Doguereau wore a black coat with vast square skirts, when fashion required swallow-tail coats.  His waistcoat was of some cheap material, a checked pattern of many colors; a steel chain, with a copper key attached to it, hung from his fob and dangled down over a roomy pair of black nether garments.  The booksellers’ watch must have been the size of an onion.  Iron-gray ribbed stockings, and shoes with silver buckles completed is costume.  The old man’s head was bare, and ornamented with a fringe of grizzled locks, quite poetically scanty.  “Old Doguereau,” as Porchon styled him, was dressed half like a professor of belles-lettres as to his trousers and shoes, half like a tradesman with respect to the variegated waistcoat, the stockings, and the watch; and the same odd mixture appeared in the man himself.  He united the magisterial, dogmatic air, and the hollow countenance of the professor of rhetoric with the sharp eyes, suspicious mouth, and vague uneasiness of the bookseller.

“M.  Doguereau?” asked Lucien.

“That is my name, sir.”

“You are very young,” remarked the bookseller.

“My age, sir, has nothing to do with the matter.”

“True,” and the old bookseller took up the manuscript.  “Ah, begad! The Archer of Charles IX., a good title.  Let us see now, young man, just tell me your subject in a word or two.”

“It is a historical work, sir, in the style of Scott.  The character of the struggle between the Protestants and Catholics is depicted as a struggle between two opposed systems of government, in which the throne is seriously endangered.  I have taken the Catholic side.”

“Eh! but you have ideas, young man.  Very well, I will read your book, I promise you.  I would rather have had something more in Mrs. Radcliffe’s style; but if you are industrious, if you have some notion of style, conceptions, ideas, and the art of telling a story, I don’t ask better than to be of use to you.  What do we want but good manuscripts?”

“When can I come back?”

“I am going into the country this evening; I shall be back again the day after to-morrow.  I shall have read your manuscript by that time; and if it suits me, we might come to terms that very day.”

Seeing his acquaintance so easy, Lucien was inspired with the unlucky idea of bringing the Marguerites upon the scene.

“I have a volume of poetry as well, sir——­” he began.

“Oh! you are a poet!  Then I don’t want your romance,” and the old man handed back the manuscript.  “The rhyming fellows come to grief when they try their hands at prose.  In prose you can’t use words that mean nothing; you absolutely must say something.”

“But Sir Walter Scott, sir, wrote poetry as well as——­”

“That is true,” said Doguereau, relenting.  He guessed that the young fellow before him was poor, and kept the manuscript.  “Where do you live?  I will come and see you.”