“How d’you know that ?” I asked in surprise, as we had just met for the first time.
“I know it,” was his reply, “by the caressing way you took up that book !”
Your real bookworm loves all books. Like the modern genius, he is amoral. But unlike the genius, his amorality, simple soul, is confined within the four walls of a library. He could never, I am sure, bring himself to agree with André Theuriet, who in “La Chanoinesse” depicts
“les Brjoux indiscrets auprés des œuvres de Duclos ; Candide, Jacques la Fataliste et le Sophia voisinant de Restif de la Bréttone à deux pas de l’Emile, et les Aventures du Chevalier de Faublas—une nouveauts—non loin de l’Histoire philosophique des Indes,”
all of which books, by a kind of moral exercise of his imagination we cannot sufficiently deplore, he found exhaling “une odeur de volupté peryerse, quelque chose comme le parfum aphrodisiac des scringes et des tubereuses dans une chambre close.”
Every dwelling-house has its own peculiar atmosphere, sometimes agreeable, sometimes not. But, whatever its quality, so characteristic and persistent are some of them that T am sure a blind man would always be able to tell them by the smell alone. Few of us may be gifted with the analytical nose of a Charles Dickens to detect the ingredients
