"Wait one moment," Abbot Lowrich riposted. "We'll have time enough to deal with your affairs after we've dealt with our own. We did not come to you, my friend from Paris, and myself from the fjords of Norway, to make good a missing cantata by a lazy composer, or to dash off a pot boiler, but to see some of these books that are at least worth the trouble and expense of a journey, a good first edition duly documented, a well-preserved cinquecento rarity with its date of publication, a valuable volume printed by the Aldine Press in which its English and French bookbinders have deigned to arrange margins."
"As you please," replied Apostolo. "And I am all the more willing to consent to it as this inspection will not take us long. I have one work only worthy of being examined by connoisseurs like you. But what a work it is," he added, taking out of its triple wrapping an impressive looking folio. "What a work indeed," he went on, looking solemn, after he had quite detached it from its prison of wrapping paper. "A work to marvel at..." And he held out the book to Abbot Lowrich while giving him a look full of confidence and pride.
"Damnation!" murmured Lowrich, after having run his eye, as was his wont, over the unfamiliar treasure. Then he turned to me, but very different from what he had been the moment before, his arms hanging down at his side, his eye downcast, his forehead pale. "Damnation!" he muttered in French in a voice hardly raised and so that he could only be heard by me. "It's that damn book that I undertook to give you if it was here, the first edition of the Poliphilus... It's here, the traitor, and as fine as if it had just been printed. Things like this only happen to me..."
"Calm down," I answered, laughing. "Perhaps we'll get it for a price less than you think. And how much is Master Apostolo asking for this rarity?"
"Ah!" said Apostolo. "Times are hard and money is scarce. In times gone by I'd have asked fifty zecchini for it from Prince Eugene, sixty from the Duke of Abrantès, and a hundred from an Englishman. But today I have to give it away for four hundred wretched Milan pounds, or the exact equivalent of four hundred French francs. I can't even knock two quarantani off the price."
