tradesmen and workmen, sufficed for Ramel. He rarely went out and then
only to take a walk from which he soon returned exhausted. He had
formerly worked so assiduously and had given, in and out of season, all
his energy, his nerves and his body, improvising and scattering to the
winds his appeals, his protests, his heart, his life, through the
columns of the press. What an accumulation of pages, now destroyed or
buried beneath the dust of neglected collections! How much ink spilled!
And how much life-blood had been mingled with that ink!

Ramel willingly passed long hours every day at his study window, looking
out on the green trees or at the high walls of a School of Design
opposite, or at the end of a tricolored flag that waved from the frontal
of a Primary Normal School that he took delight in watching; then at the
right, in the distance, throbbing like an incessant fever, he saw the
bustling life of the Saint-Lazare Station, where with every shrill
whistle of the engines, he saw white columns of smoke mount skyward and
vanish like breaths.

"Smoke against smoke," thought Ramel, with his pipe between his teeth.
"And it would be just as well for one to struggle--a lost unity--against
folly, as for a single person to desire to create as much smoke as all
these locomotives together!"

Ramel appeared to be delighted to see Vaudrey, whose name the
housekeeper murdered by announcing him as _Monsieur Vaugrey_. He placed
a chair for him, and asked him smilingly, what he wanted "with an
antediluvian journalist."

"A mastodon of the press," he said.

What had Vaudrey come for?

His visit had no other object than to enjoy again a former faithful
affection, the advice he used to obtain, and also to try to drag the
headstrong Ramel into the ministry. Would not th