Laudator Temporis Acti

Anatole France, The Queen Pedauque (tr. Jos. A. V. Stritzko), chap. 3, describing an episode at the bookseller's shop at the sign of the Golden Bible:

I went there frequently to thumb the books she received from Holland and also those Bipontic editions illustrated with notes, comments and commentaries of great erudition. I was amiable and Mistress Pigoreau became aware of it, which was my misfortune.

She had been pretty, and still knew how to be pleasing. Her eyes spoke. One day the Cicero, Livy, Plato and the Aristotle, Thucydides, Polybius and Varro, the Epictetus, Seneca, Boethius and Cassiodorus, the Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Plautus and Terence, the Diodorus of Sicily and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, St. John Chrysostom and St. Basil, St. Jerome and St. Augustine, Erasmus, Saumaise, Turnebe and Scaliger, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure, Bossuet dragging Ferri with him, Lenain, Godefroy, Mezeray, Maimbourg, Fabricius, Father Lelong and Father Pitou, all the poets, all the historians, all the fathers, all the doctors, all the theologians, all the humanists, all the compilers, assembled high and low on the walls, became witnesses to our kisses.