two o'clock in the
afternoon
The ventriloquist Fritz-James flourished here in the Cafe Borel before he went to fight and fall at Montmartre with the young lads from the Ecole polytechnique . Here , too , there were fruit and flower shops , and a famous tailor whose gold-laced uniforms shone like the sun when the shops were lighted at night . Of a morning the galleries were empty , dark , and deserted ; the shopkeepers chatted among themselves . Towards two o'clock in the afternoon the Palais began to fill ; at three , men came in from the Bourse , and Paris , generally speaking , crowded the place . Impecunious youth , hungering after literature , took the opportunity of turning over the pages of the books exposed for sale on the stalls outside the booksellers ' shops ; the men in charge charitably allowed a poor student to pursue his course of free studies ; and in this way a duodecimo volume of some two hundred pages , such as _ Smarra _ or _ Pierre Schlemihl _ , or _ Jean Sbogar _ or _ Jocko _ , might be devoured in a couple of afternoons . There was something very French in this alms given to the young , hungry , starved intellect . Circulating libraries were not as yet ; if you wished to read a book , you were obliged to buy it , for which reason novels of the early part of the century were sold in numbers which now seem well-nigh fabulous to us .