Translation in The Book‑Hunter in Paris: Studies among the Bookstalls and the Quays (London : Elliot Stock, 1893),

EPISTLE DEDICATORY
TO THE STALL‑KEEPERS ON THE QUAYS OF THE GENTLE RIVER SEINE

Quietly or not as you may in your modesty, this little book is offered to you, gentlemen philosophers of the open air and of the petty gain: to you who, immovable and resigned, mount guard from morning till evening before all those wrecks of human thought which chance, weariness, disgust or inconstancy of fashion have brought to your primitive stalls like a rag‑shop of impressions, to rekindle the passer‑by’s curiosity, enrich the poor or excite, by the hunt for some document, the always uneasy passion of the scholar.

It deserved to be dedicated to you, for you were the inspirers of this fresh little booklet which, sooner or later, after having run its course of fortune in the springtime of its novelty, and endured the inexorable destiny of things, may well, in the autumn of its success, come to be dashed upon your asylum of the disinherited — like those leaves once brilliant with green, now dull or russet, which the November wind drives whirling above your heads and dropping among so many other printed leaves upon the cold parapets of the Seine. Then you will gather it up one day in the gust, ragged, damp and stained — this book now so spruce in its bibliophile dandyism — and you will doubtless read it for the first time as you sit on your humble straw stool in the quick current of the Quays, dimly hearing the hasty footfalls of strollers on the asphalt or snatches of fashionable dialogue borne away on the wind. You will read it in its true milieu and atmosphere, with far more interest and pleasure than have those who skimmed it with a distracted eye, buried in their armchairs, half‑asleep by the fireside — the luckiest of readers securely retired from the chill wind.