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 the directorship of the press tempt him?

“With it, the directing of the press!” said Denis.  “It is much better to have an opposition press than one that you have under your thumb.  Friendly sheets advise only foolishly.”

“Why, Vaudrey, do you know,” suddenly exclaimed the veteran journalist, “that you are the first among my friends who have come into power—­I say the first—­who has ever thought of me?”

“You cannot do me a greater pleasure than tell me so, my dear Ramel.  I know nothing more contemptible than ingrates.  In my opinion, to remember what one owes to people, is to be scrupulously exact; it is simply knowing orthography.”

“Well! mercy! there are a devilish lot of people who don’t know if the word gratitude is spelled with an e or an a.  No, people are not so well skilled as that in orthography.  There are not a few good little creatures to be sent back to school.  All the more reason to be thankful for having learned by heart—­by heart, that is the way to put it, my dear Vaudrey—­your participles.”