RETROSPECTIONS OF AN ACTIVE LIFE I VISIT TO ABBÉ MIGNE RETURN TO THE UNITED STATES VISITS TO WASHINGTON AND RICHMOND A MONG the curiosities of Paris not described in guide books and little known outside of the Church are the Ateliers Catholiques of the Abbé Migne. While in Paris in 1859 I spent an agreeable morning in this establishment and wrote the following account of my visit: The place was first brought to my notice by a professor of the Pontifical College at Rome, who said it was one of the largest book manufactories in the world. I found it just outside the Barrière d'Enfer in the Rue Petit Montrouge. Save a sign in very large letters painted the whole length of the immense building, there was no exterior indication of the business carried on within. I rang a bell and asked the concierge if the Abbé was in. He answered in the affirmative and took me into an immense printing room, a hundred and fifty by sixty feet, the floor of which was covered with printing cases and the walls with stereotype plates. Adjoining this was a smaller room separated by a glass partition in which fifteen or twenty men were engaged in collating copy, reading proofs, and attending to the counting room business of the establishment. In one corner was a smaller office which was appropriated to the Abbé himself, who at the moment of my entering however, was in the printing apartment. I found him a remarkably fine looking man, and withal, as I had reason to expect, an intellectual man. He noticed almost instantly, from my French probably, that I was not a Frenchman, and he immediately said that he talked French or Latin but that he talked Latin with greater facility than any other language. I was 3 |